The return of functioning labels: How austerity turns advocacy into competition

A parent recently posted about profound autism, describing the experience of having her son’s reality erased when people say that “profound autism” doesn’t exist. Her frustration is legitimate—parents of children with intensive, lifelong support needs face profound institutional abandonment, and “profound autism” names a reality that deserves recognition and resources. But her post also illustrates how austerity positions disabled people and families as competitors: The premise—that one group’s visibility threatens another’s access—reveals how thoroughly scarcity logic has infiltrated our thinking. Both groups need adequate support. The fact that it feels like a zero-sum game is the problem.

This is how austerity works: it manufactures scarcity, then forces communities to fight over the scraps, and the language we use to describe disability becomes weaponised in a battle that should not be happening, because the resources exist to support every disabled person adequately—the state has simply chosen not to allocate them, and functioning labels offer a tidy mechanism for rationing care while obscuring the political decision that made rationing necessary.

On labels

Some nonspeaking autistic adults have explicitly asked people not to use terms like “profound autism” or “severe autism,” experiencing that language as dehumanising regardless of the parents’ strategic intent. I understand that request, and I also understand why parents caught in systems of manufactured scarcity reach for whatever language might unlock the specific doors their children need—whether that’s “profound autism” to justify intensive school supports, or “high-functioning” to secure a spot in an after-school theatre program that might exclude a child labeled as having higher support needs. Both framings can open doors and both can close them, depending on what the institution wants to protect: its resources, or its comfort.

The fact that parents must calibrate their language based on which form of access or inclusion they’re fighting for in that moment—must choose between framings that might secure services and framings that might prevent exclusion from community—is not a linguistic problem. It’s evidence that the system has been designed to make care and belonging contingent on performing disability in ways institutions find legible, and that design is violence. I refuse to police families navigating impossible choices while the systems creating those choices remain unaccountable. I am saying that the fact that language matters this much—that the difference between “high support needs” and “high-functioning” can determine whether your child receives accommodation or abandonment, that calling your child profoundly autistic might protect them from one form of violence while exposing them to another—reveals that rationing requires sorting mechanisms, and language has been conscripted into service of sorting when it should simply allow us to communicate our realities and our needs.

Language should allow us to communicate our realities and our needs.
Instead, it has been conscripted into service of sorting—deciding who receives care and who receives abandonment.

Just a Parent

The solidarity we need is not agreement about terminology. The solidarity we need is collective refusal of systems that make terminology consequential, that force us into competitions over which words grant access to inadequate resources, that pit “high-functioning” against “profound” or “autistic” against “with autism” as though the problem is which language we choose rather than the fact that institutions withhold support from most disabled people regardless of how we describe ourselves, distribute care based on visibility and whiteness and compliance rather than based on actual need, and then position our linguistic choices as evidence we are too divided to deserve better.

Fight for your child using whatever terms open doors. I will fight alongside you for a world where the doors stay open regardless of the language we use, where support is universal and adequate and not contingent on performing disability in forms institutions find legible, where we do not have to choose between framings that might secure services and framings that might prevent violence because there is enough care to provide both, where austerity and white supremacy no longer determine who receives accommodation and who receives abandonment.

Terms used

What follows is a list of terms used, sorted somewhat according to my experience of whether support or accommodations are offered in schools.

High resources in BC schools (significant staffing, funding, specialised programming)

