4:38pm August 4, 2014

By Tumblr logic would liking people who’re intelligent be Ableist?

gendersplenda:

madeofpatterns:

gendersplenda:

Because I like to date people who’re intelligent and who’m I can have a good healthy conversation with about interesting stuff.

Thinking that “can have a good heathy conversation about interesting stuff” and “high IQ” are the same thing is ableist.

Wanting a partner you can have certain kinds of conversations with isn’t.

Hmm, Idk if I agree, cause like for me intelligence is a huge turn on, like more so than physical aesthetic. (whilst ofcourse that does play a part). For me an intelligent and funny guy is the kind of guy I’d want to be with, I’d struggle to be with someone who didn’t understand the conversations I enjoy having about politics, feminism and philosophy.

Idk, I’m not sure where I’m going with this!

You don’t need a high IQ to say worthwhile things about any of those subjects.

Do you think I’m unable to have conversations on those subjects?

Did you know my IQ is 85? For real? I was tested when I was 22, I tried my best, and my IQ was 85. The tester was shocked: He thought it would be much lower, and told me how smart I was based on the test. I thought my test score would be around 120 or something based on what he said. Then I requested my records years later: 85.

This is not unusual.

Donna Williams got multiple university degrees with an IQ of 67.

A friend of mine was in grad school studying philosophy at the PhD level when she found out her IQ was 80.

Another friend of mine has an IQ in the 30s and went to college starting when he was 12, and thrived in university throughout his early teens, became an award-winning filmmaker while still a kid.

These are not exceptions.

This is not where you say “Well obviously the test gave you the wrong IQ.”

The test can’t give you the wrong IQ. The test gives you the IQ you get. The only meaning of IQ is “the score you get on a test”. There is no such thing called an IQ that exists in your head independent of the test. So if you do badly on the test, you have a low IQ. It does not mean you are unintelligent. It just means that for whatever reason you don’t do well on IQ tests.

I’ve spent my entire life in the developmental disability services system. This means spending a lot of time around people with intellectual disabilities – mostly people with IQs under 75, although some with IQs as high as mine (which is normally the high end of “borderline intellectual functioning”) if they also have severe problems functioning in other areas.

They are not unintelligent. Some of them can pass completely for normal, even with IQs down into the forties. Some of them don’t pass at all, even with much higher IQs. (I don’t pass at all, that’s why the guy was so surprised how “high” my 85 IQ was.)

All of them are capable of having interesting conversations about justice and injustice. This is what the entire DD self-advocacy movement was built on, is people noticing injustice and fighting it. We give speeches, powerful speeches. It doesn’t take a high vocabulary to give a powerful speech about injustice. A lot of us may find elements of SJ jargon cognitively inaccessible, but that doesn’t make us unintelligent.

Dave Hingsburger talked about a speakers’ bureau who never turned anyone away regardless of the severity of their developmental disability. At one point, they sent a woman into a classroom to teach them about injustice. She could only communicate by pointing to pictures on a picture board. The teacher and students were shocked that they were just left alone to communicate with this woman. But she started showing them how to communicate with her, and by the end of the day, they had learned a whole lot and didn’t want her to leave.

People who have no language can still communicate about injustice. They communicate about it every time you do something to them that they don’t like, and they resist, with body movements, facial expressions. Their extreme effort to communicate “yes” and “no” and “this is right” and “this is wrong” can be more powerful and eloquent than the most eloquent speech I could write.

So all the way down the line, I’ve never met an IQ-based group of people incapable of having interesting conversations about these topics. It’s more about whether you’re willing to listen. Whether you’re willing to have the patience – because often an intellectual disability is merely a brain that works slower than normal, so you have to wait for them to understand something, and then wait for their mind to get the words out, but when the words come out, they’re always just as valuable as anyone else’s words. Sometimes you have to adjust your vocabulary level. Sometimes you have to learn to listen in ways you didn’t know you could listen.

But intelligence isn’t IQ. There are highly unintelligent people with very high IQs, and brilliant people with extremely low IQs. So we’re just trying to make sure you’re not making that mistake.

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