Read carefully.
Disability is bad.
I am NOT saying people with disabilities are bad people, I'm saying that THE DISABILITIES THEMSELVES ARE BAD BECAUSE THEY HURT THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE THEM.
When people hear someone say "disability is bad" they immediately assume the person saying it is attacking disabled people themselves, because apparently the only definition of 'bad' they know is 'evil/immoral/devalued on a personal level'.
Injuries are bad. That is not a controversial statement. Why are they bad? Because they hurt the people who have them. Sicknesses are bad. Chronic health conditions are bad. And yet when someone wears a shirt that says "frick cancer" they never interpret it as "frick people with cancer".
This is not complicated, and yet I see so many people thinking they're being soooo accepting of disabled people by valuing the disability higher than the person who has it.
If someone has cancer, or an autoimmune disorder, or a disease, or a physical or mental disability, that's a bad thing. It makes life harder for them. It's literally in the name, it DISABLES your ABILITY to do things, like socialize, or see, or breathe.
I have autism, and from personal experience i can tell you that it sucks. It is objectively a bad thing that has caused me and tons of other people untold amounts of misery and suffering. That's why I want a cure for it. And yet, there's people out there that can't be bothered to think about this for two seconds who say "oH, yOu hATe AuTiStic pEOplE????" because they can't seem to grasp the concept that people are separate from the disabilities they have.
Heck, there's even autistic people who don't want a cure for autism! And while it's great that they aren't bothered by having it, that doesn't mean they get to decide for the entire autistic community what's best for them.
If a cure for autism was created, it should be voluntary. So the people with stockholm syndrome for their mental issues can ignore it, and the people like me, who hate it because it's made their lives a living hell for years, can take advantage of it. Some people have expressed the worry that the cure would be mandated, but that's more of a conversation about government overreach and totalitarianism, which is a separate issue.
I think the reason there are so many autistic people that don't want a cure is because they have made autism a part of their personality, and without it, they feel like just a boring normal person, like they're losing something that makes them unique. Which, yeah, it does, but by making you uniquely miserable, which is a bad thing. When I started becoming less shy and actually talking to people more, I felt a weird kind of worry that I was losing part of myself, the part that made me so shy and timid around others. And yeah, I was, but that was a good thing because it made me able to do more things, like make friends. My personality didn't change, as some people fear theirs would were their autism to be cured, I was just loosing one of the many shackles on my mind that restricted my freedom.
I'll end with this post that describes my feelings pretty well.
