#and grateful to sadhoc for discussing this w me at length

[librarycards]

perhaps in a mythical ideal world where words were not always-already imbued with the politics of other words, we could make the claim that autism “levels” were not merely euphemisms for functioning labels, iq points, and the most deadly and pathologizing language for mentally disabled people (m*ron, imb*cile, the r-word, etc).

but we do not live in that world and never will, and it’s clear to me that finding recourse to discrete “levels” (that is, hierarchies of distance from neuronormativity) of a set of behaviors/patterns/needs already culturally/temporally contingent is 1) a way to further legitimize medical/psychiatric control over autism as a discourse/weapon of carceral control* and 2) to find nominally progressive ways to partake in violently ableist, eugenic, and de-personing discourses that fails to see autistic people as, well, people, with malleable abilities, needs**, desires, and capacities.

*and thus leading to the reuptick in anti self dx rhetoric we’re seeing now - reliance on levels made at the time of formal diagnosis = reliance on the doctor/psychologist as exclusive authority over autistic subjectivity

** this malleability is at the core of the problem within “support needs” labels as they are applied right now, in addition to an even more direct copy+paste of the false-objectivity of functioning labels