autistic people have higher occurrences of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS, a collagen disorder), Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS, a condition impacting blood flow and balance), and digestive issues with related gut pain.

When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken, or inadequate.

The trope treats us as exceptional individuals, rather than as members of an underrepresented minority community that needs access and accommodations and structural change—not just gadgets to help us function individually. It exceptionalizes, rather than normalizes, disability as a facet of the human experience and exaggerates how different we are

Technoableism is a belief in the power of technology that considers the elimination of disability a good thing, something we should strive for. It’s a classic form of ableism—bias against disabled people, bias in favor of nondisabled ways of life.3 Technoableism is the use of technologies to reassert those biases, often under the guise of empowerme

Talila A. Lewis describes ableism as “[a] system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity.” 4 Ableism is a system set in socially constructed norms. Ableism is more than just bias: it’s the entire idea that anything can or should be pe

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

McLain suggested that these types of cultural technologies, which are so radically different from the scientific approaches to autism research or the digital interventions into social skills, invite us to think differently about technologies for autism: My advice would be to find these autistic technologies, learn about how autistics use them, and

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

Ableism is more than just bias: it’s the entire idea that anything can or should be perfect in this universe of entropy and chaos, applied at the level of human bodies and ways of being.