Random Thoughts

Institutional Translation (posted on LinkedIn 4/26/2026)

“Neurodiversity is a common term used to describe individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and other neurodevelopmental disorders. The term was created to recognize differences in neurodevelopment and to reduce stigma associated with these diagnoses.”

I think this definition illustrates a larger problem that emerges when a social justice framework is translated into existing behavioral or post-positivist paradigms: something fundamental is lost in the translation. The issue is not simply that the definition is inaccurate, but that it reflects a particular institutional translation of neurodiversity — one that emphasizes diagnostic difference and stigma reduction while obscuring the movement’s deeper epistemological and political critiques. Neurodiversity did not simply emerge as a softer or more affirming way to describe neurodevelopmental disorders. It emerged, in part, as a critique of the very research traditions that positioned neurodivergent people as deficient objects of study.

Because of this, much of the foundational neurodiversity discourse developed (and is developing) outside mainstream academic outlets — in autistic-led writing, activist spaces, blogs, and alternative intellectual communities such as StimPunks, The Autistic Scholar, Sloth Communism, Neuroqueer, Neurodiversity 2.0, the ANI and InLiv archives, and related spaces. When neurodiversity enters mainstream institutional discourse, it often undergoes a process of translation: it is made legible to dominant frameworks through simplification and the stripping away of its political and epistemological critique.

What remains is often a sanitized version of neurodiversity — categorized, labeled, and packaged for institutional or consumer uptake rather than treated as a challenge to existing structures of knowledge and power.

Neurodiversity becomes acceptable precisely to the extent that it ceases to threaten dominant epistemologies. This is epistemic whitewashing.

This creates a number of issues that directly undermine neurodiversity’s potential as an emancipatory framework: its meanings become unstable, its critiques are selectively absorbed while their political implications are discarded, and neurodivergent knowledge is reinterpreted through the very frameworks neurodiversity originally sought to challenge. 

On Neurodivergent Joy (posted on LinkedIn 4/20/2026)

Thank you, once again, to the #CUNY Neurodiversity Conference 2026 for such a wonderful experience. It was a pleasure to be among friends and colleagues, presenting my work on neurodivergent joy and radical humor as subversive practices within the academy.

Kristen Gillespie-Lynch was a thoughtful and generous moderator, and I deeply appreciated her engagement. At the end of my talk, she posed a question I couldn’t fully sit with in the moment:

“Why is the study of neurodivergent joy and play meaningful?”

I am ready now.

Too often, research on autistic and other neurodivergent people centers pain, struggle, and challenge. While this work is important—it highlights the very real barriers we face in a world not designed with us in mind—it can also reproduce a singular narrative of trauma. When that narrative is repeated often enough, it begins to define what is knowable about neurodivergent life.

When all we know is pain, we lose sight of personhood.

This is its own form of dehumanization. It suggests that neurodivergent people cannot experience the fullness, complexity, and richness of the world.

But we are more than our scars.

Our pain is not the only story we have to tell.

Part of the intervention that is Neurodiversity is reframing how we tell stories about people —and expanding what counts as knowledge about their lives. Joy, humor, and play are not distractions from serious inquiry; they are themselves sites of meaning-making. They reveal how neurodivergent people build connection, navigate constraint, and imagine otherwise.

To study neurodivergent joy, then, is not to turn away from struggle, but to refuse a world in which struggle is all that can be known. 

Defining Neurodiversity Research (posted on LinkedIn 4/05/2026)

Can non-neurodivergent people produce neurodiversity research?

I’ve been grappling with this question for a while now—through ongoing conversations with neurodivergent scholars across different perspectives and lived experiences.

I’m increasingly convinced that the answer depends on what we think neurodiversity is.

If neurodiversity simply means cognitive variation, then there’s little tension.

It fits comfortably within existing positivist and behaviorist frameworks. It can be measured, categorized, and studied from a distance. Even rejected. Under that definition, anyone can produce "neurodiversity" research without much difficulty.

But that definition does a lot of work.

If, instead, we understand neurodiversity as culturally situated knowledge—as knowledge produced from specific social, historical, and political conditions—then things change.

Neurodiversity is no longer just a descriptive label.

It becomes an epistemology. A way of knowing.

And from that perspective, neurodivergent knowledge cannot be separated from the communities that produced it without being transformed in the process.

Knowledge moves from the neutral to the political.