Term	Definition	Who uses	Strategic considerations
Profound autism	A term emphasising intensive permanent support needs and significant challenges across multiple domains of life	Families of children with high visible support needs who require round-the-clock care, often fighting for adequate services and staffing	Opens doors to intensive services and specialised programming. Justifies staffing requests. Some families worry it emphasises deficit over humanity. Can be used to justify segregation.
Nonspeaking autistic	Identity-first term for autistic people who do not use oral speech as primary communication, may use AAC or other modalities	Nonspeaking autistic adults, families within neurodiversity movement, disability rights advocates. Increasingly preferred over ‘nonverbal.’	Centers communication as existing through multiple modalities beyond speech. Challenges deficit framing. May require explanation as term is less widely known than ‘nonverbal.’ Affirms agency and communication competence.
Severe autism	Term emphasising significant challenges and high support needs	Families advocating for services, medical professionals, sometimes used in research. Less common in neurodiversity-affirming spaces.	May help justify intensive services and funding. Can be seen as deficit-focused or dehumanising. Some families feel it’s the only language institutions take seriously. Often paired with descriptions of specific support needs.
High support needs	Describes autistic people who require intensive daily assistance across multiple life domains	Families of children requiring significant care, autistic adults describing their needs, disability advocates. Used as alternative to ‘severe’ or ‘low-functioning.’	Focuses on support requirements rather than deficits. More humanising than ‘severe.’ Can help justify service access. May still be used to justify segregation or low expectations. Support needs can also fluctuate.
Level 3 ASD	DSM-5 classification for autism requiring ‘very substantial support’ in social communication and restricted/repetitive behaviors	Medical professionals, families seeking diagnostic clarity, insurance and service providers. Used in formal assessments and documentation.	Provides standardised diagnostic language for insurance and IEP purposes. May help justify intensive services. Some families find numerical levels reductive or stigmatising. Can be used to deny services to ‘lower levels.’
Classic autism	Informal term sometimes used to describe autism with early language delays and more visible presentation	Occasionally used in conversation to distinguish from Asperger’s or to describe what DSM-5 calls Level 2/3. Not an official diagnostic term.	Attempts to distinguish from ‘Asperger’s’ or ‘high-functioning’ labels. Not clinically defined. Can perpetuate hierarchy. May communicate visible disability in contexts where that helps access support.
With high support needs autistic child	Descriptive phrase some parents use emphasising they are parents of disabled children, often in advocacy contexts	Parents in advocacy communities, particularly those fighting for adequate services and recognition of intensive care work	Emphasises parental experience and advocacy role. Some autistic advocates critique parent-centered framing. Can build parent community and solidarity. May be strategic in contexts where parent voice is prioritised over disabled voice.
Intellectually disabled autistic	Describes autistic people who also meet criteria for intellectual disability (IQ below 70, adaptive functioning challenges)	Families, medical professionals, disability rights advocates. Increasingly used alongside autism diagnosis rather than replacing it	Acknowledges co-occurring intellectual disability while maintaining autistic identity. Helps access appropriate supports for both autism and ID. Can face double stigma. Some research suggests autism and ID are distinct and deserve dual recognition.
Minimally speaking	Describes autistic people who can speak some words or phrases but speech is limited, unreliable, or insufficient for full communication	Families, speech therapists, autistic people describing their communication. More specific than ‘nonverbal’ or ‘nonspeaking.’	Provides more nuanced description than binary speaking/nonspeaking. Acknowledges communication that exists without overstating capacity. May help secure appropriate AAC and communication support.
Nonverbal	Older term for people who do not use oral speech—increasingly replaced by ‘nonspeaking’ in disability community	Still common in medical settings, older documentation, people unfamiliar with updated language preferences	Communicates lack of oral speech in widely understood way. Increasingly seen as inaccurate since ‘nonverbal’ implies no communication when in fact people communicate through many modalities. Being replaced with ‘nonspeaking.’
Echolalic	Describes speech pattern where person repeats words/phrases heard from others, common in autism, can be immediate or delayed	Speech-language pathologists, families, autistic people describing their communication. Increasingly understood as meaningful communication.	Describes specific communication pattern without judgment. Growing recognition that echolalia serves communicative functions. May help speech therapists understand communication goals. Can be pathologised or misunderstood as non-communicative.
AAC user	Describes someone who uses augmentative and alternative communication (devices, sign language, picture exchange, etc.)	Nonspeaking/minimally speaking people, families, speech therapists, disability rights advocates	Centers communication competence and tools rather than speech deficit. Emphasises that communication happens through multiple modalities. May help secure AAC funding and training. Challenges speech-centric bias.

Medium resources in BC schools (some accommodation, limited EA support, basic IEP)

