Before GRANN existed as an organisation, our President was part of a disabled networking and support space where a comment landed that has never really left us. Not because it was rare. But because it turned out to be everywhere.
The idea was simple, casually delivered, and deeply unsettling:
If an autistic person does not feel disabled by their autism, that must be because they have internalised ableism.
Not might. Not sometimes.
Must.
That sentiment has since become a recurring theme in many autistic and disabled spaces. And it matters that we name it, because it quietly undermines the very thing our communities fight hardest for: autonomy.
Telling someone how they should experience their own body, mind, and life is dehumanising. Full stop. Suggesting there is only one correct emotional relationship to autism, disability, or difference replaces one form of domination with another. It swaps external oppression for internal policing.
We need to pause here and ask a difficult question:
If autistic and disabled people are continually fighting to be heard, why are we so quick to talk over one another?
There is nothing illogical, contradictory, or politically naive about an autistic person saying, “I don’t feel disabled by my autism.” In fact, if someone has their needs met, consistently and meaningfully, it makes complete sense. When environments are accessible, supports are present, relationships are respectful, and communication is honoured, disability does not always register as suffering. Sometimes it registers as difference. Sometimes as neutrality. Sometimes as strength.
That does not mean circumstances cannot change. Needs can become unmet overnight. Supports can disappear. Systems can collapse. An autistic person who does not feel disabled today may feel disabled tomorrow. Both experiences can coexist without cancelling each other out.
It is also important to say this clearly: not all autistic people will feel this way. Many do experience their autism as disabling regardless of support. Many live in constant negotiation with systems that refuse to meet their needs. Those realities are real, valid, and must remain centred in advocacy, policy, and law.
And yes, autism must remain recognised as a disability medically and legally. That designation is essential for access, protections, and rights. None of this changes that.
What does need to change is the way we respond to difference within our own communities.
Telling an autistic person that they must be misdiagnosed because they don’t feel disabled is dehumanising. Telling them their self-understanding is false consciousness or internalised ableism is dehumanising. Both strip people of authority over their own narratives. Both replicate the same power dynamics we claim to resist.
Autonomy does not end where consensus begins.
Community should be a place where multiple truths can exist side by side, not a place where lived experience is filtered through ideological checkpoints. We do not build liberation by demanding uniformity of feeling. We build it by making room.
At GRANN, we believe neuro-affirmation means trusting people to know themselves. It means resisting the urge to correct someone’s inner world to make it fit our frameworks. It means remembering that liberation is not just about dismantling external barriers, but about refusing to recreate them between ourselves.
No one should be doing this.
Not to each other.
Not in spaces that claim to be about belonging.