10:48pm August 30, 2014

So… those three posts are very important to understanding a lot of things people write.

Unlike previous postings, the final two posts now have a tl;dr summary at the end, which I’m not usually good at writing, but I was somehow capable tonight.

I would strongly recommend reading these three posts if you want to understand how certain cognitively disabled people do and don’t approach language, communication, and ideology. And the gross misunderstandings that can crop up when you do assume that we approach those things the same way a lot of people do. Because those have been some of the worst online misunderstandings I’ve ever gotten into, and watched friends get into.

And it’s always people with a certain kind of cognitive language impairment that get into this kind of trouble. If a person has this kind of impairment, you can pretty much guarantee that huge misunderstandings of intent, belief, ideology, and language will happen to them. I’ve watched it happen to myself and my friends with similar language problems countless times over the years in the blogosphere and tumblr, and it’s very disheartening to watch.

So I consider these three posts very important towards understanding where we’re coming from. This isn’t about saying we’re better than people who do things in another way. It’s about saying we’re different (and sometimes that difference results in better results, and sometimes it doesn’t), and that most people don’t pick up on how different we are, especially if we have good writing skills online. And then misunderstandings happen, which can grow into long-term feuds, and all based on not grasping the way we handle language versus the way most people handle language.

Some examples:

I don’t believe that autism is a thing. I think there are only the people who get called autistic. Autism itself doesn’t exist, it’s not a real thing, it’s just an abstraction taken from a very diverse group of people. But I’ve been told over and over that because I use the word “autism”, and “autism subtypes”, then I must believe that autism is a real thing and is not socially constructed. (This is an example of language and mental widgets both.)
I’ve said babies or children instead of fetuses in abortion debates, and instantly been assumed to be pro-life. Incredibly, even after I explained exactly how pro-choice I was, people refused to believe me, all because I’d said the word “baby”. They discounted everything I had to say from that point on out. (This is an example of language and mental widgets both.)
I have been told that because I believe people with extremely severe cognitive disabilities are people and have rights, then I must also believe that fetuses need legal personhood and have the same rights as a severely cognitively disabled adult. (This is an example of mental widgets more than an example of language.)

Those are just three examples of how these misunderstandings can crop up. There are literally hundreds of possibilities, and me and my friends seem to run into them every day. That’s why I post and repost these three posts periodically, because it’s very important to understand why not everything is always what it seems.