4:15pm July 20, 2014

theaubisticagenda-dendriforming

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Intellectual disability is not being “literally stupid.” I have a lot more of a problem with people using that as an argument for “don’t say stupid,” than I do with people saying “stupid.”

Plus, that’s…

Because it’s used against d/Disabled people?

It can be. So can lots of other insults that aren’t disability-specific. That doesn’t mean every use of it is ableist.

The very reason why it’s an insult is that it’s viewed as insulting to be Intellectually Disabled, though? Like, just because people use gay to mean something other than gay for insulting people, doesn’t mean it’s not a gay-antagonistic phrase.

Not necessarily. Having an intellectual disability isn’t the same thing as being ignorant. It’s not the same thing as making choices that you should know better than to make. Assuming that these things are equivalent is exactly what I was objecting to when I originally wrote this post. And stupid is commonly used to mean both of those things. More commonly than it’s used to equate someone’s behavior with someone who has an intellectual disability.

And if you equate the meaning of stupid with the meaning of intellectual disability, then the common suggested “non-ableist” solutions I’ve seen, like using the word “obtuse” (which means, among other things, slow to understand) are just as ableist.

Yeah. Exactly. The insult “stupid” is not created based on any connection to intellectual disability. There are times when it is used in an ableist sense against disabled people by equating it to an intellectual disability. But that connection has to be made in a specific manner, it isn’t intrinsic to the word stupid. There’s nothing about the word stupid that inherently connects it to intellectual disability or any other disability, at all.

It’s frequently used against people with intellectual disabilities and other cognitive disabilities. This is because of a widespread prejudice that people with cognitive disabilities are stupid. This is not the same thing as stupid meaning cognitive disability.

And none of the alternatives people give, actually mean the same thing as stupid. In fact, everything that could possibly mean the same thing as stupid is always put on the list of words that people should be forbidden to ever use. This makes it impossible to communicate certain concepts that are important.

Worse, the people who are the most against using the word ‘stupid’? Are really fucking good at calling people stupid. They do it all the time. They just don’t use the word stupid. But they call people stupid, and they do so in a highly disability-linked way, and nobody calls them on it because they aren’t using the word stupid to do it.

And that kind of thing pisses me off a lot.

“Don’t say stupid, it’s ableist. But I’ll continue to mean stupid, and I'll mean it in the most ableist way possible, and I’ll wield the meaning of stupid against people with cognitive and language impairments most of all, all the while pretending that I don’t call people stupid.”

I’m not capable of that level of language manipulation, but I can certainly perceive it when it’s happening to me. And I don’t enjoy it one bit.

I don’t think everyone who says “Don’t say stupid” is doing that language-manipulation stuff. I think some of them honestly believe it’s ableist for a lot of different reasons. But the ones who do the manipulation, I have zero respect for at all.

Also, there are people who insist that I haven’t been hurt by these words. They say that if I’d been hurt by these words, I would automatically have the same response that they have to these words – which is to demand that nobody ever use these words again. In fact, I have been hurt by these words. I have been hurt by stupid, retard, crazy, psycho, tard, spaz, idiot, mong, all of them. You name it, I’ve been hurt by it.

But I make distinctions.

I think there’s some words that should virtually never be used, and some words that should be used with caution, and some words that should only be used in some circumstances and not others, and some words that should only be used by some people and not others, and some words that can virtually always be used, and all of this has to be evaluated on circumstances.

And it can’t just be “Lots of people have been hurt so you’re an insensitive asshole if you even conceive of using this word ever again.” Or any variant on that. That’s not okay.

You have to also take into account the large number of cognitively disabled people who find changing our vocabulary anything from difficult to well-nigh impossible, who are among the worst affected by these change-your-language campaigns, which are supposedly done in our name in the first place.

“Don’t say stupid because it means cognitively disabled. What, you’re too cognitively disabled to avoid saying stupid? Are you stupid or something? It's easy to change your vocabulary.” And they think we won’t pick up on the “Are you stupid or something?” which is always implied, never spoken, but implied so loud it’s deafening.