Autistic with PDA	Describes someone who is autistic and specifically experiences pathological/extreme demand avoidance as primary presentation	Neurodiversity-affirming families and professionals, increasingly recognised in autism community, particularly UK-based originally	Combines autism identity with specific PDA framework. Helps explain why demand avoidance is central challenge. May help find appropriate support approaches. Faces similar recognition challenges as PDA alone plus question of whether PDA is subset of autism or comorbid condition.
High-functioning autism	A term describing autistic people who can speak and appear to manage daily tasks independently	Often used by families and individuals seeking diagnosis-related accommodations. Sometimes used by people diagnosed with Asperger’s before DSM-5 changes.	May help access some accommodations without segregation. Frequently used by institutions to DENY support (‘they’re high-functioning so they don’t need services’). Associated with elevated suicide risk because struggles remain invisible.
Twice exceptional	Describes children who are both gifted/intellectually advanced and have disabilities (including autism, ADHD, learning disabilities)	Parents of academically talented children who also struggle significantly. Often used in educational advocacy and gifted education communities.	Opens doors to both gifted programming and special education services. Can help explain paradox of high intelligence with significant struggles. May face resistance from schools who think giftedness cancels out disability or vice versa.
Asperger’s syndrome	Historical diagnostic term (removed from DSM-5) describing autistic people without intellectual disability or significant language delays	Older adults diagnosed before 2013, some individuals who identify with the term despite diagnostic changes. Less common among younger generation.	No longer an official diagnosis but still used in conversation and self-identification. Can communicate ‘autism without intellectual disability’ to those unfamiliar with current diagnostic framework. Some avoid due to Hans Asperger’s Nazi ties.
Mild autism	Term suggesting autism with less severe impact or support needs	Sometimes used in casual conversation, by medical professionals unfamiliar with current frameworks, or by individuals describing their own experience	Often used to dismiss support needs (‘it’s just mild autism’). Can minimise invisible struggles. May help some people explain their experience without feeling reduced. Generally discouraged by advocates as it implies some autism is ‘severe’ and perpetuates harmful hierarchy.
Sensory processing disorder (SPD)	Describes significant difficulties processing and responding to sensory information—often overlaps with autism but can occur independently	Occupational therapists, families, sometimes used before autism diagnosis. Not officially in DSM-5 as standalone diagnosis.	Provides language for sensory challenges that may help access OT services. Not sufficient for autism diagnosis or autism-specific services. May be used when family/professional hesitant about autism label.
Low support needs	Describes autistic people who require less intensive daily assistance but may still need significant accommodations	Autistic self-advocates, neurodiversity-affirming families and professionals. Used as alternative to ‘high-functioning’ or ‘mild.’	Attempts to describe support needs without hierarchy. Acknowledges need for accommodations while avoiding functioning labels. Can still be used dismissively. More accurate than ‘mild’ but support needs can fluctuate.
Level 1 ASD	DSM-5 classification for autism requiring ‘support’ (lowest of three levels) in social communication and restricted/repetitive behaviors	Medical professionals, insurance documentation, some families. Often correlates with what was previously called Asperger’s or high-functioning autism.	Provides standardised language for diagnosis and documentation. Frequently used to deny services (‘they’re only Level 1’). Can help access some accommodations while avoiding segregation. Numerical levels can feel reductive.
ASD	Acronym for Autism Spectrum Disorder, used in medical and educational documentation	Medical professionals, educators, researchers, formal documentation. Shorthand in clinical settings.	Efficient shorthand in professional contexts. Same limitations as ‘autism spectrum disorder’—’disorder’ language contested, doesn’t specify support needs. Necessary for paperwork.
Level 2 ASD	DSM-5 classification for autism requiring ‘substantial support’ in social communication and restricted/repetitive behaviors	Medical professionals, families, insurance and service providers. Middle category between Level 1 and Level 3.	Provides standardised diagnostic language. May help justify services without implying ‘severe’ disability. Can still face barriers accessing adequate support. Numerical system doesn’t capture complexity or fluctuation.
Autistic ADHD or AuDHD	Describes people with both autism and ADHD diagnoses (very high comorbidity, may share genetic/neurological underpinnings)	Self-advocates, families, clinicians recognising frequent co-occurrence. Growing recognition that both diagnoses can and often do occur together.	Acknowledges both neurotypes and their interaction. Helps access supports for both conditions. May face resistance from professionals who believe one diagnosis ‘cancels out’ the other. Both conditions often require different accommodations.
Unreliable speech	Describes speech that is present but inconsistent—may work sometimes but not others, may be affected by stress or environment	Autistic people describing their experience, families, speech and language professionals understanding communication variability	Captures the reality that speech capacity fluctuates. Helps explain why someone can talk sometimes but not others. Challenges binary assumptions. May help advocate for AAC even when speech is sometimes present.
Social communication disorder	DSM-5 diagnosis for persistent difficulties in social communication without restricted/repetitive behaviors characteristic of autism	Speech-language pathologists, psychologists, families. Sometimes diagnosed when autism is suspected but criteria not fully met.	Can access some speech/social support services. Less stigmatised than autism in some contexts. Some children later re-diagnosed as autistic. Doesn’t provide access to autism-specific services or understanding.

