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4:30am June 21, 2014

amorpha-system:

lichgem:

It’s uniquely fucked up when some of the most damaging ableist abuse you’ve experienced came from your own friends.

This.  

I don’t hate the people who did it to us.  I think they know better now.

But it was incredibly damaging for us to be told that we had to function at the level of a non-disabled person all the time in order to “help people understand that plurals can be functional,” and that otherwise we shouldn’t be allowed to “be a representative.”

The word/concept of functionality has been abused in some very weird ways in the plural community over the years by a number of people— it had its own kind of “functioning labels terminology” in some places.

(And if they are reading this— know that we do not hate you for it.  It’s been many years.  We’ve both learned a lot of things since then.  But we can’t pretend the damage it did to us didn’t happen, either.)