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.

Not all autistic people have trouble with eye contact norms and expectations; eye contact is not a good or reliable indicator of who is autistic and who is not, but many do struggle with this completely arbitrary norm that so much is projected onto.

Former poster children—literally what they were called and where that term comes from—were called Jerry’s Kids. In the actual telethons, Jerry Lewis waxed on about the horrible fate awaiting children with muscular dystrophy.

Crip Camp, which was co-produced by the Obamas. Like “queer,” it has also been verbed, and is sometimes used to describe the process of disorienting and undoing ableist ideas and structures.

But why are an amputee, a person with dyslexia, a blind person, and someone who is bipolar all in the same category? (This sounds like the start of a joke.) What holds this category together? Disability, which today is a category of understanding, is actually a historical concept that developed relative to work, employment, and education.

The category of “disability” doesn’t fall simply along the lines of impairment: we don’t count most people who wear glasses as disabled, although they are visually impaired. And not everyone who is disabled is impaired: some people with dwarfism who are otherwise healthy experience the world as disabling simply because things are built too

the initial identification and social expulsion of Jews and others, the confiscation of their property, their ghettoization, their deportation, and, ultimately, even their extermination.

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.

Native American beliefs are fundamentally rooted in ideas of a multi-layered and ever changing reality. Because reality is ever changing Native Americans have no conception of normal and conversely have no concept of abnormal. It