It also becomes far more vulnerable to misrecognition when taken up outside of that context.

We see this misrecognition all the time:

 • Research that claims neurodiversity, but still measures people against dominant, neuronormative expectations

 • Articles that use the language of neurodiversity but do not cite or engage autistic scholarship

 • “Emancipatory” frameworks that continue to rely on deficit-based language and assumptions

In each case, neurodiversity isn’t being engaged—it’s being translated.

Made legible within frameworks that remain fundamentally unchanged.

So the question shifts.

It’s not simply: Can non-neurodivergent people produce neurodiversity research?

It becomes:

Can they do so without reabsorbing neurodiversity into the very frameworks it was meant to challenge?

Can they decenter their own epistemic authority?

Can they even recognize it?

I don't think these questions have a clean answer.

But I am increasingly convinced that the risk is not exclusion—it's absorption. 

On Quiet Exclusion & Neurotypical Perspectivelessness (posted on LinkedIn 03/26/2026)

Exclusion is not always loud. It is not always a state governor standing in a doorway, refusing to let students enroll. It is not always a governing board of a university insisting that those it serves are not fit to lead.

More often, it is subtle.

As Richard Delgado (1989) points out, it often takes the form of a shifting of priorities—one that appears neutral, but is structured by standards already shaped by the dominant group. It is a loud commitment to inclusion paired with a quiet centering of dominant perspectives. It sounds like, “yes, we want a faculty body that reflects the students we serve,” while still prioritizing professionalism, departmental need, and institutional values over lived experience.

Marginalized needs and ways of knowing are pushed beneath what is framed as institutional neutrality. Over time, the result is predictable: the very voices institutions claim to serve are the ones most consistently excluded.

This process is what neurotypical perspectivelessness names: the persistence of marginalization through frameworks that appear neutral, even when they are shaped by dominant ways of thinking.

This is also why prioritizing neurodivergent leadership is so important. It is not simply about doing “the right thing,” but about redefining expertise and shifting who has the authority to decide what matters. 

Defining Neurotypicality (posted on LinkedIn 03/20/2026)

For me, it is more useful to think of neurotypicality not as an absolute state, but as a socially and culturally constructed ideal. There are no inherently “neurotypical” people; rather, individuals are positioned as more or less aligned with this ideal. In this way, neurotypicality functions to legitimize and reinforce hierarchy, while shaping how we understand difference, ability, and even knowledge itself.

To paraphrase Pierre Bourdieu, neurotypicality operates as a structured system that becomes a structuring condition. As a result, neurodiversity is not a fixed set of categories, but a spectrum of variation defined in relation to the neurotypical ideal.

Response to Neurotypical Perspectivelessness (posted on LinkedIn 03/15/2026)

The feedback regarding my paper and theoretical framework of neurotypical perspectivelessness has been deeply humbling. The conversations surrounding it have also raised important tensions and far-reaching implications, some of which I am still trying to think through.

If neurotypical perspectivelessness is understood as a structuring condition rather than merely an interpersonal bias, then it changes how we interpret disability, education, expertise, leadership, and even what counts as legitimate knowledge.

A concise way to put it is this: the issue is not simply that neurodivergent people are misunderstood; it is that the dominant standpoint is rarely recognized as a standpoint at all. 

Response to Administration Comments on Gov. Newsom (posted on LinkedIn 03/10/2026)

True to form, the current administration’s comments regarding Gov. Newsom and, more broadly, neurodivergent people are despicable and reprehensible. We should not need to continue justifying our capabilities, and being forced to do so only reinforces the idea that we are somehow less than.

Notably, the President’s comments reflect a much larger narrative that extends beyond a few poorly chosen words. How many neurodivergent spaces have had neurodivergent leadership? How many have Autistic leadership? How many neurodiversity centers are led by Autistic people? How many college presidents are openly Autistic? When representation is lacking within our own institutions—especially those supposedly “for us”—statements like these cease to be isolated remarks and become part of a self-fulfilling pattern. Institutional underrepresentation does not simply mirror harm; it helps produce and sustain it. 

On Language (posted on LinkedIn 03/07/2026)

One small note on language—not directed at anyone specifically, but as a broader conceptual point: the term 'neurodivergent' is often used as if it were simply a softer substitute for diagnostic labels. More accurately, 'neurodivergence' refers to divergence from socially constructed norms around cognition, communication, behavior, and perception.

