Learning about ableism took me down an uncomfortable and slightly confrontational path. If you had asked me before entering these autistic-led spaces, I would’ve sworn up and down that I didn’t have an ableist bone in my body. But these autistic adults challenged my views in a way nobody else could. They called me out on using phrases like diff-ability and differently abled. They suggested that I preferred those phrases because somewhere deep within I viewed disabled people as less-than. They said that using those words was my attempt to make my children seem more valuable, whether I realized
...more
