7:44pm March 17, 2014

There was a conversation going on about the word able-bodied.

youneedacat:

Note that I’m not telling anyone else how to think about this, and I don’t really care what word you use or don’t use. To me it’s more important what you mean.

I’ve heard some disabled people people argue that even cognitive and psychiatric disabilities are taking place in the brain, so they’re physical, so it’s okay to say people with these disabilities are not able-bodied.

I’ve sometimes used the term able-minded for people without cognitive disabilities.

I tend to have a hard time changing the words I use, so even when I’m uncomfortable using able-bodied to mean nondisabled, I do sometimes use it.

I don’t know, I guess I’m kind of ambivalent. And to me it matters what the person means.

Like…

Three different disabled people will be saying the word ‘able-bodied’ to mean ‘nondisabled’.

One of them uses it because to them, even cognitive impairments are physical at root. That’s fine with me.

One of them uses it and means the same thing as nondisabled, they just aren’t able to pull out all the ‘right’ words all the time. That’s fine with me.

One of them uses it because they’re really not thinking much about cognitive disability when they think of disability. Like they just see disability as meaning physical disability only. And that’s not fine with me. (It also wouldn’t be fine with me if they started using all the right words but retained that bias. Again, what’s behind stuff is more important to me than the stuff itself.)

Personally, I’ve found simply ‘abled’ ‘abled people’ to be a good compromise. If I am disabled, then they are abled. So of course it refers to people who are both physically and mentally nondisabled.

I’ve never been able to bring my brain to use ‘abled’. I’ve sometimes used 'enabled’ though, to make the point that a huge part of disability is about the fact that society enables some people and disables others. But then people never know what I mean. My favorite term is nondisabled, it simple and to the point and can mean anything. But other terms slip out sometimes just because of how my brain works.

Another area I have much more trouble using words for is psychiatric disability. Sometimes I use 'mental illness’ just because the term is so heavily embedded in our language, but I don’t really like that term because it is so heavily tied to a viewpoint where mental illness is just an illness the way physical illness is, and I don’t believe that. In some contexts I use 'crazy’, but I know that’s offensive to a lot of people. It’s still my favorite of the various words to use, because it’s a word that’s heavily embedded in our language, does not contain any assumptions about how it comes about or what it is (since I don’t even know and neither does anyone else, really, yet), and I have a soft spot for words that are already a heavily understood part of the language. (As such, I’ve also used mad, lunatic, things like that, which may also reflect my connections to the 'mad pride’/'lunatic liberation front’ type communities, even though I don’t consider myself part of those communities because they get kind of fucked up.) I sometimes use psychiatric disability, which may be my favorite of the more politically correct words to use, because it puts it firmly in the camp of disability, but I still don’t entirely feel comfortable with it because I don’t like the idea that psychiatry has any claim on us. But I like it a lot better than mental illness.

But as I said, I’m not trying to dictate what other people use for words, these are just my personal preferences. And believe it or not I do have plenty of preferences about words, I just don’t usually tell people about them because… in so many communities right now, stating a preference when it comes to words is taken by a lot of people as making an insistence that everyone conform to your preferences. Which isn’t what I want to do at all. These are my preferences, and other people will have completely different or even contradictory preferences for just as good reasons as my reasons. So I think everyone should use the words they personally think are best, to the best of their ability, rather than making an across-the-board prescription for what words to use and what words to avoid. Because most of us have preferences and most of them clash with each other at least some of the time.

But another problem I have is that with my word-finding issues and complicated echolalia-based language, I can’t even follow my own preferences let alone the preferences of others. Like I hate the word mental illness, but I use it all the time because it’s what pops out when I try to describe it. I’m just not capable of directing which words come out of my mouth. In fact that’s a good example – words never come out of my mouth, but that’s still the word I use for it and it is quite difficult for me to change it. This is one of many reasons I tend to give people a good deal of slack around language usage, because I need that slack myself.

Notes: