Text to speech voices tend to be in the dominant dialect and accent of their country — or of their whole language. British English voices are in a posh accent. American English voices are in that weird accent I don’t recognize the location of, but I do recognize as that strange group of people who (falsely) think of themselves as accentless. And so on.

Being half or more Southern in origin, and someone who got speech therapy partly as the result of having what sounded like a nonstandard accent, and got openly mocked by teachers over things like this, this has always pissed me off. Where are all the many and varied accents and dialects throughout the English-speaking world? Where are the accents and dialects considered poor or working-class? In a world where the technology exists to take just about any voice and develop a synthesized version, there is no excuse for not developing voices for a wider range of accents and dialects.

Yes, yes, I’ve heard a million times that people all ought to relish the chance to speak in an accent that “everyone” (read: everyone they think important) understands. That if we want to speak in ways that our families or communities speak, there must be something wrong with us. That we would otherwise appear stupid or uneducated (thanks, and screw you too). I’ve heard all of this.

But I just don’t and can’t buy it. To me all that says is “Please disappear.”

Neither does Dan Bagley, CEO of Cepstral, which produces text to speech voices for Mac, Windows, and Windows CE. He’s from Arkansas, and his company created the voices Dallas (male) and Belle (female), both of which have Southern accents. As far as I know they’re the only widely available Southern text to speech voices.

I was really excited about these voices, but there’s two problems I have with them. One is that they’re available only for Mac at the moment. I hope this will change. The other is a class thing — in keeping with the tendency towards dominant accents even in a non dominant region, they’re definitely not the accents I grew up hearing. And I’m way not into the Southern belle thing.

Fortunately, though, they’re closer to familiar accents than anything else I’ve ever heard. Also fortunately, my current main communication device is a Mac. So I downloaded Belle and have been using it ever since. I have to admit that as far from my family’s accents as she might be, she’s doing better with my natural word patterns than most voices I have used. She’s lower quality than the voices I normally use with Proloquo, but not so much that it would stop me using her. Far better than the old Dectalk voices I used to use.

Cepstral lets people download demo versions of these voices, so if anyone with a Mac is interested I’d definitely try them out before buying. They suggest that too, considering they’re $40 and nonrefundable. The demo versions will randomly say things like “please register me” every few sentences or so, so they’re good for trying out but not for real life use.

The Americanization of Mental Illness (New York Times)

I don’t know how I missed this article when it came out. It basically describes a lot of the negative effects that the USA is having on other cultures, when we export our supposedly “scientific, objective” views of “mental illness”. People suddenly starting to show psychiatric symptoms in patterns that never existed in their cultures before that. People suddenly being treated worse (in America and elsewhere) when mental illness is seen as a “brain disease” (suggesting that NAMI’s approach to “stigma” is having the opposite effect to what’s intended — although unfortunately the article didn’t go too much into the fact that it’s a problem when people see something that’s a fixed part of one’s body as being worse than other sorts of problems). People suddenly not faring as well under Americanized treatments than they did in the way their cultures were handling things already. The article doesn’t romanticize how other cultures treat mental illness either — the end says that all cultures have good and bad points in that regard.

I’ve long been disturbed at the way that Western psychiatry treats itself as a science akin to medicine, with “illness” being not just a metaphor but a presumed fact. (Even when I was in the psych system I hated that people would say I “got sick” when I’d just attempted suicide, or other bizarre things like that. I remember a boy in a mental institution with me who was there because he’d taken a gun and shot his television and a bunch of other objects. Someone sent him in a bunch of balloons that said “Get Well Soon” on them. Every last one of us in the dayroom at the time found that bizarre and laughable.) The article emphasizes the way our minds, and therefore our cultures, play a much larger role in shaping these things than Western psychiatry will generally admit. And the idea that we’re sending that part of our culture around the world disturbs me more than most of the other things we export.

This is for the next disability blog carnival. One of the questions asked is “Is there someone whom you have met in real life or online who has had an impact on how you view your disability or disabled people in general?” This is my answer.

How do I even articulate the ways my family shaped my views on disability? It’s a very mixed bag. And in saying what I’m about to say, I do not want to give the impression that my family is some kind of romanticized disability utopia. Far from it. There is plenty of misunderstanding, prejudice, and ableism to go around, just like in most families. Yet in being who they are, my family taught me a lot about disability without even knowing, without even trying. They taught me even despite the words that would sometimes come out of their mouths and the prejudice that led one family member to not allow me near his children unsupervised because I lived in a residential facility. There was something deeper going on underneath that even that kind of behavior could not fully eliminate or obscure. And since I generally see things like this from underneath, I learned lessons that nobody tried to teach me.

Most people in my immediate and extended family experience disability in some way. Whether it goes by the common classifications of developmental disability, psychiatric disability, chronic illness, physical disability, cognitive disability, or things that blur all these artificial lines, these things are practically everywhere in my family. I’m not exaggerating. I hate having to fill out forms in doctor’s offices about family history. I end up having to circle practically everything, and write in a lot of extras.

