What an invalidating thing to say.

“What we’re worried about is the power dynamics relative to adults and children and there is this question of if we even COULD relate to our hypothetical children in a respectful way while living in our current society. We’d want to, but maybe no matter what we did the children could end up feeling like we didn’t.”

It’s possible to treat children respectfully. My parents are proof of that. My earliest memories, at 3-4 years old, are of them treating me as an equal, explaining things to me, and negotiating with me. They still had veto power, but I definitely had a say in how they ran my life. The key is that whenever the kid protests about something, you stop and listen to what they’re trying to communicate and find something workable for both of you. My sensory sensitivities didn’t cause me nearly as much trouble as they do for most late-diagnosed autistics, because my parents – though they didn’t understand why those things bothered me – were willing to accept my word that they *did* bother me.

I can’t imagine doing stuff like that to an adult! And I never force my son to look me in the eyes or do physical stuff he doesn’t want to. The most intrusive I am is when I ask him to “use a nice loud voice” cause he mutters a lot and it’s really difficult to hear/understand what he’s saying…

I’m so sorry you had to go through that and have to deal with such ignorance and condescension. I really hope she didn’t ruin it for you, and for the record? You totally rock!! I’m glad the thing you made to avoid unwanted interactions worked well for you. I hope you don’t come across that type of behavior from someone again!!

Why,thank you! And I agree with you, whatever the person’s motivations are (innocent, ignorant, or malicious), treating others as “less than” is discrimination.

Victoria Ferrante, you are kind of hitting an something because children are one of the largest groups of people that are regularly treated as less than human and not worthy of making their own decisions or having their own boundaries respected.

I was talking to someone the other day and we both are leery of the idea of having children, even though the other person would really like to one day. What we’re worried about is the power dynamics relative to adults and children and there is this question of if we even COULD relate to our hypothetical children in a respectful way while living in our current society. We’d want to, but maybe no matter what we did the children could end up feeling like we didn’t.

Obviously it would not be totally appropriate to treat disabled people like children, but it shouldn’t be more wrong than it would be to, say, treat women like disabled people regardless of ability. There’s nothing wrong with being disabled and there’s nothing wrong with being a child. When people compare me to children as a way of trying to shame me I say as much, that I consider it a compliment to be compared to that group of people.

When a group is not respected that is when they start getting lumped together and treated like the same kind of thing. So we see women or racial minorities being told that they’re cognitively or otherwise biologically inferior (like disabled people), we get disabled people being told that they’re like children, we get white people with inconvenient beliefs being compared to racial minorities (“indian lover” was once a very difficult thing to be considered), etc.

And then kind of what I’m saying is just that a child shouldn’t be treated like Amanda Baggs was, either.

(also, response to your response to me: You are pretty nice.)

I’m sure there are some people who see disabled people as less than human, but there are also those who see them as children.

(Assumptions made on my part are based on similar experiences.)

I wouldn’t say “she didn’t understand”. I think it is probably more like, “She thought it was okay to act this way”. The distinction is small but significant. Because she was interacting with somebody who is disabled, she didn’t categorize her actions as wrong; because she at some point bought into the idea that disabled people aren’t quite as human as the rest of the human race–there’s “people” and there’s “disabled-people”, and the second is a totally different category from the first. Because she didn’t put “disabled people” in the “people” category, she didn’t think about what she was doing in the context of “How I am treating a fellow human being.” She thought about it in the context of “How nice a person I am to be interacting with a disabled-person”. And that mindset left her free to do some rather nasty things.

To Mr. Ruiz,
:)

Also when I feel up to writing the post, I will post what I made the night after this happened, to better handle unwanted interactions the next day. It worked great.