Abelism - Blog Posts

Help whys my grandpa trying to convert me to Christianity bc apparently it'ill "make my adhd go away"

I'm just trying to eat breakfast in peace 😭

Hey if you're not physically disabled and just ND, please don't say "cr*ppling," or any variations thereon, since it's ableist toward physically disabled people. "Disabling," and "incapacitating," are two better words to use instead.

(It took me a while to figure it out; anon was bothered by this post.)

Okay, sure, I’ll try to do that. That said, I want to encourage people engaged in anti-ableism efforts that take the form of asking people not to use certain words to put their energies elsewhere. Firstly, I think they make the disability advocacy community inaccessible to a lot of people, since having to relearn which words are “allowed” is overwhelming and particularly difficult for people who have limited access to words in the first place.

Secondly, every time I’ve seen this implemented it…hasn’t made anyone less ableist? People who scrupulously remove “crazy” from their vocabulary in favor of “irrational” still treat the people they’re talking about like unpersons. Often the recommended replacement words are just as good at suggesting “less valuable person” as the words they replaced. I think there’s some value in asking “does our use of words surrounding disability to mean ‘bad thing’ come from a place of treating disabled people like tragedies?” and often it does, but that doesn’t mean that challenging that mindset is as easy as changing out the words. Thirdly, I think it emphasizes the wrong concerns. I saw a newspaper headline the other day saying “the president’s plan will be a crippling blow to the economy” and one about the “crippling burden of student debt”. I’d think that the fact the president’s plan includes making it harder to get SSI, or the fact disabled students are way less likely to graduate and likelier to end up in debt, is a much more urgent problem than the turn of phrase used in the headline. 

Lastly, it seems like the anti-words advocacy often pretends at a false consensus in disability activism. There are physically disabled people who are bothered by that newspaper headline and those who are not. There are mentally ill people who are bothered by use of crazy and some who couldn’t care less. But no one ever says “hey, that word bothers me personally because people have used it to be mean to me”, they say “it’s ableist towards physically disabled people,” as if all physically disabled people agree on this (or as if the ones who disagree are just obviously confused poor souls and don’t merit a mention). “There are physically disabled people who dislike the phrase ‘crippling anxiety’ and there are physically disabled people who don’t care and there are physically disabled people who have, themselves, described their anxiety as crippling” is much more accurate, but less compelling.

Hey whump community, if we as a whole could stop incorrectly referring to various whumper characters as "sociopaths" "psychopaths" "bipolar" "narcissists" or any other demonized mental conditions, that would be nice.

If you're going to write a story which seriously takes into account how a mental illness, cluster b disorder, or whatever affects a character (yes, including villains) I'm fine with it so long as you put in your due research.

But if you're going to throw around improper diagnostic terms and slurs for the mentally ill simply to state that a character is "evil" or "abusive" then you are getting yourself blocked no questions asked.

-Abraham ♡♡♡

Sound and Color - Masterlist

Sound and Color

The sound and the colors of Leaves : 2467 / General Audiences / Matt and Clint bond over their mutual love for fall and leaves and their disabilities

The sound and the colors of Snow : 3959 / General Audiences / Matt helps Clint get the support he needs and they take a walk through wintery NYC

The sound and colors of Flowers : 2531 / General Audiences / Matt and Clint are working together as the city warms up.

The sound and colors of Sunshine : 3570 / General Audiences / Matt and Clint suffer in the heat and talk about Family.