In that sense, neurotypicality can also be understood as a social norm tied to power: certain ways of thinking, communicating, and behaving are treated as standard, while others are marked as deviation. From this perspective, neurodivergent is often better understood less as a diagnostic category and more as a socio-political position in that it describes a relationship to normativity and power rather than a medical identity alone.

Relatedly, 'neurodiversity' emerged from autistic activism as a challenge to deficit-based framings of mind and behavior. It is more than a general term for human variation. When we introduce 'neurodiversity', it matters that we frame it as a social justice project rooted in questions of inclusion, power, and normativity, rather than reducing it to simply meaning “brain differences.”  

Microaggressions & Epistemic Trespass (posted on LinkedIn 02/25/2026)

Another note on the intersection of perspectivelessness, neurotypical microaggressions, epistemic trespassing, and institutional practice.

A common institutional pattern is the positioning of “experts”—typically trained in psychology, educational psychology, or neuroscience—as authorities in the design of neurodiversity support programming or in advising other institutions on supports for neurodivergent students.

Notably, these experts often have no training in pedagogy, student development, or educational design, and little familiarity with critical or neurodiversity theory.

Designing effective supports for neurodivergent people becomes difficult when institutional actors lack conceptual clarity about what 'neurodivergence' is as a construct—particularly when it is treated primarily as diagnostic difference rather than as a form of lived identity and community-grounded epistemology.

Neurodiversity is not neutral, nor is its language. The term neurodivergent carries a specific conceptual logic grounded in lived experience and community epistemology. Failure to account for this risks epistemic whitewashing—the appropriation and depoliticization of neurodiversity through institutional authority.

This is how neurotypical microaggressions operate at the institutional level to reproduce neurotypical perspectivelessness.  

Dominant Norms & NT Microaggressions (posted on LinkedIn 02/25/2026)

Extending my recent work on neurotypical perspectivelessness:

Dominant communicative norms often appear neutral and universal rather than situated. When that neutrality is named, interactional regulation often follows.

In this frame, neurotypical microaggressions are not merely interpersonal slights —they function as mechanisms of epistemic boundary enforcement, disciplining those who expose positionality and restoring the appearance of neutrality in everyday discourse.

This situates neurotypical microaggressions within existing scholarship that understands microaggressions as structural and epistemic violence, rather than individualized interpersonal harm. 

Hegemony & Perspectivelessness (posted on LinkedIn 02/23/2026)

I had a colleague ask me if hegemony produces perspectivelessness or if perspectivelessness is a necessary component of hegemony. I found it to be an intriguing question - one that I have grappled with over the last several months.

I think hegemonic systems are structurally invested in maintaining the appearance of universality, and epistemic plurality threatens that appearance. As a result, plurality is often neutralized, misread, or contained.

Perspectivelessness is not merely produced by hegemony; it is the epistemic condition through which hegemonic norms appear as common sense. Epistemic plurality exposes that appearance as positional, and hegemonic institutions frequently respond by neutralizing or containing such exposure.

Neurodiversity in Film (posted on LinkedIn 01/21/2026)

Out of the classes I’ve developed and currently teach at Landmark, Neurodiversity in Film has become one of my favorites. It is powerful and transformative to listen as students break down the stories that popular media has told about them—to deconstruct problematic depictions such as Sheldon Cooper, and trace how these characterizations perpetuate assumptions about race, class, and ability that are historically rooted in eugenic and pathology-driven narratives.

Then—to move beyond critique—students enter a re-storying process. They tell their own stories. They develop their own characters. They write their own worlds.

And in writing ourselves, we write ourselves anew.

Neurodivergent Pedagogy (posted on LinkedIn 01/15/2026)

Question: What happens when we center neurodivergent voices and lived experience as a pedagogical intervention?

Answer: We transform higher education.

“I never realized before this just how deeply the eugenics mindset and the pathology paradigm had embedded itself into our culture, and it made me realize that those ideas were not the common-sense truth that so many people seem to think they are.”

- Student, Neurodiversity in Culture & Society, F25

“This course has dramatically shifted my understanding of the history of medicine in the United States. I had not realized exactly how intrusive the medical model was.”

