Is Autism Really a Disability?
You’re not struggling because you’re autistic. You’re autistic—and struggling—in a world that refuses to adapt.
I know, this is a controversial topic. Please, hear me out.
When I question whether autism is a disability, it’s not provocation—it’s a search for understanding I wish I hadn’t needed four decades to reach.
To be clear, I’m not denying or downplaying exhaustion, shutdown, burnout, sensory trauma, employment loss, isolation, or the countless daily misalignments that continuously compound into something life-altering.
These experiences are real.
They’re devastating. And if you’ve lived them, I don’t need to explain them to you. You know what it feels like to be worn down by a world that doesn’t recognize how you think or move or process. You know the kind of pain that isn’t always visible but still shapes every part of your life. You’ve spent years—a lifetime—trying to figure out why the simplest things seem so difficult, or why everything feels like too much.
I don’t question that reality. I live it too. What I want to say is that these experiences, as real and overwhelming as they are, don’t mean what we’ve been told they mean.
Being disabled by the world you live in doesn’t mean that your way of thinking is itself a disability. And suffering—however deep, however constant—doesn’t mean you’re broken.
But that’s what many of us have been led to believe. Through diagnoses, through education plans, through years of trying to access help that always seemed to come with conditions. Support is only available once we’ve accepted that we’re deficient. That something essential about us needs to be corrected.
Of course that narrative gets under your skin. It should. But not for the reasons you’ve been taught to believe.
That narrative didn’t come from your experience. It came from how others misunderstood it.
Autism was never a categorical list of problems, or a disorder built from what’s missing. It wasn’t born from “misbehavior.” It’s been misunderstood since the day the term “autism” was coined.
What autism is—fundamentally, structurally—is monotropic cognitive inertia.
I know, that phrase is a mouthful. But the experience might be something you recognize. It’s a way of thinking that naturally settles into a few things at a time, often with a lot of depth. It’s not just about “special interests” or “hyper-focus.” It’s about how your attention forms, how it holds, and how it deepens. If you have a monotropic mind, focus isn’t just a preference—it’s how your brain organizes itself. Your thoughts lock into immersive threads, and pulling away from them isn’t just hard—it can feel jarring, even physically disruptive. You’re not avoiding distraction because you want to stay focused. You stay focused because that’s how your mind finds balance. Continuity doesn’t just feel better—it keeps you grounded.
This is not a flaw. But it does mean the world we’ve built—a world optimized for polytropic cognition, where success depends on fast-switching, social cue responsiveness, and distributed attention—is fundamentally misaligned with how monotropic cognition functions.
It’s not just that we’re different. It’s that the system assumes its model is neutral, and treats anything else as broken.
That misalignment is what disables us. The system’s refusal to recognize our structure as valid—that’s what turns difference into deficit. But the system doesn’t acknowledge this because it wasn’t designed to understand structure. The system was designed to interpret behavior.
What we call “autism” didn’t come from a deep understanding of how we think. It came from the outside—built around the behaviors that made us stand out, the ways we confused or frustrated others, the places where we didn’t meet expectations. It was pieced together backwards, shaped by what seemed wrong or missing, rather than by any real insight into the internal experience of being autistic.
Once that framing took hold, it became the foundation for everything else. Diagnoses were structured around what could be observed, not what could be understood. Education systems prioritized conformity over comprehension. Insurance policies were written to respond to pathology, not to support difference. Even therapy often focused less on helping us function in ways that made sense to us, and more on smoothing out the parts of us that made other people uncomfortable.
None of it was designed with our cognition in mind. And because of that, the support we were offered was rarely support at all—it was containment.
That kind of framing doesn’t just shape policy or practice—it seeps into how we see ourselves.
It took me most of my life to even accept that I’m disabled. Not because I didn’t suffer, but because I didn’t believe I was allowed to name what I couldn’t explain. And now that I can name it, I still carry the imprint of that delay—the guilt, the internalized ableism, the defensiveness I sometimes feel when words like “disability” come up. I’m not immune to those feelings. But I no longer let them define the terms of the conversation. Because if we don’t clarify what’s structural and what’s imposed, we will always confuse the label for the truth.
When I say autism isn’t a disability, I am not erasing your pain. I’m refusing to let a structurally distorted framework continue to define your existence. I’m refusing to confuse being disabled by a world that misreads you with being inherently defective. The difference matters—because it changes not just how we’re treated, but how we see ourselves.
And that includes every autistic person—not just the late-diagnosed adult making sense of a lifetime of confusion, but the early-diagnosed child who’s been labeled and tracked since preschool. It includes the non-speaking adult who requires full-time care. It includes the autistic person with overlapping conditions who navigates layers of impairment, stigma, and exhaustion every single day. This reframe doesn’t erase the need for support. It demands it. But it shifts the reason for that support—from an assumption of internal brokenness to a recognition of structural mismatch.
If you need help, you deserve help. If you’re struggling, you deserve accommodation. But you don’t deserve it because you’re deficient. You deserve it because you are struggling. That should be enough.
And yes, I get it—we don’t live in that world—yet. I understand the compromises we’re being forced to make. I know what it means to fill out disability paperwork, to list your worst days, to suppress your strengths to qualify for aid. I know the tension of navigating support systems that only understand you through a lens of pathology. You do what you need to do to survive. You should. And I’ll never fault anyone for that.
But we also have to name the difference between strategic compliance and truth.
Calling autism a disability may get you access—but that label was never made to describe you. It was made to define what society was willing to tolerate.
This isn’t just about changing how we talk about autism. It’s about changing how we understand it at the level that actually matters—how we build around it, respond to it, and make decisions that affect people’s lives.
When autism is treated as a disorder, the systems that follow are designed to correct it. Support plans often focus on what can be discouraged or suppressed, not what helps a person function. Therapy might focus on building “flexibility” without considering whether what’s being called inflexible is actually cognitive momentum—something misunderstood, not malfunctioning. Access to care can depend on how well someone fits a clinical checklist, rather than what kind of support would actually help.
These aren’t minor oversights. They affect how people are treated, how they’re understood, and how much they’re expected to explain or justify who they are.
And I know this framing might feel unfamiliar, especially if you’re used to hearing autism described through diagnostic language. I also know it might sound inaccessible—not because it’s complicated, but because it refuses to flatten itself into something simpler than the reality deserves.
But this isn’t about being provocative, or about making things harder to follow on purpose. It’s about not erasing the parts of our experience that don’t fit into the usual categories. It’s about naming what’s been missed, and building a language that can actually hold it.
If you’re autistic and struggling, this is for you. If you require high support, this is for you. If you’re a caregiver doing your best in a system that gives you no good options, this is for both of you. And if you’re not autistic but you’re still here—if you’re willing to wrestle with what this means—then yes, this is for you too.
The harm we’re addressing here wasn’t caused by difference. It was caused by how difference was defined. And the fix isn’t just kindness. It’s clarity.
So I’ll say it again—without caveat, without compromise:
Autism is not a disability.
The world disables us. The system misreads us.
But what we are—structurally, cognitively—is not a deficit.
It’s a different kind of integrity.
And it deserves to be recognized. ∞
Thank you, I couldn't have said it better myself and I have tried.
I completely agree with what you’ve said. My question, though, always comes back to the embodied sensory differences we have, which sometimes feel quite disabling to me. The heat, for example. I become quite disregulated when it’s hot and humid outside. There are steps I can take to mitigate this, but in the end it’s the earth doing what it does but I have a difficult time navigating it. How would you define the sensory? I’m very curious.