A reaction to the DOJ’s disability memo and the renewed threat of reinstitutionalisation, read through the older grammar of autism pathogenesis—where disabled lives become origin problems before they are treated as lives.
In this episode of AutSide After Dark, I return to an older piece I wrote about the word pathogenesis and why it has never felt neutral when placed beside autism. The talk begins with language—not as decoration, not as terminology floating harmlessly above the world, but as infrastructure. I wanted to sit with the way certain words enter a room sounding professional, careful, and medically precise, while already arranging autistic life as a problem of origin, mechanism, prevention, and control.
From there, I move into the present political moment: the renewed threat of institutional thinking in American disability policy, especially around the weakening of protections that have helped disabled people remain in their homes, communities, relationships, and ordinary lives. I do not treat this as a sudden rupture from nowhere. I place it inside a longer history in which disabled and autistic people have repeatedly been framed as burdens, risks, failed developments, preventable outcomes, or lives requiring management before we are recognised as members of the world.
The centre of the talk is the connection between biomedical language and political imagination. When autism is described through pathogenesis, risk, biomarkers, pathophysiology, therapeutic targeting, and prevention, the future being imagined can quietly become a future with fewer autistic people in it. That does not require open hatred. It does not require a cartoon villain. It only requires respectable systems to keep asking why we exist while refusing, with the same urgency and funding, to ask what we need to live safely, freely, and well.
I end from a more personal place: as an autistic woman, a teacher, a writer, a mother, and a disabled person who does not want her diagnosis used as a pretext for removal, containment, or managed existence. The episode is emotional because the stakes are not theoretical. I am talking about the difference between being studied as a mechanism and being met as a life. I am talking about the pathogenesis of neglect—the institutional process by which meaning becomes behaviour, distress becomes noncompliance, testimony becomes anecdote, and disabled people are made to feel as though the world would prefer a future in which we never arrived.
