yukinojou: (Maki Ichiro)
Beth Winter ([personal profile] yukinojou) wrote in [personal profile] megwrites 2010-06-14 04:58 am (UTC)

Which is something I brought up earlier in the discussion - that with sufficiently advanced medicine the decision to have treatment for many physical disabliies would be made by either parents or people who were fully functional until a very short time before the decision, both of whom would be much more likely to choose the treatment than someone who has been disabled for a significant amount of time and maybe has started to treat it as one of their defining traits. This, I think, is a logical extrapolation of what happens now with, say, many heart defects.

But what I'm considering here are physical disabilities that are not a difference (I firmly believe intersexuality is not a disability), but lack of functionality/ability available to others. Note that I'm only talking about such examples above - not, say, non-neurotypical mental function. In such cases I could see in the future the same pattern that is starting to emerge with intersexuality today, letting the people in question make the decision once they can make it in an informed manner, but it very much depends on the overall social attitude.

We have no idea if the current -ism discourse, including identifying and trying to combat ablism, is a permanent change in attitude, after all. Particular readers (like [personal profile] megwrites) may not find various speculative societies personally appealing, but that does not make them invalid speculation. What I would like to see is that point get addressed, like in your proposed story, but not necessarily by making each speculative world be a perfect place.

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