Not interested in going down that road. This post is about why ableism should be important to everyone concerned with oppression. (And yeah, that’s pretty much the scope of this post, so don’t expect it to go past that or give me crap for not being able to go past that.)

I respectfully disagree with people who say phobia in this context is ableist. I have phobias, I’m gay, and I’m genderless. Homophobia and transphobia are not words that offend me any more than xenophobia does. There is no consensus on these words.

And I don’t in general like social rules that require people to change huge amounts of language in order to discuss our own oppression. Especially when the rules seem to change every week. I also have cognitive limitations around changing vocabulary, so if I do it, it has to be for an extremely good reason, and even then it can take me years to change a single word. And then not with 100% success. No matter how motivated I am. But I do need more motivation than this.

Also words like heterosexism break my brain. Every time I read them it’s like a small explosion inside my brain that disrupts my ability to think in other ways. I don’t know why and I can’t control it.

Further reading:

On Language Dickery (by amorpha)

The Fireworks Are Interesting

Words That Bite My Brain

Some cognitively disabled people have been discussing this problem for years — the insistence on a precise and ever-shifting set of language that may not work with our brains, in order to be considered unoffensive. I think looking at what people do and mean rather than the exact words we use may be more important. And language disabilities are not always immediately obvious from someone’s speech or writing.

There’s some things you need to understand:

1. I have cognitive disabilities that make the level of abstraction necessary to even make this post extremely difficult. I could barely articulate the things I could articulate here.

2. I then had to translate that into language. Same deal. Barely managed it.

3. This was for a disability blog carnival, so the focus was on ableism. You could look at the role of any other kind of oppression this way, and find some patterns that are similar and some that are different.

4. In this post, am not looking at every possible way that every possible oppression connects with each other, and I am not looking at horizontal connections. I am looking at the way ablesim connects vertically with other kinds of oppression, particularly ways ableism is embedded in other oppressions (this is not the same as how ableism combines with other oppressions, which as I said other people cover differently). Getting on my case for not looking at horizontal connections (which has been done more and better by tons and tons and tons of people everywhere because those are the main connections people look at between oppressions) is asking me to do more than this post was meant to do.

Also, seriously, expecting me to do more than this when I could barely make the post in the first place is ableist in itself. It was limited in scope on purpose. So that I could write it at all, among other things. I could barely write it. Holding these ideas in my head is hard. Turning them into words is hard. All of these things were barely within my grasp. Asking me to go beyond that, and calling me discriminatory or oppressive in some way for not being capable of going on that, shows a type of ableism that’s incredibly common in these discussions.

Also to repeat: Embedded is not the same as combined with. These are two totally different relations between oppression. I’m not dealing with combinations. I’m dealing with one type of oppression and how it is embedded in others. Anything else is more than I could do.

Also I was not trying to rank oppressions or say ableism is the worst or most important oppression (I thought I said this).

I was trying to say ableism is embedded in every kind of oppression people face, and that therefore understanding ableism is crucial to understanding any form of oppression. This is for a disability-related blogging event. People often believe that ableism is trivial or not something they deal with if they’re not disabled. But if you’re oppressed, you deal with ableism, and I wanted you to know it. That was the entire point of the post. Understanding ableism better will help you immensely.

I can’t cover everything at once, that’s not something I’m even remotely capable of on a cognitive level. Don’t expect me to. I covered what I covered as well as I possibly could — not as well as I wanted to, mind you, but as well as I could. (This topic could have been expanded on in a million ways if I could hold more ideas in my head and translate things into language better.) Other people can build on it or not. But don’t turn my cognitive limitations into moral failings, that’s a form of ableism in itself.

Have you also looked at belonging as a possible minimal element? Also, I totally agree with that “IQ” is crap. I’ve been trying to convince my mom for years, but she’s only slightly opened up to the idea, even though that’s the way I teach math- by assuming that everyone has an innate, perhaps hidden or obscured, passion for math. And I also agree that “Autism,” “Aspergers,” and similar labels are totaly arbitrary and don’t address the real issues. If people have to say they have Aspergers in order to have people open up to what they’re saying (and sometimes people assume that people are naturally “over-sympathetic” and try to cite something ironic to change that perspective). And what about those who would almost be labeled as having autism, or the many whose families stigmatize it?