On the surface, various family members may either accept or reject the views society places on disability, and in many different ways. But underneath… underneath is where it gets really interesting.

Because the biggest message I got from my family, without any of them ever trying to send such a message, is that disability is inseparable from the human condition, from life itself. I look at us as a whole and I see an amazing landscape of human variation. I don’t see defective people. I don’t see people who never should have been born. I don’t see unpersons. I don’t see empty shells. I don’t see burdens on society and on each other. I just see people.

I was trying to explain all this to my father when he visited recently. It’s really hard to put into words. I brought up the people I’ve known who are the only disabled people in their families. I would never want to put up with the bullshit that some of them have to put up with. Not that my family doesn’t have its own brands of bullshit, but still. At least I can look underneath the bullshit and see that ever-changing landscape of people who are in similar positions to me.

They may or may not think about it the same as I do, but it’s not their thoughts that gives me an advantage. It’s their being. It’s who they are. It’s who all of us are, in relation to each other. Some things are deeper than words, deeper than thoughts. They make their way into the core of your being and connect you to your roots. Nobody can break these connections, not even if they want to. They transcend hatred, prejudice, bullshit, and all the other things that can tear us apart on other levels.

This means I was never prepared for the level of contempt for our very existence that exists in mainstream American thinking. That contempt is hidden behind discussions of how horrible and traumatic it is to have a disabled family member. I could never get into support groups for children of disabled parents, siblings of disabled people, and so forth. Because so much of what they say is all about the “normal life” they wish they had had. And they have all this resentment for the position they’re in.

I hear people say things like “I didn’t get to have a childhood because my mother was disabled” and I want to shake them and ask “What do you think ‘a childhood’ is supposed to be!?!?” But I know what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be an entire world without people like me in it. We’re always described as barriers to the normal lives that people around us deserve. I can’t get on board with that. I can’t even fathom how that is considered a good thing.

Seeing how the rest of the society we live in viewed people like us was almost like a kind of culture shock. Even the worst of the disability prejudice within the family was nothing compared to what I found outside of it. Reading about the way the eugenics movement targeted families much like mine, in terms of disability, class, and race (during that era many of us were visibly mixed-race), makes me glad we escaped that fate, and horrified for those who didn’t. Of course, eugenics did play a part in the struggle my great aunt with an intellectual disability had in getting married to a man with a similar condition. But we were never systematically targeted as a whole.

Still, to this day the remnants of eugenics seem to be everywhere. There are people who think it ought to be illegal for anyone with genetic conditions to have children. Or that it’s a mother’s duty to abort a fetus found to be disabled. And that if people disobey this, then their children ought not to benefit from any kind of disability services from the government. What that tells me, is that people don’t want me to exist. They don’t want my family to exist. Any of us. They would rather none of us had been born.

I have trouble having those conversations. I have trouble believing anyone should be in the position of having to argue for their own existence. And people saying these things usually believe they’re being totally sensible and not acting from hatred and naked bigotry. They say my emotional reactions mean I can’t think clearly on the matter. If what they do is thinking clearly then I want no part of it. I can’t describe the pain, or the rage.

My mother once wrote to me. She had been reading things by other parents of autistic children. They said that all parents of autistic children think about killing their child at some point, and that parents who say they haven’t ever thought that even once, are lying. They said that no parent would deliberately have a child if they knew their child might be autistic. My mother told me that doctors had suggested she abort me before I was born. That she didn’t listen. That she’d always wanted me. That she wanted me to know that they had never, ever, not wanted me to exist. That knowing I would be autistic would not have changed anything. I cried. I cried because these people had made her feel like she needed to tell me that. I can’t imagine how that felt for her. I can’t think of it now and not cry.

A lot of people in mainstream American society seem to believe that they have some kind of absolute right for us not to exist in their lives at all. That it is only natural that we be taken out of our families and put into group homes, mental institutions, nursing homes, and the like. That it is only natural for us to be taken out of school and put into segregated special education classes or schools. That we be put onto government programs that are run in such a way as to make us an underclass below people who actually work for a living.

I never understood these “rights”.

When I was in special ed, I noticed something. I noticed that a lot of us had been taken out of traditional classrooms, because of excuses like “It would be too hard for the teacher to teach all of these different kinds of people,” or “These people are a distraction to the regular students and impede their learning.” And yet… here we were, in classes, together. When they bothered teaching anything useful at all, teachers had to accommodate our various ways of learning. We had to learn to concentrate in classes together with people who were supposedly too distracting to be in regular classes. We were people who supposedly struggled to learn or socialize the same way other people did. Nondisabled children were supposed to be really good at these things. If we could handle it, why couldn’t they? It didn’t make sense.

The reality was, that those weren’t the real reasons we were in segregated classes. We were in segregated classes because nondisabled people felt they had the right to learn without us present. They felt they had the right to a world without us in it, with us shunted off to the side somewhere where they didn’t have to bother getting used to our presence.