- Student, Neurodiversity in Culture & Society, F25

Centering neurodivergent voices and lived experience is not simply an additive gesture of inclusion—it is a deliberate pedagogical intervention that reorganizes what counts as knowledge in higher education. When students encounter testimony from neurodivergent peers as theory, not anecdote, it generates productive epistemic friction that exposes the historical contingency of dominant paradigms, including the medical model, pathology frameworks, and the inherited logics of eugenics.

As learners begin to name these systems rather than unconsciously absorb them, transformation becomes possible: belief structures shift, normative “common sense” loses its authority, and higher education moves toward neurocognitive justice, where students are positioned not as objects of accommodation, but as co-producers of meaning and legitimate knowers of their own experience.

Thus, when we center neurodivergent voice as pedagogy, we do more than change classrooms—we reshape the foundations of higher-education itself, advancing neurocognitive justice through the power of situated story-telling and community-generated knowledge. 

On 'Neurodiversity' Research Centers & Epistemic Justice (posted on LinkedIn 12/19/2025)

I’ve been sitting with a recurring frustration, and I want to name it carefully.

Increasingly, universities are hiring Directors of Neurodiversity Research or launching Centers for Neurodiversity led by people who neither produce neurodiversity scholarship nor situate themselves in relation to the movement that gave rise to the paradigm—often without autistic leadership at the center.

This is not about identity policing.

It *is* about epistemic authority.

Neurodiversity is not a neutral topic area or a branding category. It is a social justice movement and an epistemic intervention that emerged from autistic community spaces as a response to dehumanizing, medicalized, and eugenic logics of normality. To claim authority over “neurodiversity research” without engaging autistic-authored scholarship, without reflexive attention to positionality, and without accountability to neurodivergent communities is not neutral—it recenters dominant frameworks while wearing emancipatory language.

When institutions position non-autistic, non–neurodiversity scholars as authoritative leaders in this space, the result is not inclusion but extraction: the language of a liberation movement is taken up while its politics, histories, and risks are set aside.

Leadership matters. Directors set research agendas. They determine what counts as knowledge, whose voices are amplified, and which futures are imaginable. When autistic scholars are absent from those roles, neurodiversity is too easily transformed from a challenge to power into an institutional asset.

If this tension feels uncomfortable, I think that discomfort is instructive. It invites us to ask harder questions about authorship, accountability, and what it actually means to claim alignment with neurodiversity—not just rhetorically, but structurally.

Neurodiversity was never meant to be perspectiveless. 

That's a Wrap - Closing the Second Year of EDU:3013 (posted on LinkedIn 12/12/2025)

That's a Wrap!

The Fall 2025 session of EDU 3013: Neurodiversity is officially done. Thank you SO MUCH to Alex Newson PhD for closing our course with an insightful talk. If you all are not following the work of this hashtag#ActuallyAutistic scholar, you need to be!

The final unit in the course is titled “Neurodivergent Futures” for good reason. Endings bring a time to reflect on the journey, our purpose, and the future of neurodivergent people.

EDU 3013 is a course created by neurodivergent scholars, rooted in neurodivergent cultural knowledge, and designed for neurodivergent students. As we close the course—and as I reflect on my second year teaching it—some things immediately come to mind:

1) We cannot truly engage in neurodiversity-informed work without understanding the history and the social and cultural contexts from which the neurodiversity paradigm emerged.

2) Neurodiversity-informed work—including teaching—necessitates centering the voices of neurodivergent communities.

3) Neurodiversity-informed teaching makes space for counter-storytelling.

Teaching itself is an intervention. When grounded in emancipatory scholarship, it humanizes. It creates space that pushes back against dominant narratives that seek to flatten. And it allows for the radical work of dreaming better futures.

4) In a space that denies humanity, existing is a radical act. In a system that thrives on apathy, dreaming is a radical act. 

So here is my closing invitation—one that I ask every speaker who joins us and one that I use to end the course: 

*What is a hope you have, and how can we work together to make that hope a reality?*

Be well.

Response to RAND Report (posted on LinkedIn 12/12/2025)

In 2023, RAND released a report arguing that neurodivergent people represent an untapped, underutilized resource whose talents could significantly enhance national security. The report identifies “common strengths” such as pattern recognition, analysis, visualization, problem-solving, memory, and hyperfocus—framing these as capacities that could be leveraged for matters of state interest.