Low/no resources in BC schools (dismissed, requires extensive/more explanation)

Autistic	Identity-first language centering autism as integral to identity rather than as an external condition	Strongly preferred by many autistic self-advocates, neurodiversity movement, increasing adoption by families and professionals	Centers autistic identity and community. Challenges medical model framing. Some people prefer ‘person with autism’ (person-first). Term itself doesn’t specify support needs so may require additional description for service access.
Person with autism	Person-first language emphasising personhood before disability, autism as one characteristic among many	Many families, some professionals, people who prefer this framing, required by some organizations and style guides	Emphasises humanity and personhood. Preferred by some individuals and families. Rejected by many autistic advocates who see identity-first as more affirming. May be required language in formal/professional contexts.
Autism spectrum disorder	Official DSM-5 diagnostic term replacing previous subcategories, emphasising spectrum nature of autism	Medical and educational professionals, formal documentation, insurance, clinical settings. Required for official diagnosis.	Necessary for formal diagnosis, IEP eligibility, insurance coverage. ‘Disorder’ language contested by many advocates who prefer ‘autism’ or ‘autistic.’ Emphasises spectrum but doesn’t specify where on that spectrum.
On the spectrum	Casual phrase indicating someone is autistic without using diagnostic language	Often used in conversation, by people uncertain about formal diagnosis, or those uncomfortable with direct disability language.	Softens language in a way some find more comfortable and others find dismissive. Doesn’t convey support needs. Can minimise disability. May be entry point before formal diagnosis or more direct language.
Neurodiverse	Describes neurological differences including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and others as natural variations rather than deficits	Neurodiversity movement, many autistic self-advocates, progressive educators and workplaces.	Challenges deficit framing. Emphasises diversity and accommodation over normalisation. Can be seen as minimising disability or support needs. Creates community across different neurotypes. Some prefer more specific language.
Neurodivergent	Describes individuals whose neurological development and functioning diverge from dominant societal norms (autism, ADHD, etc.)	Self-advocates, families aligned with neurodiversity framework, increasingly used in workplace accommodations and education	Similar to neurodiverse but specifically describes individuals rather than populations. Challenges pathology framing. Broad term that may need specification. Growing recognition in professional settings.
Special needs	Euphemistic phrase describing people requiring accommodations or support, including but not limited to autism	Commonly used in schools and casual conversation, sometimes preferred by families seeking less clinical language	Softens language in ways some find respectful and others find patronising. Doesn’t specify what needs are. Can be seen as euphemistic avoidance of disability language. May help access general special education services.
Differently abled	Euphemistic phrase emphasising abilities rather than disabilities, intended to be positive	Some families, people uncomfortable with ‘disabled’ language, occasional use in media	Attempts positive framing but often rejected by disability advocates who see it as avoiding necessary language of disability and access needs. Doesn’t help secure services or accommodations.
Monotropic	Describes attention style where autistic people focus deeply on fewer things at a time, as opposed to polytropism (many focuses)	Autistic self-advocates, researchers, neurodiversity-affirming communities. Growing recognition as framework for understanding autistic cognition	Provides positive framework for what’s often pathologised as ‘restricted interests.’ Explains both strengths (deep focus) and challenges (difficulty switching). Helps advocate for environments supporting deep focus. Less widely known outside autism community.
Asynchronous profile	Describes uneven abilities across domains—very high functioning in some areas, significant challenges in others	Parents of gifted autistic children, educators, psychologists discussing assessment results	Helps explain paradox of advanced abilities alongside significant struggles. Challenges assumptions that high ability in one area means competence across all areas. Useful in educational planning. May overlap with ‘twice exceptional.’
Highly sensitive person	Term from psychology describing heightened sensory and emotional sensitivity—sometimes overlaps with or is confused for autism	People describing sensory sensitivities, sometimes used before autism diagnosis is considered, popular psychology communities	Provides language for sensory experiences without disability framing. Can be stepping stone toward autism assessment. Sometimes used to avoid autism diagnosis language. Does not guarantee access to disability accommodations or services.
Verbal	Term used to indicate someone can use oral speech, often in contrast to ‘nonverbal’—increasingly seen as inadequate descriptor	Medical and educational settings, older documentation, used to distinguish from nonspeaking people	Simple descriptor of speech capacity. Doesn’t capture communication complexity or other autism-related needs. Can contribute to dismissal of significant struggles in ‘verbal’ autistic people.

