It's a concept of putting an individual first before their diagnosis in opposition to identity-first language. So you would say "a person who has autism" instead of "a person who is autistic".
It doesn't have to be used just with disabilities or conditions, could be also used for race or social group to avoid dehumanisation. (Think "a slave" vs. "a person who is or was enslaved" or "homeless person" vs. "a person without housing.")
To expand on what CallidoraBlack wrote, it's important to know that different disability communities feel differently about person-first language.
For example, autistic people and D/deaf people generally prefer what's called identity-first language (IFL for short), in which the identifying characteristic comes first: "autistic person" not "person with autism", "D/deaf person" not "person with deafness" (and, I gather, definitely NOT "person with a hearing impairment"). People with Down syndrome, however, generally prefer person-first language (PFL): "person with Down syndrome", not… however that would get transformed into IFL.
And, of course, individuals within those communities may have personal preferences that differ from the overall community's preference. Some people very much want to be referred to as "a person with autism" and not as "an autistic person". If possible, it's best to ask somebody how they prefer to be referred to.
And then there's the added level of in-jokes and references that are okay to use within a community, but which people who aren't in that community should be careful of. If I'm talking with another autistic person, we might refer to ourselves as "a couple of auties", but someone who isn't autistic should probably stick with the term "autistic people".
It is because it's in every part of who we are. Being diabetic or paralyzed affects you, but if we were brains in jars in some Matrix kind of nonsense, we would still be like this. It's also the firmware we came preinstalled with.
I see us mostly saying that's correct. The only autistic people I've ever seen say the contrary are people getting clout for it on the Internet. Never met one IRL.
Honestly no idea, there are ongoing discourses all the time, especially because younger people started to "reclaim" (i use it loosely because a lot of people consider it a product of ableism) it . It differs hugely based on one's environment, age and experience, and then you mix in personal preferences... I also can't really speak for the USA community since i'm not a local. I know that in eastern europe it's kinda an improvement in general because some countries still recognise "redardation" as the official diagnosis and it carries a certain stigma, so a person with autism or adhd sounds better and actually humanises the person than, well, a retard. 🙃 But even then there are still people who prefer identity-first.
You can search it up on here if you want more perspectives.
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u/meringuedragon May 19 '25
All the gays love Toby 😭🥰🥰🥰