Timothy Speed (2026)
Autistic persons are routinely subjected to welfare and labour enforcement regimes designed around neurotypical assumptions of regulation, motivation, and adaptability. These regimes are commonly framed as neutral, activating, or supportive. This paper argues that such framing is structurally flawed.
Autism is not a disease or episodic impairment but an embodied mode of existence characterized by distinct forms of perception, regulation, and world-relation. When subsistence, legal status, or access to basic resources are conditioned on compliance with neurotypical norms, autistic persons are placed in situations of structural incompatibility that produce predictable harm.
The paper develops a non-medicalized framework for understanding harm as an objective, foreseeable consequence of welfare coercion rather than an individual pathology or subjective experience. Drawing on international human rights law, disability law, and comparative welfare regimes, it shows how continued enforcement under conditions of known incompatibility raises questions of state responsibility across jurisdictions.
Using the UK Work Capability Assessment (WCA) as an empirical warning case, and referring to Germany as an illustrative jurisdiction, the paper argues that ignorance of harm can no longer be plausibly claimed. Where states continue to enforce structurally incompatible requirements despite available knowledge, legal responsibility is triggered—whether framed as negligence, failure to accommodate, or degrading treatment.
This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18130874
Keywords: Autism, neurodiversity, embodied existence, structural coercion, welfare enforcement, predictable harm, state responsibility, human rights, disability law, Work Capability Assessment (WCA), welfare conditionality, legal accountability
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