The logic of scarcity

When I speak with parents whose children require intensive, round-the-clock support—children who are nonspeaking, who need assistance with all activities of daily living, who experience the world through profound sensory and cognitive differences that demand specialised infrastructure—I hear desperation born of real neglect: schools that refuse to provide adequate staffing, waitlists that stretch years, respite services so scarce that families collapse under the weight of care work the state has abandoned, and a pervasive sense that their children have become invisible within a broader disability rights movement that centres articulate self-advocates while failing to address the material reality of families whose children cannot speak for themselves. These parents may look at the landscape of autism advocacy and conclude that the problem is erasure, that if “profound autism” were named and recognised as distinct, resources would flow toward it, services would expand, and their children would finally receive the support they have been denied.

But the children are not invisible because the language is wrong. The children are invisible because the state has decided they are too expensive to serve adequately, and reinstating functioning labels will not change that calculation—it will only redistribute inadequacy, ensuring that some disabled people receive slightly more while others receive nothing, and the fiction of scarcity remains intact, unchallenged, naturalised as though resources were genuinely finite rather than deliberately constrained.

The truth is this: autistic adults who are labeled “high-functioning” are also receiving inadequate support. They face years-long waitlists for assessments that cost thousands of dollars if pursued privately, workplace accommodations denied because their disability is deemed too mild to warrant adjustment, exclusion from services considered appropriate only for children or for people whose support needs present visibly, medical providers who dismiss their reports of sensory overwhelm or executive dysfunction because they can articulate their experience and therefore must be exaggerating it, and the pervasive social expectation that they should be able to mask indefinitely without cost because their intelligence should allow them to override their nervous systems through sheer cognitive effort.

The problem is not that one group is receiving too much. The problem is that everyone is receiving too little, and austerity logic insists we must rank suffering to determine who gets the inadequate care the state has chosen to provide.

Suicidality and support needs

I carry a profoundly disfiguring skin condition on my hip that remains hidden under clothing. Research on Concealment and Distress shows people with hidden disfigurement attempt suicide at higher rates than those with visible disfigurement. Invisibility compounds suffering in a particular way: people with visible disfigurement know where they stand, face acceptance or rejection directly, while those of us with hidden disfigurement live in perpetual uncertainty about whether we would still be wanted if we stopped concealing, and the performance of concealment itself becomes unbearable.

A similar dynamic operates with autism: children with visible, high support needs face immense suffering, inadequate services, and often overt exclusion, but the terms are clear; children who can mask face different suffering—the exhausting performance of neurotypical coherence, the terror that acceptance is conditional on continued masking, the abandonment that arrives the moment the mask slips—while retaining some access to spaces the former children are often excluded from.

To be clear: intelligence does not determine support needs, and ‘high-functioning’ is not a synonym for ‘intelligent.’ But institutions collapse these categories, treating cognitive ability as though it should grant volitional control over autonomic nervous system responses, and positioning intelligence as evidence that disability must be mild or manageable.

Suicide data reveals this dynamic with devastating clarity. A 20‐year study of suicide death in US autism population found that suicide deaths occurred more commonly among autistic people without intellectual disability than among those with Intellectual Disability (ID)—autistic people without ID were over nine times as likely to die by suicide as the general population, while those with both autism and ID had elevated risk but less pronounced. This suggests that “high-functioning” autistic people are more likely to be able to mask and perform neurotypical competence—face substantially higher suicide risk than their peers with co-occurring ID.

The data on females is even more striking. In this Utah study, zero autistic females died by suicide during the first fifteen years of surveillance (1998-2012), but seven died between 2013-2017. During that final period, autistic females were over three times more likely to die by suicide than non-autistic females, and when looking specifically at young people, autistic females were over five times more likely to die by suicide than their non-autistic peers. The researchers note that autistic females are often diagnosed later or not at all, especially those with higher intellectual functioning who can mask more effectively, which means the earlier years likely undercounted autistic female deaths because these girls and women hadn’t yet received diagnoses. The study explicitly acknowledges: “women, especially those with higher intellectual functioning, are often diagnosed with ASD later in life, and some may never receive a formal diagnosis. Therefore, autistic females who died by suicide during the earlier years of this study may have been disproportionately less likely to receive an ASD diagnosis.”

