12:45am October 18, 2014

"Retarded" seems to mean something different to autistic people.

I keep reading things by autistic people, or by the parents of autistic people, where the autistic person suddenly demonstrates a new skill – usually typing, sometimes speech.

And they demonstrate that they understand a concept like “A galaxy is a group of stars.” (Yes, I’ve been gritting my teeth and reading Portial iverson.)

And when Portia saw her son type that, her immediate reaction was to be thrilled that “My son isn’t retarded after all.”

Except… I don’t know how many people with intellectual disabilities Portia Iverson has actually met. Because most of them know that a galaxy is a group of stars. Seriously.

It seems like to a lot of autistic people and their families, especially those who have grown up being considered empty shells, “retarded” is a word for “empty shell”. Which is horribly unfair to nonautistic people who can’t escape their ID label just by typing something that most people know. Or to autistic people who won’t ever be able to type. Or for autistic people who continue to score low (just not as low) after learning to type.

Anyway, this usage of ‘retarded’ and 'not retarded’ offends me, a lot, because I know a lot of people with intellectual disabilities who can do all the things that these autistic people claim mean they are “not retarded’ if they can do them. (And, in fact, I know people with intellectual disabilities who deliberately show off their largest vocabulary words because they know the contrast between what people expect, and hearing a word like 'cunnilingus’ come out of their mouth (true story!), is going to make nondisabled people seriously uncomfortable. In that case the guy was trying to make the point that in this sexuality class for DD people that I was in, we didn’t need to be baby-talked through it. We not only knew what sex was, we knew plenty of vocabulary words about it. It did have the intended effect, although the instructor’s first reaction was to blush and then say "That’s a BIG WORD” in a sing-song voice…)

Anyway I’m just expecting that if an autistic person had typed that word, for any reason, they’d be saying “There’s no way she has an intellectual disabilitty, that’s no ordinary word she used there.” (And then there might be a scandal about whether she was really the one typing, even if FC was not involved.) But I can assure you the guy who used it had an intellectual disability. Having an intellectual disability doesn’t mean being unable to communicate, unable to think, unable to use long words, or unable to smart off to condescending sex ed teachers.

I do understand the desire to cast off an inaccurate label. But these people don’t seem to be in this just for the inaccuracy. They’re doing this because the word “retarded” has come to mean something so irrevocably bad that nobody with it could ever quite be human. So to prove their humanity, they “prove they’re not retarded”, by doing things that… people with ID are absolutely capable of doing. Yeah, THAT makes sense.

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