2:42pm June 29, 2014

➸ The tl;dr version of my post about cognitive disability and academic communication styles in social justice circles.

youneedacat:

I’m usually very bad at summarizing my longer posts. In fact, it’s usually impossible. This upsets me a lot because it means that a lot of my posts are unreadable to a lot of people. Sometimes, though, I’m able to summarize things. I’ve been able to do it here.

If you want to read the whole,…

When I studied linguistics, I learned that people use jargon and buzzwords specifically to create barriers to entry in a field. Academics feel like they should exclude as many other people from academic discourse as possible or risk losing the thing that makes them valuable to society. If anyone can talk about gender issues, why would a journal publish a PhD’s essay on nonbianary gender over a BA’s essay on nonbianary gender?

How well a person can use the jargon and buzzwords of a certain field marks very clearly whether that person is part of the in-group or the out-group. That is the words’ primary function. I once worked as an editor for university professors. They use a lot of jargon, but they also make their sentences so grammatically complex that the sentences are almost impossible to understand. Professors write these convoluted sentences, which I consider poorly written sentences, because they think it puts them in the in-group.

I’d also like to say that your difficulty with terrible buzzwords like heteronormative is not unique to someone with a receptive language problem. I often wonder if most of the people who frequently use those buzzwords understand what they mean. Many of those words do not have widely accepted definitions, so different writers use them differently. They sound fancy, but they mean little.

That’s one function of buzzwords, and I know they function like this in this context, definitely. At least some of the time.

But I also know that to a lot of people, these words mean specific things that they aren’t able to express in other ways. I have watched people discover many of these words, including heteronormativity, with a kind of excitement: "There’s a word for that? I can describe that? This is wonderful!“

And that’s quite real too. And people won’t want to give that up. It’s amazing when you find a word for something that you’ve known about all your life, but never knew a word for. And I don’t think it’s fair for me to ask people to give that up regardless of its effect on me.

I do think it’s fair, though, to ask that movements not be centered around the use of academic words and behavior.

My trouble with these words isn’t unique to people with receptive language problems, or to people with cognitive disabilities, or to any group of people. But receptive language problems make the problem far worse than it already would be, and make things impossible that other people would possibly, eventually, find ways to deal with.

My receptive vocabulary is both smaller than usual, and smaller than my expressive vocabulary. Which is the reverse of how people’s vocabularies normally stack up. But is fairly normal for a classic hyperlexic. It’s turned up that way both when I used a dictionary-based way of estimating my vocabulary size, and also on standardized tests when I was little. When I did it in the dictionary, I could only understand at my absolute best, something like 3 out of every 5 words that I can use. And since my vocabulary size changes moment to moment, that’s just a measure of at my best, not a measure of always.

I also recognize how strange it is that I’m the one talking about this. When I write long posts that are extremely difficult for a lot of people to read, merely because of their length. But unfortunately, conflicting access needs exist.

In an ideal community – and I’ve seen this work before, so it’s a real thing – there would be people who would be willing to help each other understand each other, when one person’s communication style was hard for someone else to understand. This doesn’t just help with people like me who write long posts that need to be summarized but can’t summarize them. And it doesn’t just help with people who write in an academic style.

It also helps with people who write in highly nonstandard English. There are a lot of cognitively disabled people who write and speak with very unusual grammar. And there are a lot of cognitively disabled people who rely on a very very standard use of English grammar in order to understand what other people are writing.

The way groups handle these situations say a lot about the nature of the people in the groups.

The groups that care the least about each other generally dissolve into bickering about who has it worse, and who has more rights – the ones who can’t write in a way others understand, or the ones who can’t understand the way other people are writing unless it’s done in a specific way. I’ve seen horrible, long flame wars that ran like that, with people taking sides and losing friends and stuff.

The groups that care the most about each other, something amazing happens. They tend to spontaneously develop systems for translating between each other’s communication styles. If someone has trouble writing in a standard way, and someone else has trouble understanding them, then someone who can handle both, will step in as an interpreter and interpret between the two of them. Always making sure, of course, that their interpretation is accurate enough for the person who wrote the original writing.

What amazed me was the resistance I got in one group when I proposed that we do exactly that. I’d seen it work wonders in other groups. In this group, though, I got a gruff "No, that would be hand-holding. We’re all adults here. We don’t need that kind of thing.” And that was that. People didn’t understand each other and they seemed to want not to understand each other. Or at least, they didn’t seem to want to understand each other enough to let go of their pride and actually help each other. Meanwhile, each side accused the other side of simply not caring enough to try harder and overcome their writing difficulties or their comprehension difficulties. Because, each side said, if the other side only tried harder, everything would be fine.

It got very vicious. There was one woman with autism and ALS who actually tried so hard to write in standard English that she lost control of her bowels, which she normally had control over. And still couldn’t write in standard English. When I told that to one of the people who had been really mean to her – attempting to say “hey, you know, she’s having real problems here, could you ease up?” – the response I got was basically “I crap myself all the time, it’s no big deal, and she should never try to play the ‘I have worse disabilities than you’ game with me because I’ll always win.” There was another woman with autism who had very nonstandard English as well, but could write in standard English if she pushed herself to the limit. She got told, basically, “You’ve said it yourself, you just prefer to write in a difficult-to-understand way because it's more your real self. I am not going to coddle you because of that.” Which she’d said it was more like her real self, yes, but… not like that, not at all like that. Something can be more like your real self, and you can be capable of getting away from it only with great difficulty… and that great difficulty may not be worth the cost, may not always be possible.

Meanwhile, on the other side, I was trying to explain to people that receptive language problems are a thing. Because the people with nonstandard communication styles were saying that the only problem was that people weren’t willing to put in the effort to understand them. And I basically got told that no, the people who couldn’t understand nonstandard language were just bigoted against people with expressive language problems.