The research reveals that the very characteristics schools and institutions use to justify withholding support—the capacity to mask, the absence of visible intellectual disability, the ability to perform compliance some of the time—correlate with profoundly elevated suicide risk, particularly for females. The study also found that autistic people who died by suicide were significantly younger than non-autistic people who died by suicide (average age 32.4 years vs. 41.8 years), and that young people with autism had over twice the risk of suicide as young people without autism. This concentration of deaths among younger autistic people suggests that the transition through adolescence and early adulthood—periods of intense social demand, identity formation, and institutional expectation—becomes lethal for autistic young people who lack adequate support.

I’ve come to understand it this way: when support needs are externalised, the world is the knife cutting you down; when support needs are internalised, you become the knife—you contort your body into acceptable positions, suppress every natural movement, starve yourself or purge to maintain the ‘right’ appearance, pour yourself into uncomfortable clothing, pluck and pick and punish your body into a shape that might be tolerated. The violence is still violence; it’s just that you’ve been made responsible for enacting it, and no one calls it harm because you’re doing it to yourself. These deaths are not random—they map directly onto which labels schools take seriously and which they use to justify abandonment.

Race and poverty

The analysis I offer here emerges from a particular social location. I write as a white, non-binary parent who is economically stable now, with access to advocacy resources and institutional credibility that schools systematically deny to many families. I was also impoverished in childhood, which shapes how I recognise scarcity as something produced and enforced rather than natural—but poverty in adulthood carries different constraints, and it would be dishonest to collapse those experiences.

While gender and sexuality shape autistic experience in important ways—particularly for trans autistic youth—I have found that race, class, and the visibility of disability are the primary axes along which schools ration accommodation. These axes do not operate separately. Scarcity requires sorting, and race and poverty function as sorting technologies alongside functioning labels, determining not only who receives support but who is read as dangerous, deficient, or disposable.

Black, Indigenous, and other racialised families encounter systems that interpret autistic distress through the lens of threat rather than dysregulation, discipline rather than support, and control rather than care. In these contexts, the difference between being recognised as disabled and being read as defiant or dangerous can determine whether a child receives accommodation or faces suspension, restraint, removal from their family, or police violence. The stakes of legible disability categorisation are therefore not merely bureaucratic but existential in ways white families do not face with the same consistency or intensity.

Poverty compounds these risks. Families without access to private assessments, legal advocacy, or alternative schooling options are forced to accept whatever interpretation institutions impose, however inaccurate or violent. Where white, middle-class families may be able to contest abandonment through appeals, complaints, or withdrawal, poor and racialised families are more likely to be surveilled, disciplined, and blamed for the system’s failures.

For these reasons, I cannot assume that my critique of functioning labels—particularly the harm done to children who can mask and are thereby abandoned—translates cleanly across racial and class lines. In communities where disability labels can be weaponised to justify child removal, institutionalisation, or police violence, strategic refusal of diagnosis or deficit-based language may reflect not denial but survival. The choices families make about language, diagnosis, and engagement with systems often represent forms of expertise born of navigating intersecting oppressions I do not experience and therefore cannot fully theorise.

What I can say is this: race and poverty do not sit outside scarcity logic as additional injustices layered on top of an otherwise neutral system. They are integral to how scarcity is enforced, determining who is abandoned first, who is scapegoated instead of supported, and who is blamed for demanding too much from systems that were never adequately funded in the first place.

Scarcity as ideology

I think it’s critical to consider the growth of austerity measures, when considering the drive to re-instate functioning labels. Scarcity logic suggests that resources must be rationed rather than expanded, and when austerity becomes the governing framework for disability support, communities fracture along lines of perceived deservingness, abandoning collective claims to adequate infrastructure in favor of hierarchical arguments about who suffers most and therefore merits the limited care the state has decided to allocate.

This is engineered scarcity. The resources exist—wealth concentrates at scales that could fund comprehensive support for every disabled person without requiring anyone to prove their disability is profound enough to justify accommodation—but austerity ideology insists that scarcity is natural, inevitable, immutable, and under that framework the question becomes not “how do we ensure everyone receives what they need” but rather “how do we decide who is disabled enough to deserve the inadequate resources we have chosen to provide,” and functioning labels offer institutions a mechanism for making that determination, a way to rank suffering and distribute care accordingly.

