The Alternate Lexicon
Currently viewing the tag: "ableism"
If your response to someone being upset with you for your bad behaviour is along the lines of, “Your feelings are your business. You could choose not to be upset,” then you are in sore need of an empathy lesson. I would also strongly remind you that while you cannot “fix” or change another’s emotions, you are always in charge of your own actions: if another person is hurt in reaction to your actions, it would be thoughtful and kind to consider why.
I loathe person-centered language.
Part of my job at work is supervising residents in their work setting (if you want more information, feel free to scroll down to the locked post). They do a variety of jobs, and one of those is making the training binders for new employee orientation. This is a new task for my team, so it’s impossible for me to judge how independently they’ll be able to do it with time and practice, but this first lot of 15 needed to be done by yesterday and it ended up being mostly staff doing the work. Since I greatly enjoy doing this sort of menial paperwork–sorting, organizing, labelling, filing–I was very good and found it more enjoyable than most of my job.
The binders are a drastically better collection of information than I had at my previous job. There are sections about developmental disabilities, cultural diversity, and appropriate teaching strategies for adults. There are a few standout ideas in there, like an article about the differences in language use between the people who live in the group homes and staff, and how it is intensely othering.
There’s also a big section on using person-centered language, and having stared at it for days and days while doing these binders and then having a little nudge from the internet, I feel like I now have a simple explanation for why person-centered language unequivocally sucks.
Person-centered or people-first language is this idea that we should phrase things with the person placed before the disability:
Person with autism, not autistic person
Person with intellectual disability, not intellectually disabled person
Person with hearing loss, not D/deaf person
Person with vision loss, not blind person
Some disabilities lend themselves more to one construct or another–person with CP sounds pretty tolerable to my ears, while CP person or cerebral palsied person sounds weird (Kit, I welcome your thoughts on this specifically). I don’t like any of the adjective forms of Asperger’s that have been constructed (though it’s sort of moot since I think autistic is a better descriptor for the whole spectrum anyway).
At first glance, this idea doesn’t really bother me. I’ve felt pretty neutrally about it for a long time–I couldn’t see how it was harming anyone to use unnecessarily long constructs when the shorter ones were just fine and inoffensive, but whatever. If someone wanted to “put the person before the disabilty” and that led them to treating disabled people as equals, then fine.
But my work is inherently about how we (society-general we) can’t treat people with disabilities as equals. Every person I work with has a documented intellectual disability, and most of them have multiple disabilities. Because of this, they have been deemed unable to be their own guardians, their own caretakers, their own adult people. It’s not that I think needing assistance–any level, from mild to total–makes one less of an independent adult, but few have actively chosen of their own right to live with us. They are there because they have been “placed”–deemed too unable to learn, adapt, care for themselves that they must have caretakers whether they want it or not–rather than because they decided that they want help.
I think person-centered language actively harms them, and me, and all of the disability community.
Person-centered language claims to be about people first, but why would we need to make awkward linguistic constructs if disability was a neutral concept? Saying that we put people first means that you think disability is shameful, in need of being hidden or removed, that you are unable to think of people who are openly disabled as people. Saying I am a person with autism rather than an autistic person denies that autism is a value-neutral descriptor for the way I think and experience the world around me. It tries to make autism into something separate from the “real” me (and that leads to dangerous curbie mythologies and “treatments”), into something that is bad. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people shows that “disability” is a dirty word, something bad and to be avoided, rather than a word that describes our interactions with the community because of our atypical strengths and weaknesses. Saying we are people with disabilities rather than disabled people removes the burden from society to make adaptations and accomodations and places it upon us.
Using person-centered language ends up devaluing the person because it attempts to remove a central part of who they are and make it negative.
Unfortunately, I would probably be fired if I made some key edits to the binders, so they’ll remain as-is. For now.
I go in tomorrow morning to fill out paperwork for HR to begin my new job. I’m waiting for Stina and Dylan to do some reference letters and send them along, but I’ll get them when they come–no major concern.
My major concern is falling into a pattern of presumed incompetence. It was coincidental that I found this blog post today about the least harmful assumption (presuming competence even when others do not) as almost all of the people I will be working with have been diagnosed with intellectual disability (and many of them with autism). I need to work and remember that their diagnoses may not be correct and that any communication is welcome. I hope I’m up to the task.
Oh, Jezebel.
Let’s talk. You recently went through a transition of Editor in Chief, moving from Anna Holmes to Jessica Coen. Why yes, that is the Jessica who destarred me for calling out ableist language–and, yes, it’s reflective of the tone of the whole site, now.
A number of blogs have sprung up to deal with your shit, and that’s not really what I’m trying to do here. I took a whole day off yesterday–the first Day Without Jez I’ve had on purpose in about two years. And it was…great. There was less stress, less frustration over a formerly well-written website that can no longer be bothered to turn on the spelling and grammar check features in Word before posting. I didn’t see the dozens of comments using “lame” and “retarded” as insults, or an editor call anyone assholes. Again.
It’s not me, Jez, it’s you. And I think we might be done.
A lot of people are dissatisfied with the turn of the site, and leaving, and it’s led to some of the best wikipedia editing I’ve ever seen.
A full compendium of the edits are available here.
There have been mass destarrings (usually for pointing out explicitly racist language), and more than a few bannings for the same.
In conclusion, this was the best thing to come of it:
(Credit for that goes to the lovely Haugenite.)
