Accessible Sex Education

neurodivergentsexuality:

by Devyn

An autistic woman and sexual abuse survivor was just declared to be “incapable of consent” in the UK. Let me repeat that: someone who has experienced and survived genuine sexual assault was just banned, against her wishes, from having consensual sex. 

And I feel like, this duality—forced “sexlessness” paired with forced sex—is so fundamental to the ways that developmentally disabled people are oppressed. Because statements about how intellectually disabled, autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent people “cannot consent” are definitely not actual evaluations of an individual’s abilities: they’re just a decision about our rights. When someone says that neurodivergent people “can’t” make the call about our own sexualities—what happens to our bodies, who we’re intimate with, and what forms that intimacy takes—they are really just saying that we shouldn’t be allowed to. This case was never a debate about whether or not H, the woman in question, “should” be having sex or what kind of support she should be getting or how that sex should be negotiated, it was just confirmation that—above all else—the decisions about her sexuality should always be made by people other than herself.