I watched your video’s on YouTube too. And i read your other blogs as well. You progressed through the years. Despite of your setbacks. The internet is a good place for non verbal people to communicate.

Much love from the netherlands. Boycke.

I want to be clear. There is an original post I wrote. It is being described here. The point of that post is the following: Other people determine how disabled people are seen more than we do. So it is not that there is a specific type of disabled person who shows up more as tired, or as a sensory seeker, or some other supposed rarity. It’s not that disabled people are passing. It’s that nondisabled people are passing us off as something we’re not. And that’s all the difference in the world, even though it doesn’t sound like a lot. The two ideas have very different meanings and the two experiences are very different. Passing involves trying to look different than you are. Being passed off — what I described in the orignal post — involves other people forcing their interpreretations of the world onto you. Again, totally different.

Not interested in going down that road. This post is about why ableism should be important to everyone concerned with oppression. (And yeah, that’s pretty much the scope of this post, so don’t expect it to go past that or give me crap for not being able to go past that.)

I respectfully disagree with people who say phobia in this context is ableist. I have phobias, I’m gay, and I’m genderless. Homophobia and transphobia are not words that offend me any more than xenophobia does. There is no consensus on these words.

And I don’t in general like social rules that require people to change huge amounts of language in order to discuss our own oppression. Especially when the rules seem to change every week. I also have cognitive limitations around changing vocabulary, so if I do it, it has to be for an extremely good reason, and even then it can take me years to change a single word. And then not with 100% success. No matter how motivated I am. But I do need more motivation than this.

Also words like heterosexism break my brain. Every time I read them it’s like a small explosion inside my brain that disrupts my ability to think in other ways. I don’t know why and I can’t control it.

Further reading:

On Language Dickery (by amorpha)

The Fireworks Are Interesting

Words That Bite My Brain

Some cognitively disabled people have been discussing this problem for years — the insistence on a precise and ever-shifting set of language that may not work with our brains, in order to be considered unoffensive. I think looking at what people do and mean rather than the exact words we use may be more important. And language disabilities are not always immediately obvious from someone’s speech or writing.