there will be autistics who never can do [thing] no matter how forced, no matter how punished, no matter how anything.

i can’t force myself to do [thing] i can’t do. not ever.

many autistics like me.

especially hate hearing autistics say “well if i didn’t do [thing] i would get abused” as if we autistics also didn’t get abused, except we still couldn’t do [thing].

you are dismissing higher support needs autistic who are or have been abused.

Like for example, universities in US were built near “insane” asylums so that populations could be sorted between desirable characteristics (universities) and undesirable characteristics (asylums) in order to encourage reproduction between white upper class people and discourage reproduction between those deemed ‘unfit’ & also so the unfit could be experimented on and studied. (Folks who wanna read more on the eugenicist origins of universities should read the book Academic Ableism)

Eugenics underpins the entire pro-life/pro-choice debate in America where white women are encouraged to reproduce and people of color are discouraged (or literally sterilized, or have their children routinely killed by police)

It’s in IQ tests and other forms of testing to sort people into groups where certain scores are implicitly “better” than others. It’s in how those tests will be used to talk about how different ‘races’ perform.

It’s in the anti-vaccine movement where people believe that it is better for a child to die than to be autistic.

It’s in our language evolving so that the default negative things we can call someone are idiot, stupid, crazy, lunatic. It’s in every joke about how “humans need a new plague” “there’s too many people”

Already-inadequate social safety nets are already being dismantled and I think the cultural environment is going to become more and more brutal to disabled people.

We've seen some of this already obviously. The socially-acceptable, earnest explanations that the r slur is okay now because everyone's saying it, the refusal to do literally anything to protect disabled people from covid, the austerity so many governments are enforcing on the most vulnerable members of their populations.

Politics and culture are in lockstep on the insistence that disabled people are expendable. I think this has already changed the social landscape dramatically and it's only accelerating.

As the number of people too disabled to work surges from the longer-term effects of an unusually disabling virus, as work becomes increasingly brutal and underpaid (your actual income number MAY be the same, but you can't buy as much food or housing with it, and new hires are being paid even less), as social services continue to be gutted, people who care for disabled people are going to increasingly see us as burdens and see our survival as incompatible with their own.

If you aren't yet disabled, PLEASE stand up for us and find ways to organize additional support instead of just dumping your disabled loved ones on the street to die.

"I'd never do that!" Good!! Hold on to that!! Bc the Overton window will shift your opinions and politics if you let it.

So many people who were righteously angry five years ago about governments suggesting killing disabled people was an acceptable price to keep the economy running, are now repeating those same conservative party lines almost word for word and thinking it's different because they're used to it now.

It's going to become increasingly common to abandon disabled people. It's going to be described as setting boundaries and protecting your peace and prioritizing reciprocity.

since writing this, millions of people have died preventable deaths from a pandemic that much of the global north pretends doesn’t exist anymore.

access to healthcare is being revoked from increasing percentages of the population– removal of testing, accelerating vaccine prices, artificial shortages of medications (blamed on PWUD or disabled people’s “over-reliance”), insurance companies automating denials, increasing criminalization of health care concerning “sexed” traits and reproductive capacity (e.g. abortion, HRT, puberty blockers).

many places are beginning to criminalize wearing masks. doctors have even stopped wearing them. activists have even stopped wearing them.

anti-fatness is at its most blatant in years and most people have framed this acceleration of oppression as nothing more than a fashion cycle (“thin is back in!”), ableist slurs that had temporarily been deemed inappropriate by abled people are returning to common vernacular.

every climate disaster is quickly framed as people “deserving” it. every new pop science article that goes viral claims to have found the “cause” of the supposed phenomenon of the anonymous masses “degrading” their intelligence/IQ/cognitive abilities, and the solution presented is always Hard Work.

I just thought you'd like to know :D