Taking a cue from the radical Deaf community, ANI members began to refer to themselves as “Autistic” instead of saying that they were people with autism. “Saying ‘person with autism’ suggests that autism is something bad—so bad that it isn’t even consistent with being a person,” Sinclair observed. “We talk about left-handed people, not ‘people with left-handedness,’ and about athletic or musical people, not about ‘people with athleticism’ or ‘people with musicality’ . . . It is only when someone has decided that the characteristic being referred to is negative that suddenly people want to
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