fierceawakening:

unexpectedkate:

queeranarchism:

skye-writing:

There is a difference, I think, between “fighting ableism because it’s an axis of oppression” and “fighting it because you genuinely believe a diversity of perspectives on the world is a good thing”.

The essence of ableism, to me, is insistence that there’s only one way to be a person. Real people can walk. Real people can communicate verbally. Real people learn in X way and have no trouble integrating unfamiliar information. Ballastexistenz wrote that ableism is integral to every other kind of oppression, and I find that powerfully true. Oppression is founded on the principle that marginalized groups are doing Person wrong. Blacks are animals, gays are perverts, women are hysterical. Another blogger noted recently that anti-oppression work can’t just “pass the unperson ball” – it has to deflate it. And too much anti-oppression rhetoric, I think, is focused on merely passing.

Something I see a lot: “It’s okay for autistic people to have trouble with SJ concepts, because their brains aren’t wired that way. But neurotypicals have no excuse.” That’s…colossally missing the point. It’s putting the symbol before the substance in a big and dangerous way. Rather than reconsidering the standards of correct thought, it’s saying that certain groups, by virtue of being sufficiently marginalized, can be excepted from those standards. Instead of achieving a curb-cut effect, wherein accommodations for the disabled end up benefiting everyone, it sets up yet another binary.

And neurotypical vs. neurodivergent is not a binary. Certain clusters of traits are indisputably one or the other, sure, but there are far too many edge cases for it to be simple. What do you call a person who fits no diagnostic criteria, who isn’t actually disabled in any meaningful way, but whose worldview orbits a fundamentally different axis than most people’s? If you’re anti-SJ, you might call them a special snowflake; if you’re SJ, an edgelord. I call them a person who in some ways has it harder than quantifiably disabled people. At least disability has a name and a tribe. Where do you fit in when you’re not clinically “neurodivergent” but just a person who thinks differently?

I struggled mightily with that before I knew I was autistic. But still, I eventually found a name for my strangeness. I’m lucky that way. Some people never do, and some people’s strangeness has no name. And their alienation is not any less tragic than that of “officially” neurodivergent people. It isn’t.

Any anti-oppression effort that includes mockery of weird people is not one I want in on. Not just because it’s ableist to mock weirdnesses in disabled people. Because my anti-ableism includes a bedrock belief that different ways of experiencing the world aren’t just tolerable but actively good. It’s not something we put up with just because disabled people are oppressed.

This this this.
And it’s not just weirdness that gets labelled bad by ableism. It’s instability, it’s vulnerability, it’s change, it’s existing for yourself. All the fucking amazing things that make people who they are.

This is what diversity as a value means to me.

Also, let me repeat this part: Anti-opression work shouldn’t just pass the unperson ball – it ought to deflate it. This is what I mean by “stop throwing each other under the bus.”

“Anti-opression work shouldn’t just pass the unperson ball – it ought to deflate it.”

oh look, it’s my problem with SJ