as small as a world and as large as alone, cuttlefishculler: can someone who is actually...

5:56pm May 21, 2014

can someone who is actually autistic clear up to me how to deal with someone who claims it is ok to use ableist language/assume pronouns/keep otherwise negative behaviors Because of their autism?

its my gut reaction to say these people are wrong and making excuses but i wouldn’t actually know and i lack the knowledge to evaluate it

:S

Okay so…

I don’t know the people in question, and I don’t know how sincere they are being. I have known one autistic person in particular who used autism as an excuse to use every slur on the planet, and she did it gleefully, with no remorse or sense that maybe something was wrong here, and I had a serious problem with that. (But she was the rare exception. Very rare. I hesitate to even mention her.)

Pronouns are another matter. Autistic people have well-documented problems using pronouns, starting at the earliest phases of our lives. I get pronouns wrong all the time on people who are cis and very unambiguous about their gender. Many autistic people have trouble with using the usual pronouns right, let alone all the unusual pronouns out there. Each individual autistic person has to decide how much effort they’re going to put in, and even all the effort in the world may make no difference.

FYI, my own preferred pronouns are not the standard ones, but I don’t usually tell people what they are, for a lot of reasons. But I would still have trouble using them, even though I prefer them. I always do my best with pronouns but I screw up all the time. Often the pronoun that comes out of my mouth is completely random – it’s like my mind has a category for “pronouns” and then it goes all mix-and-match on me when it spits them out. And I don’t even mean just getting the wrong gender, I can also get the wrong number or person.

I know many autistic people for whom the mandate to always get pronouns right OR ELSE is a source of such severe anxiety that if they know someone is sensitive about it, they won’t talk to them or about them for fear of using the wrong pronouns. I know autistic people, including trans autistic people, who have been effectively driven out of the trans community (either by trans people or misguided allies) because of the extreme reactions some people have to getting pronouns wrong. Because the assumption is that if you get pronouns wrong then you’re deliberately “misgendering” someone, and that everyone can easily just look up what pronouns someone wants and use them, and that everyone can easily use the right pronouns on command, and those are not safe assumptions to make around people with a fucking language-based disability. I know what it’s like to be misgendered, but not being able to figure out pronouns is not misgendering and it’s treated as if it is. And I’ve seen autistic people flamed to a crisp over this and nothing, nothing they say, can stop the dogpiling once it starts.

Ableist language? Which ableist language? Because not all disabled people even agree on what language is ableist.

There’s a group of disabled people who have decided amongst themselves to speak for the rest of us on this matter, but they don’t. They’ve basically created a list of every word that could possibly be linked back to disability in any possible way (including many that are not actually linked back to disability at all, including some where linking them to disability like this is more ableist than the word ever was to begin with). And decided that those words are ableist and that anyone who uses them is ableist and should be flamed and dogpiled.

Many, many disabled people disagree with which language is ableist and why. But somehow there’s kind of been this list of words that are approved for use by everyone, and words that are disapproved for use by everyone, and everyone has to follow along or face social ostracism. Like, for instance, I think the word allistic is far more ableist than the word stupid, and I’ve gotten some grief for that, because it doesn’t follow the party line among this small group of people who make all the decisions. (Mind you, when I decide a word is ableist, I’m not saying people shouldn’t use it. I just think the origins of allistic are ableist. I think people should make informed decisions about whether to use it, and it’s not my business to tell them not to.)

Anyway there are words that I think are irredeemably ableist. Retard is one. Vegetable is another. These are words that are not just potentially offensive, they carry meanings that say this is not a human being we are talking about, these are words that carry death along with them. And I’m far more strict about what circumstances I would allow someone to say those words without considering them ableist, than I am about words like lame or stupid. But I just want to be clear here that there is no consensus in the disability community about which words are ableist and which are not, and anyone who claims there is consensus is either mistaken, confused, or lying.

That said… here’s my take on offensive language (including grey areas):

Autistic people often have a language disability. This means that it ranges from difficult to impossible for us to change what words we use. It’s not easy. It’s not even hard-but-doable, for many of us. It takes an enormous amount of effort.

Case in point: Retarded. I used to use that word a lot. I didn’t use it as an insult, which I think is offensive. But I used to use it to mean has an intellectual disability. I was able to make the change – mostly, not entirely. But making that change took years of concerted effort. I don’t think retarded is always a slur, but I think it’s close enough to a slur that it was worth getting out of my vocabulary.

But.

Thing is.

Not everyone can do that even in those circumstances.

And what I did for that one word, I could not do for a list of twenty words. I could barely do it for that one word. I couldn’t completely do it for that one word. There are times when I still say someone is retarded, or that they have mental retardation, or MR, or something along those lines, and that’s even using the best of my abilities to change the words I use. When I grew up, it was the term people used, it was even the term people with intellectual disabilities used.

And the thing about language is.

I don’t have a search-and-replace function in my language centers. I have a really hard time doing language at all, either receptive or expressive. I don’t handle words as individual words. I handle words as chunks of words, like large puzzle pieces that I mix and match. This happens on a semi-unconscious basis. This means that any effort I put into changing the words I use, is coming out of other cognitive areas that I need.

When that effort is taken out of other cognitive areas that I need, I mean other cognitive areas that I need. For an online autistic person, I have fairly severe cognitive, perceptual, and motor planning difficulties compared to most. Not in all areas, but in enough areas to cause me serious trouble. I can’t get through the day without a lot of assistance. And while I’m doing better cognitively than I’ve done in years (thanks to treatment of severe adrenal insufficiency), I’ve still got a lot of work that my brain has to do that most people’s brains don’t have to do.

So like… people normally don’t have to think really hard in order to recognize objects in their environment. I do. Without thinking, it’s all just a blur of shape and color. I have to piece together, painstakingly, everything about my environment, everything about my body, and everything about my thoughts. Language is an area where I can write quite well but at a large cost to my cognitive spoons. I can’t be sitting around doing search-and-replace on every word I use looking for a word list fifty words long just because a small group of people decided that something is ableist.

I can’t tell you whether any given person is using things as an excuse, but I can damn sure tell you that when I talk about these things, it’s not a fucking excuse. I work my ass off just to do the simple stuff. I can’t do the complicated stuff on top of that without the entire Jenga tower falling over.

Some autistic people won’t even be able to do what I did and virtually eliminate the word retarded from their vocabularies, even if they strongly believe that it’s an ableist word. Such people should not be condemned for it. There’s something seriously fucked up when people shit on people with cognitive disabilities in the name of protecting people with cognitive disabilities from ableist language, but that happens every day.

And that is why, no matter how much I hate a word, it is very rare that I will tell you not to use one. That is also why my definition of what counts as a slur is extremely strict, because I think slurs are worth getting rid of, but you can’t call everything a slur just because it may or may not have some ableist connotations.

And yes, lots of autistic people have language disabilities. That’s a huge part of autism for a lot of people. Including a lot of people who have superficially eloquent language usage, like mine on a good day.

So I can’t say “No, it’s never used as an excuse.” Sometimes it is. But I can say that most of the time, when I’ve talked about it, when my friends talk about it, we are not using autism as an excuse. We’re talking about why autism makes it impossible to follow extremely over-strict standards of behavior cooked up by a minority of people who are able to follow such strict standards.

(And yes, there are plenty of autistic people who are perfectly capable of following such standards of behavior. I am not and will never be one of them. This is one reason that I will never advocate such strictness.)

Notes: