ableism is the process of favoring, fetishizing, and building the world around a mostly imagined, idealized body while discriminating against those bodies perceived to move, see, hear, process, operate, look, or need differently from that vision. Often, the greater the deviation, the greater the discrimination. In other words, ableism is one possible answer for a young girl seeing herself as valuable as a princess one week and deflating into shame and self-loathing the next. (Thanks for all you do, Oxford English Dictionary, but my definition is better.)
