Disabled people deserve access to the supports they need, whether due to autism or to co-occurring conditions. Just as squares are not more quadrilateral than trapezoids—they are all four-sided shapes–there is no such thing as “profound autism.”
I think that a lot of the problems people have with the idea of autism as a super power is the idea that it elevates the autistic person above everyone else, rather than the super power being about this one particular aspect of them that is special.
When people claim that “cure autism now” and the disease model and the Judge Rotenberg Center are not about me, well I beg to differ. The only reason they’re not about me is that I’m old and verbal enough to not be vulnerable to that kind of abuse. Autistic people do not get abused [and/or put in ABA therapy] because they are low-functioning, they get abused because they do weird things.
