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4:50am July 11, 2013

josiahd:

adelene-dawner:

josiahd:

fearsfortherestofus:

I surveyed 236 posts in the “Ableism" tag, and sorted them into the subjects I felt they were most appropriate to be in.

It is interesting to note how heavily dominated the tag is by Autism posts. I believe that if I had continued doing this, the difference between autism and the physical disabilities would have kept growing. The disparity is especially interesting in the context that ableism itself traditionally speaks of physical impairment. I was also shocked by how many posts I saw that were aggressive towards people with visible disabilities, written by people with invisible disabilities.

Other notes:
LD & ID - Learning and Intellectual disabilities. (Mostly about the use of slurs.)
Politics - Was usually about regulations pertaining to disabled people.
General Ableism - Spoke of both Mental and Physical disorders, without favoring one or the other.

I don’t think autism is actually all that straightforward to categorize as a mental rather than physical disability. I think it’s both.

For instance, motor skills problems and movement disorders are part of autism for a lot of people. That’s not mental. That’s physical.

For some people language processing is mental; for others it has to do with speaking being physically difficult; for others it’s a combination of other.

That too. And if you divide disability into physical/sensory (blindness, deafness)/mental (which seems more natural to me than lumping blindness and inability to walk together), it’s actually all three of those, too.

And the stuff that mental health types like to focus on in autism is very often the consequence of physical/sensory disability rather than a thing in itself.

Plus people often assume I’m writing specifically about autism when I’m not. Including when I’m not writing about autism even slightly. So I don’t trust someone to be able to tell what conditions a person must be writing about, from the outside.

I’d be far more interested in surveying what kind of ableism are being discussed in the tag. There was a time when practically the entire tag was like “you said stupid or lame, those are ableist slurs” which really annoyed me. Given that they’re definitely not slurs and usually not ableist.

For the record, I’m autistic, yes. But I’m also chronically ill, learning disabled, a wheelchair user, have chronic pain, double vision, and things considered mental illnesses. In fact I fit more categories on there than I don’t fit. So don’t EVER assume that I’m writing about just one of those things, chances are I’m writing about all of them. No matter how many do or don’t get named.

I also have problems with the way things are lumped together as well as the ways other things are separated. Big problems.