The social model simply asks us to expand our ideas about disability: it pushes back against the knee-jerk assumption that disability is abnormal and that our bodies and minds should be normalized.

The film Invitation to Dance is about disability activist Simi Linton, who is also a wheelchair dancer. Linton describes dance as “the expression of joy and freedom.”

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

It exceptionalizes, rather than normalizes, disability as a facet of the human experience and exaggerates how different we are from nondisabled people.

They have articulated ten principles of disability justice: Intersectionality, Leadership of those most affected, Anticapitalist politics, Cross-movement solidarity, Recognizing wholeness, Sustainability, Cross-disability solidarity, Interdependence, Collective Access, and Collective Liberation.

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.

In the constant praise and promise of bodies-fixed-through-technology, we see that disabled is a bad state of being, and that disabled people must be altered to be worthy. The Cyborg Jillian Weise writes: They like us best with bionic arms and legs. They like us deaf with hearing aids, though they prefer cochlear implants. It would be an affront to

The standard narratives about individuals “overcoming” disabilities tokenize certain types of disability while erasing others.

Hans Asperger, after whom it was named, was a Nazi collaborator. He sentenced most people he identified as autistic to death or institutionalization, selecting only certain specific types of autistic people—those who presented with what would later be called Asperger’s—as worth saving, as “real” citizens, because