At face value, this may seem positive: a recognition that neurodivergent people possess meaningful strengths. However, this framing risks reinforcing the exact logic that the neurodiversity paradigm emerged to challenge—the reduction of neurodivergent bodyminds to forms of labor or value that can be extracted in service of the state.

Neurodivergent strengths do matter. But when they are consistently articulated through the language of productivity, efficiency, or national benefit, we re-inscribe the same neoliberal and ableist assumptions about whose minds “deserve” support, legitimacy, or inclusion. Such logics ultimately maintain, rather than transform, the systems that marginalize neurodivergent people in the first place.

Moreover, positioning neurodivergent people as “essential to national security” risks slipping into the instrumentalization—or even weaponization—of neurodivergent traits. Historically, state-centered framings of marginalized groups that emphasize their usefulness, rather than their inherent humanity, have paved the way for exploitation and dehumanization.

The neurodiversity paradigm arose to counter precisely these dynamics. Its central claim is that neurodivergent people possess intrinsic worth outside of productivity, utility, or strategic value. Recognizing neurodivergent strengths is important, but doing so must not come at the cost of reinforcing the very systems that have long benefited from our exclusion.

Neurotypical Perspectivelessness (posted on LinkedIn 12/10/2025)

What is Neurotypical Perspectivelessness? 

Neurotypical perspectivelessness (Denisen, publication forthcoming) refers to the dominant cultural tendency to treat neurotypical experience as the neutral, universal, and unmarked standard by which all other minds are understood and judged. It describes a lack of perspective-taking—not on the part of neurodivergent people, but on the part of institutions, practices, and individuals who assume that neurotypical norms are self-evident, natural, or value-free.

This perspectivelessness renders neurotypical expectations invisible while positioning neurodivergent ways of sensing, thinking, communicating, or organizing life as deviations that must be corrected, accommodated, or explained.

The concept builds on longstanding analyses of unmarked normativity in critical disability studies (e.g., Garland-Thomson, 1997; Minich, 2016) and aligns with critical neurodiversity’s emphasis on revealing and destabilizing the “view from nowhere” claimed by neurotypical norms.

Defining Neurodiversity Research (posted on LinkedIn 12/03/2025)

Quick note: Including neurodivergent people in your sample—or even making them the focus of your study—does NOT automatically make your work neurodiversity research.

By definition, neurodiversity research deliberately centers the voices, experiences, and interpretive authority of neurodivergent people and is grounded in the foundational principles of the neurodiversity paradigm.

This means directly addressing epistemic justice, and centering neurodivergent voices in your research questions, methodological choices, interpretation, and dissemination of findings.

Neurodiversity research is typically:

- critical, 

- collaborative, 

- co-creative, 

- and qualitative, though not exclusively.

At its core, it is about doing research with neurodivergent communities—not on them.

Epistemic Violence (posted on LinkedIn 11/03/2025)

Pointed question: 

What happens when you take something from a marginalized community, 

- do not do the work to understand it,

- do not give them credit, 

- and then use it in a way it is not meant to be used?

It's called epistemic violence.

This is exactly what happens when well-meaning individuals adopt the language of neurodiversity while ignoring—or actively reshaping—the scholarship, histories, and community labor that built it. They don’t amplify the paradigm; they dilute it. They don’t honor the movement; they appropriate it.

It’s also why it is so harmful when institutions establish “centers for neurodiversity,” “certificates in neurodiversity,” or “neurodiversity” courses that do not center the voices, labor, and expertise of neurodivergent people.

Using the term while sidelining the very community that built it reproduces the same extractive logic: taking the concept, stripping it of its political and liberatory roots, and repackaging it in a form that serves institutional comfort rather than community empowerment.

The Limits of Good Intentions (posted on LinkedIn)

“Ideology - the received wis­dom - makes current social arrangements seem fair and natural. Those in power sleep well at night -  their conduct does not seem to them like oppression.” - Delgado (1989)

I have been working to create more neuroinclusive campus environments for about six years now, and I have found that one of the biggest barriers to inclusion is not fixed by better-feeling chairs, acoustic-sensitive room designs, or even accessible lesson planning. These things are certainly important - and necessary - in building inclusive spaces, to be sure, but they are generally surface-level fixes. 

I’ve found that the biggest barrier is not material or logistical, but attitudinal — it’s *well-intentioned people*.

