"Not an appendage": the year the subject started writing

Ole Ivar Lovaas and ABA at UCLA framed the work as suppressing behaviors, retraining the brain, fixing the problem. In parallel, disability rights organizing insisted everyone deserves access. PARC v. Pennsylvania (1971) and Mills v. Board of Education (1972) established that children with disabilities cannot be excluded from educational settings simply because of their disability. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act followed in 1975, later IDEA. In the 1980s autism became a spectrum.

Then the people being described began describing themselves. Jim Sinclair founded Autism Network International in 1992 and published "Don't Mourn for Us" in 1993: when parents say I wish my child did not have autism, what they are really saying is I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different child instead. Not an appendage.

Lorna Wing, psychiatrist and mother of a disabled daughter, gave the spectrum its shape and the line I keep returning to: nature never draws a line without smudging it. Every category I use in a school building is a line someone drew, and the smudge is where the actual students are.