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“Diagnosis is a Privilege”
In the wake of RFK Jr’s Autism registry, is it really?
“Diagnosis is a privilege.”
How often have you heard an Autistic adult who came into that identity later in life use those words?
I hope that RFK Jr’s plan to create a registry of all diagnosed Autistic individuals settles once and for all how much this is not the case.
The choice to access a diagnosis is a privilege. People who are able to mask their Autism and did not have diagnoses forced upon them as children get to decide whether to identify themselves as disabled publicly or in the eyes of the state.
They get to choose for themselves whether the possibility of accommodations and greater social acceptance is worth the risk of being viewed as legally incompetent, being deprioritized for ventilators or organ donations, being denied immigrant and refugee status, and losing the right to make decisions about their body or money — all rights that Autistic people have been very much denied in countries all over the globe, including the United States long before Trump took office.
Visibly Autistic people, nonverbal people, intellectually disabled people, and those who cannot mask have never had the option to obscure that they are disabled. They’ve never been granted the right to…