Let me explain. One of the ways systems of oppression persist is by convincing us that sexism, ableism, and racism are primarily perpetuated by a handful of bad people. Thus, the supposed “fix” is to root out these bad actors, allowing the supposedly neutral system to function as intended.

As Delgado, Crenshaw, King, Broderick & Lalvani remind us, this is not the case. Systems of oppression reproduce themselves not through a few bad actors, but by shaping how we understand concepts such as race, gender, and neurodiversity. When we frame ableism or sexism as moral failures, we reinforce the illusion that “good” people cannot be complicit in oppression. This makes it profoundly difficult for even the most well-intentioned individuals to confront the ways they may participate in exclusion: “I can’t be ableist—I’m a good person.”

Embracing neurodiversity as a framework means recognizing that true emancipation requires intentionally reckoning with how we’ve been socialized to think about marginalized experiences. A few new chairs and a shiny ‘neurodiversity’ center are nice gestures, but true neuroinclusion demands intentional reflection.

It requires reckoning with the systems that shape our assumptions about what counts as support, access, and inclusion — and asking how those very frameworks may still reproduce exclusion, even when designed with the best of intentions.

Counter-space & Neurodiversity Centers (posted on LinkedIn)

Can the formalization of counterspaces—such as Centers for Neurodiversity—lead to meaningful change?

The growing number of such centers on college campuses is heartening, as it reflects an increasing recognition of the needs of neurodivergent students.

Yet, history reminds us that institutionalization can also lead to de-radicalization, as the movements these spaces represent often become dependent on the very systems they seek to subvert in order to survive. In this way, their existence may ultimately sustain the structures they once sought to challenge, rather than signal a truly radical shift in practice.

There is, nonetheless, room for celebration: the slow but recognizable acceptance of neurodiversity and the needs of neurodivergent people marks a meaningful cultural shift. Still, this optimism must be balanced with caution—and with an awareness of the hegemonic forces that continue to reinforce the status quo.

Response to RFK & HHS 'Cure' for Autism (posted on LinkedIn)

It's hard to predict what will come out of HHS today, but I do know this: autism is not a disease to be cured. It is a fundamental part of who we are. It is embodied experience. It is valuable. It is human.

Reflections on Inclusive Education (posted on LinkedIn)

I have been working almost exclusively with ND learners in a college setting for a little over 5 years now, and, through this experience, I have had the pleasure of engaging with many wonderful learners and educators. 

The more I have developed in my practice - as a scholar, educator, and ND person - the more I am becoming convinced that 'teaching for neurodivergent learners' (aka neuro-inclusive teaching practice) is not meaningfully different from what I would identify as just good teaching practice. 

I think we have been socialized to think of teaching and learning from a very narrow view point that has historically privileged certain cultural groups and certain ways of being and thinking (re-reading Thorndike, Terman, Goddard, Strong etc. has further emphasized this). The work of emancipatory teaching practice is un-learning much of those assumptions and re-centering learning as a collective, relational process geared toward developing critical consciousness.

There is no magical practice or set of practices for supporting 'ND learners' - however you wish to define it. There is no panacea. The work is in recognizing and addressing our own socialization as well as deconstructing the larger structures and systems which continue to produce inequity in education.

On Teaching Neurodiversity History (posted on LinkedIn)

One of the tensions I am working through at the moment is how to effectively teach the history of neurodivergent folx in the US without re-traumatizing students from the communities who have historically been the targets of deeply harmful stories.

We recently talked about the case of Carrie Buck v. Bell and the rhetoric that legitimized what was done to her (in the context of dominant hegemonic narratives). Students usually experience a strong sense of outrage followed by a sense of betrayal for having just learned about both the case and the deep history of eugenics in the US school system (higher ed. included) - something that they have felt was intentionally hidden from them, especially as neurodivergent individuals. 

This is usually followed by a sense of shock and dismay as they begin to realize that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was talking about people just like them. They also begin connecting the dehumanizing language used by eugenicists to statements that have been levied towards them, usually coming from people they loved and trusted who meant well but were unaware of the legacy of ableism in the US. 

I think it’s this well-meaninged ableism that causes the most harm. 

Framing the discussion in terms of movements and counter-movements seems to help some - emphasizing that the communities that were the targets of dehumanization were not passive - but even that feels hollow at times.

And, yet, this work is so necessary. We cannot move towards emancipation without reckoning with the past, and failure to attend to historical context guarantees reproduction.