Ranking systems always serve rationing systems. When we accept the premise that some disabled people are more legitimatised than others—that profound autism deserves recognition while “mild” autism can be dismissed, that high support needs warrant accommodation while low support needs represent personal responsibility—we concede the argument that resources should be allocated based on hierarchy rather than based on need, and hierarchy always benefits the institution at the expense of the collective, because it transforms advocacy into competition, replaces solidarity with scarcity-driven infighting, and allows the state to position itself as a neutral arbiter deciding which disabled lives merit investment rather than as the entity actively choosing to underfund support systems in the first place.

The path forward

All disabled people need some support. Some people need intensive, specialised, lifelong support. These realities coexist. The only reason we perceive them as competitive is because the state has structured the system to force competition, to require disabled people to argue that their suffering is greater than someone else’s suffering in order to access the care that should be available without ranking, without hierarchy, without the performance of profound incapacity as a condition of being believed.

The real political project is not to reinstate functioning labels but to reject scarcity itself, to refuse the premise that care must be rationed, to insist that every disabled person deserves adequate support without having to prove they are disabled enough to justify the cost. This requires shifting the problem from disabled people to the distribution system, saying: the issue is not that we have too many people claiming to be disabled or that some disabilities are less legitimate than others; the issue is that we have chosen to underfund support systems, and that choice is political, reversible, indefensible.

Parents of children with high support needs and autistic adults with lower support needs share common enemies: the austerity logic that pits them against each other, and the white supremacy that ensures racialised families face compounding exclusions regardless of where their children fall on any spectrum of support needs, because anti-Blackness, colonialism, and racism operate as additional sorting mechanisms through which institutions ration care, deny accommodations, criminalise distress, and abandon disabled children while blaming their families for demanding too much. The solidarity we need requires refusing to rank suffering along any axis—whether support needs, race, class, or gender—rejecting every hierarchy that rationing systems deploy to divide us, and building collective demands for universal, adequate, rights-based support that does not require anyone to prove their disability is profound enough, their distress legible enough, their family respectable enough, their skin pale enough to deserve care. White supremacy ensures that when resources contract, white families get positioned against racialised families in competition for inadequate services, with racism dictating that racialised families receive less support, harsher discipline, greater surveillance, and more punitive interventions even when their children’s needs mirror those of white children who receive accommodation—and this racial sorting serves the same function as functioning labels, allowing institutions to justify withholding resources while obscuring the political choice to underfund in the first place. Austerity and white supremacy work in tandem: austerity manufactures scarcity, white supremacy determines how that scarcity gets distributed, and both systems require us to accept that some people will inevitably be abandoned so that others might receive barely adequate care, when the actual solution is rejecting abandonment entirely and demanding that everyone receives what they need.

Functioning labels will not fix this. They will only make it easier for institutions to justify the inadequacy they have already decided to impose, giving them a mechanism to say: we served the most severe cases, and everyone else must cope—while white supremacy ensures that even among “severe cases,” racialised children receive harsher interventions, face criminalisation rather than support, and get excluded from the accommodations extended to white disabled children. The answer is not better rationing. The answer is refusing to ration at all, dismantling the white supremacy that determines who gets abandoned first, insisting that every disabled person deserves what they need, and holding the state accountable for the choice to withhold it.

My children considered suicide because schools abandoned them. The parent’s son is happy because schools accommodated him. Both realities reveal the same problem: that care is distributed based on visibility rather than need, that institutions extend support selectively while pretending scarcity made selectivity inevitable, that functioning labels serve rationing rather than description—and that white supremacy operates as another sorting mechanism, ensuring racialised families face compounding barriers regardless of their children’s support needs, because racism positions their children’s distress as threat rather than as disability requiring response.

Profound autism exists. My children are also profoundly disabled. Black autistic children face violence white autistic children do not. These statements do not conflict. What conflicts is the ideology that insists only one of them can be true, that resources are finite, that we must choose who suffers less in order to decide who receives care, that some communities must be sacrificed so others can survive.

I refuse that choice. I refuse the premise that made it seem necessary. I insist instead that all disabled people deserve adequate support, that profundity manifests in many forms, that the problem is not how we describe disability but how we have chosen to respond to it—and that austerity and white supremacy are the enemies, not each other.