At my mom’s funeral, a woman I had never seen before got up to speak.

Her son was one of my mom’s clients. He’d just been diagnosed with autism as a toddler, and doctors had told her stuff a lot like this: That he would never hug her, never have a normal life. When she came to see my mom to get started with his therapy she was absolutely distraught and desperate. She said my mom snapped her back to reality by cutting her off when she was saying what the doctors had told her. My mom basically just scoffed and said “They don’t know.”

And with that, it was dismissed.

Everybody’s different. Her son is fine. She had him stand up at the funeral, mortified obviously, because she was super proud of how well he was doing. She talked with pure joy about how well he was doing in school, in life, just kind of being a slightly neurodivergent normal kid.

I’m not saying this just to emphasize how awesome my mom was, although she was, but just to reinforce what you already know: “They” have no idea, and this kind of thinking that they do is absolutely counter to the way that human life and human development actually works.

In fact, in all corners of human history that I’m aware of, this kind of ruthless “practicality” has been associated with nations and movements that don’t last very long. It’s not practical or effective. In fact, on both a societal and a personal level, the obsession with finding people who can be labeled as inferior is usually a sign that someone’s not very superior, which is why they are constantly doing that, and they know it.