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 ==== Autism Related Reading Notes ====
+**"Critic of the Dawn" by Cal Montgomery
+**
+<blockquote>I remember the first time people who taught me that i was okay and who stood naked in line with me, waiting for a paper cup of shampoo and a turn under the showerhead, on bath nights. Or , "You were misdiagnosed." And i remember the times i could not speak and had no keyboard, the times i slammed my head against a wall over and over until the staff looked for a helmet i couldn't remove, and i am sadly grateful that they haven't known a world in which communication and self-respect are possible only with blood and broken bones.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>"Disabled person," I call myself. Maybe it's time for a nod to terminology.
+In Britain in the 1970s, disabled people began to criticize the link between physical difference and social death, began to draw a distinction between impairment-- which has to do with the way we differ from one another -- and disability -- which has to do with the way impaired people are treated in a society that does not plan for impaired people.
+Disability, on this understanding, is not in-ability but dis-enablement, and nondisabled people are not, in comparison to us, innately able. They are, rather, enabled by society set up to accommodate their needs and not ours.
+Disability is injustice, not tragedy; unequal treatment, not inherent inequality.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>"We hold these truth to be self-evident," i read, "that all men are created equal." And i was hooked.
+I was naive: i was ten, and if i hadn't grasped the ways inequalities played out in the US, hadn't heard of disability rights, hadn't tuned in to criticism of saying //men // and meaning //humanity//, i'd heard of slavery. But in that moment, i failed to make connection.
+//We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...//I thought it meant that every human being valuable , none more than another. That everyone had a chance, none more than another. I thought it was simple; in my simplicity i thought it was true.
+I was a child in love with a childish conception of equality. But i was in love.
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>I am different.
+"Same as what?" you ask. "Different as what?" The reference point -- the imaginary person around whom society is planned -- is pale and obscure figure, but those who have searched him out report that he is white, straight, nondisabled, educated, mature, moneyed, and male.Those whose sameness to this reference point, this mythical man, has been stressed -- whose struggle in his world has been blamed on choice, on moral lapse -- may quit reasonably insist on their difference. "Disabled and Proud," reads a tee-shirt. Those whose difference from him has been stressed -- whose exclusion from his world has been considered justified -- may quit reasonably assert their sameness. "I am not a puzzle. I am a person," reads a button.
+As different people experience disability in different ways, have it attributed to different sources, adopt different tactics for different situations, there are shifts between the campaigns of sameness and the campaigns of difference -- and the disability community is shattered, broken into subcommunities with different traditions, different priorities, different dialects to explain different experiences.
+</blockquote>
+<blockquote>I know that the tactile defensiveness -- disliking touch -- is impairment, because i look around me and see other people seeking out exactly that kind of physical contact that is painful for me; because i notice that i come from species that enjoys the mechanics of sexual reproduction; because i know the fiery pain of "friendly" touch. I know that prosopagnosia -- not recognizing faces -- is impairment, because i look around me and understand that not recognizing  a face is almost always a moral failing or a moral judgment.</blockquote>
+<blockquote>And yet... the barriers are not so clear, not so easily addressed as some writers seem to believe, and it is not as clear as we might think how we should re-envision our society to welcome, to value, to enable all people to full membership.
+</blockquote>
 **"Don't mourn for us" by Jim Sinclair from the book "Loud hands/ autistic people speaking"**