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See, e.g., Rebekah Moras, Feminism, Rape Culture, and Intellectual Disability: Incorporating Sexual Self-Advocacy and Sexual Consent Capacity, in Emerging perspectives on disability studies: 189, 191 (Matthew Wappett & Katrina Ardnt eds., Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) (“The disability hierarchy places people with physical disabilities (especially disabled white men and veterans) at the top, while people with intellectual disabilities, psychiatric disabilities, and other mental or ‘hidden’ disabilities are at the bottom. This hierarchy is exemplified in comments such as ‘I’m Deaf, not stupid;’ ‘I’m a woman, not an idiot;’ ‘I have cerebral palsy, I’m not retarded;’ ‘I’m Black, not a moron;’ ‘I use a wheelchair, I’m not an imbecile.’ … This kind of distancing does little to challenge ableist rhetoric that implies people must be independent, strong, competent, and measurably intelligent, before being valued and supported.” (internal citations omitted)); see also Kim Sauder, Fighting My Internalization of the Hierarchy of Disability, crippledscholar (Aug. 23, 2015), https://crippledscholar.com/2015/08/23/fighting-my-internalization-of-the-hierarchy-of-disability/ [https://perma.cc/P7NN-9RLQ] (“[The hierarchy of disability] is a social construct that makes certain kinds of disabilities more acceptable than others… . [I]t is all tied into associating disability with negativity but within the framework of the hierarchy, some people make out worse than others. People with intellectual disabilities or who are perceived to have intellectual disabilities are inevitably found near, the bottom.”).
