Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement (A Norton Short)

Historically, municipal laws known as “Ugly Laws” criminalized disabled people for simply existing in public spaces—for being visibly disabled—as if our appearances were inherently uncivil.

McLain pointed out that most studies characterizing autism are of white eight-to-twelve-year-old boys. She also noted that the stereotypes of autistic people as robotic are often drawn from examples of traumatized autistic people. This is because many autistic people have been traumatized—if not through ABA therapy, then through living in a world t

The medical model is the idea that disability is a malady, something outside the norm that needs to be addressed, cured, eliminated, or remediated through medical or therapeutic intervention. Under this model, disability is something to root out, something to work against, something to fear or pity. Disability is framed as a problem that resides in

Categories of disability are constructed relative to our expectations and norms.

“disability is inherent in the human condition,” and it is important to our world. Disability is many things, not just visible differences or those that affect mobility, and we can expect more disability (not less, as Herr hopes) in the future. Even if the technologists’ wildest space fantasies come true, everyone is disabled in space—with gravity

In its simplest definition, ableism is bias or discrimination against disabled people or stigma against the status of disability—a bias toward nondisabled lives and ways of being.

For some autistic people, eye contact not only doesn’t indicate engagement, it can be actively distracting and/or taxing.

Things should be allowed to be joyful and fun and autistic without turning them into exercises for social scripting and normative behavior patterns.

Even when people do try to comply with the social norm, there are many ways to “do” eye contact wrong—too much eye contact (staring) and unblinking eye contact are often read as hostile or awkward or creepy. Not all autistic people have trouble with eye contact norms and expectations; eye contact is not a good or reliable indicator of who is autist