So that’s a good image of what things look like when nobody is willing to meet each other halfway.

But when people are willing, it’s amazing.

I knew some of these same people in other forums. And in those other forums, there were ways of translating that were set up, and they flourished, and it was wonderful for everyone involved. It literally meant that nobody had to crap themselves in order to be understood, FFS.

I’ve also gotten flamed really badly for asking for help summarizing my posts. To the point where even when people volunteer to summarize my posts for me, I feel like I shouldn’t accept. I feel ashamed that I can’t do it on my own. I remember the time I begged for someone, anyone, to help me summarize things, and someone said “Nobody’s going to do that, this isn’t like your house, we don’t have servants here.” (This was during a time when my bullies were trying to paint me as if I was a rich person with servants rather than a poor and severely disabled person receiving assistance from the state to do things I can’t do myself.) And I hadn’t even told anyone they had to do this, I’d just politely asked whether anyone anywhere could, because the person was insisting that I summarize myself and that if I didn’t do it she wouldn’t be able to read my posts and that if she couldn’t read my posts it was because I was an asshole who wasn’t trying hard enough.

That conversation about 'servants’ and the like left a really lasting mark on me I think because I was already vulnerable at the time, and it was like being kicked while I was down. It was highly difficult because the person was trying to tell me that mentally ill people are all evil, and that the only reason I thought otherwise was “ideology”, and that she was acting from “personal experience”. If I gave my personal experiences with people who were mentally ill but not evil, she told me my posts were too long to read and that I was deliberately making it impossible for her to understand what I was saying. If I did not give personal experiences (the only way to shorten my posts), she said I was “reciting ideology”. At one point I spent the entire afternoon trying to find a way to keep the personal experiences in my posts but shorten them enough to suit what she said her cognitive problems allowed… and I ended up in a screaming, head-banging meltdown after five hours of continuous work, but still not able to shorten my posts enough. And that’s when I broke down and asked for help, and that’s when she told me “You don’t have any servants here, nobody will help you.”

So now every time I ask for help summarizing a post, I fear that people think that I see them as my servants.

I don’t see people as my servants. Ever.

What I believe in is communities, where people who can help each other, and are willing to help each other, do help each other. With whatever people need help with. I strongly believe in that. I participate in such things when I can, offering what help I can to whoever needs it. I don’t single myself out as in special need of help that others somehow don’t deserve. I see myself the same as I see anyone else in a community like that – I help when I can, and I get help when I need it. Except ever since the servant comment I see myself as a little less deserving of help than other people, and I am shyer about asking for help.

Anyway, this is turning kind of long and rambling.

One word that I wish didn’t have the explodey effect on my brain, but does, is shibboleth. Because that’s exactly what the rest of these buzzwords serve as, in some contexts. Shibboleth has many meanings, but one meaning is “words that differentiate between in-groups and out-groups”. Like if you know (or can say, or pronounce properly, or whatever) the words, you’re part of the in-group, and if you don’t, you’re part of the out-group. Shibboleth is one of those words that’s very useful for a specific concept, but I don’t use it as often as I otherwise would, because it does hurt my brain. If it didn’t hurt my brain, and if more people knew what it meant, it would be a perfect word to use, a lot, in these discussions.

But that’s not the only reason people use these words. Some of these words do have highly specialized meanings and people like to be able to use those meanings to communicate quickly about things they have no other words for. And also some people use these words, and these communication styles, because that’s how they’ve learned that 'doing activism’ works, that’s the style they’ve learned.

It’s sort of like… I’ve seen the word side-eye become very popular in social justice circles, not because people would normally use it, but because it’s a common word used in particular PoC cultures, that just happened to be involved in social justice work on tumblr, and the word side-eye spread just as fast as the word heterosexism because the same people were using these words. It was really strange for me to watch people who’d never said side-eye in their life, start using it constantly as they were exposed to tumblr’s social justice communities. And they used it in just the same sort of way they used the academic jargon. It was kind of a jarring effect, but I can’t explain why.

Side-eye is not a word I have any trouble understanding, BTW. But I’m very good at picking up on the patterns of language people use, and the way those patterns of language spread. It’s a side-effect of how I learned language, I had to be very good at picking up patterns of which words go where when. So I am able to watch vocabulary spread through communities and it’s interesting which vocabulary gets picked up and spread, and which vocabulary doesn’t. I don’t know why side-eye became so popular, but I found it a little uncomfortable and I can’t explain why. I mean it seemed natural when people were using it because they grew up using it or had learned to use it from people they knew, but it looked very stilted and weird when people were using it as if it was social justice jargon. I think that’s one reason it stood out so much.

I do think one thing that really helps is something called cognitive interpreting, or English-to-English interpreting. That’s basically where people interpret like a foreign language interpreter, only for people who have cognitive disabilities (interpreting in both directions if necessary). That’s a good solution in situations where you’ve got two people who are simply not able to meet each other halfway because they’ve both got cognitive problems that are tugging their needs in opposite directions. And I’ve seen communities spontaneously form groups of people willing to do this for each other, and that’s pretty amazing.

But I also think that more than that needs to happen. Which is that anti-oppression movements need to simply not have academic communication styles be the central thing that happens. Like they can beone thing that happens, somewhere, but being the central thing, is a serious problem, because that basically makes the central part of the movement inaccessible to the people most likely to benefit (at least in theory) from that movement. Luckily, there’s lots of movements that never got entrenched in academic stuff. But again, I’d love to see tumblr be less entrenched. Not because academic stuff has no place, but because it shouldn’t have the central place. It shouldn’t be some kind of entrance requirement, and right now it pretty close to is.