golbatgender:

Ableism is really silly. Like, humans’ whole deal is “we don’t have any specific adaptations in particular, we make prosthetics instead.” Like, cold environments? Skip waiting for an advantageous mutation, let’s make prosthetic fur—clothes. No hooves? Prosthetic hooves—shoes. No claws or beaks? Instead, we make all kinds of knives and tools. Can’t find a natural shelter? Build one. Arid climate? Irrigate it.

Everything that we call civilization is just humans making prosthetic adaptations instead of waiting around for mutations. We get some advantageous mutations too, but we’re so reliant on the artificial ones that all the wetware upgrades are hackish as fuck and often do things like kill you if you get a double dose of the gene. And then humans invent more artificial adaptations so it doesn’t actually have to kill you.

But then somewhere along the way we all decided that only some artificial adaptations were okay, and more unusual ones were bad? Which is kind of ridiculous. Especially with how far stuff has developed. We can make prosthetic insulin and other hormones, even. Prosthetic chemicals, and isn’t that amazing? But for some reason we think that having to rely on those kind is a sign of weakness or lesser worth than just having to rely on houses or shoes, or that it’s too much to make all the things compatible. That people with some kinds of tech dependence should just suck it up while others get what they need to go about their day with a relative lack of pain and hardship. And that just goes against everything our history as a species says we should do. And because it’s “more expensive”? We invented capitalism a lot later than we invented shoes or crutches or quinine, I’ll tell you that.