3:07pm January 3, 2012

What “equal” and “human” mean for people like me.

This has been bothering me ever since I got a comment suggesting that if I talk about equality or disabled people all being human, that this is somehow about making everyone the same. The short answer is no it doesn’t. But there’s a longer answer about why I say these things that’s really important.

Understand these five things if you understand nothing else:

1. It’s still a matter of scholarly debate, whether people like me count as persons or not. For much of my life (and still, much of the time) I would not have matched certain bioethicists’ definitions of a person, because of lack of awareness of myself as a self persisting over time. But it almost doesn’t matter whether I see myself that way or not, because most such judgements of personhood are done by appearance and not by actual cognition. And my current appearance would normally flunk that test.

2. When people discuss the cognition of people like me, they often say things like “This brings into question what it means to be human.”

3. One scholar wrote a book in which people like me, from the title onward, are compared to apes. Comparisons to apes in general, chimps, and monkeys are frequent in literature and research about many different cognitive conditions including mine. Historically, people with developmental disabilities (as well as people of color, and even more specifically people of color with real or presumed developmental disabilities) have been explicitly dealt with as not as evolved as real humans. And it’s not all gone yet.

4. There are still people who believe the old legends that disabled children, and particularly children like I was, are actually fairies or demons who have been left in the place of the “real” stolen human child. Our nonhumanness has been used as an excuse to abuse and kill us without remorse, for centuries.

5. Disabled people, especially cognitively disabled people, are still murdered at alarming rates and it’s a matter of actual debate whether it’s wrong to do so.

As someone who both is and looks cognitively disabled, equality means that I have the same value as a nondisabled person.

Similarly, being part of humanity means actually literally being considered a human being and everything that implies. Not another kind of ape, not a monkey, not a demon, not an enchanted block of wood, and not some weird category of a half-person, human in shape only.

The only thing I want to be the same as other people is value and rights. I’m not the same cognitively, physically, or culturally as the people with power and I have no desire to be.

Also factor in that I have genuine language problems. I can’t tell you what I was envisioning in my head as I wrote that. Literally can’t tell you. It doesn’t translate. I did what I could and it took me over a decade to get this far.

So I’ve finally got this pile of words vaguely pointing in the right direction. And someone decides that two of those words mean that I was talking about something totally unrelated to my topic. This is practically the definition of mental widgets(*), or language dickery(**) – take two words from what I said, connect them to an ideology, decide I have that ideology, ignore everything else. This never works. Ever. Even when the ideology is as close to my views as an ideology can get. And this ideology was as far from my views as it can get. One of those weird ways that you can take a word, and people can read two completely opposite meanings into it.

Anyway – what I want is to survive. And I also want to not have had to actually spell out why a disabled person, especially a cognitively disabled person, might feel they have to emphasize our equality (of value, not sameness) and humanity (which includes literally being considered the same species as everyone else). This is so much not the fucking time, to take those two words and make them into something bad that I never said or believed.

It’s not the time because cognitively disabled people have to be able to assert these things to a world that denies them to us. And it’s not the time because we are using the words we have, and nitpicking the word choice of someone with language problems is a really good way to make us freeze up and lose the ability to use language at all.

Now pardon me while I tell people I’m equal and human. Because most people (no really, it seems like its most people) don’t truly get that. And I want people like me to survive, even if I haven’t come up with the perfect words and the perfect disclaimers to explain it all. Because I may never have those words and I’ve got to use what I have.

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(*) See Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets.

(**) See Disambiguation post: On Language Dickery.

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