Mind you — I don’t believe in traditional school. I believe it’s just another form of institution, with the power structures that lead to bad things. I believe it’s unnatural to separate people out by age and expect them to learn socialization from people as immature and inexperienced with it as they are. Because it’s considered normal, few people in mainstream USA think of this, and many are outraged when I say such things. But I know how damaging school is to the minds and souls of the people who attend it, even if many people deny that this happens.

So I am not saying that I wish everyone was in regular school. (Nor am I saying the thing some “inclusion” advocates say, that it’s bad for disabled people to be together because we might catch disabled cooties and they want us to learn to be more like nondisabled people.) I wish nobody was in regular school. I wish learning happened instead, in ways that most people cannot even imagine. But nonetheless, I dislike the fact that nondisabled people in regular schools think they have the right for us not to be present with them. That’s just messed up.

But what I said about how things ought to be done in a way most people cannot even imagine? I don’t just think that about school. I think that about the entire way our society deals with disability. I want everyone to be able to see that vast landscape of human variation that I see when I look at all people, disabled and nondisabled. I want people not to see us as defective, as people who ought never to have existed in the first place. I want people to see our problems as just part of the human condition, just like everyone else’s problems, not something specially and uniquely horrible.

And I get that mentality from my family. They didn’t necessarily try to give me that mentality. But they succeeded anyway. They showed me who they are, who I am, who we are, down as deep as it goes.

I have a story that’s been writing itself in my head for a long time.

A disabled girl seeks out the nymph-like beings who make up the trees and the rocks and the landscape in her world. She expects them to look like the nymphs in pre-Raphaelite paintings. Instead, to her shock, they have the same level of diversity that humanity has. They come in all sizes, colors, and body types. Including many that are disabled. Including some who look just like her. When she sees the ones who look the most like her, she is shocked. And repelled. And she runs away in terror, and goes home and cries. She can’t get the image out of her head. She was looking for what she considered “better” than her, and instead she finds she’s almost looking into a mirror. But eventually she learns, that just like the trees and the rocks and the ground come in all different types, so do people. That trees, rocks, and ground don’t mind this. That people shouldn’t either. That there’s nothing horrible and unnatural and wrong and shouldn’t-exist about the way she’s been built. And then she cries for an entirely different reason.

That’s how I see disabled people. And that’s what my family taught me, willingly or not. I may have been getting messages from society ever since I can remember that there was something terribly wrong with me. (One of the first conversations I remember between my mother and a stranger involved a stranger asking her what was wrong with me.) But… I was also getting that deep down underneath message that all kinds of people exist in the world and had a place in it, disabled or not. That both the good and inconvenient parts of disability were just part of what goes on in life, not something jarringly different from “real” life.

My most basic views on disability don’t come from ideology. They don’t come from buzzwords like neurodiversity or social justice, or the movements and ideologies surrounding those terms. They aren’t specific to autism and don’t come from the autistic community. They come from deep down in my bones, the bones my family gave me.

Note: If you link to this post, the cut won’t be there, so be sure and let people know that if they don’t want to read spoilers for the latest My Little Pony series then they shouldn’t follow the link.

When I hear someone describing themselves as “good with” an entire category — “good with animals”, “good with autistic people”, “having a way with cats” — it immediately sends warning flags up. (Not absolute warning flags, but certainly warning flags.)

But I never expected a children’s cartoon to give such a good example of why. (I’ve had a stomach virus lately and for awhile children’s cartoons were the only thing I could follow.)

The following is a series of clips from an episode of the latest My Little Pony series. They deal with a character named Fluttershy. Fluttershy is a normally sweet, soft-spoken, sensitive person whose talent is basically “being good with animals”, whether butterflies or bears. (Each pony has an innate talent or affinity that they discover as they are growing up. Once they discover it, a symbol magically appears on their butt. Fluttershy’s symbol is a bunch of butterflies.) Given this characterization, I never expected them to show the dark side of believing oneself “good with animals” to the degree she’s normally portrayed as.

Don’t click on the cut unless you want spoilers for a fairly late episode in the series. I’ve done my best to transcribe it since there’s no captions. The clips show only Fluttershy’s parts of the episode. Some parts may not make sense without context, but the basic gist of it is pretty clear after awhile. And I have to say — some of that is barely, if at all, exaggerated from interactions I’ve had with people who believed themselves “good with autistic people,” “good with nonverbal people,” or whatever else in that vein they believed. I’ll write more about that after the transcript, because I don’t want what I say to give too much away about the episode.

Read the rest of this entry →

I just read Notes from the Urban/Rural Divide: Pardon Me, Your Contempt is Showing by meloukhia.

I was raised in San Jose, California, so it might seem odd that this post hit home for me. But it does.

I grew up hearing from other people that the region of California my father is from wasn’t actually part of California. Because California is only the Bay Area and the Los Angeles area, apparently. The school actually called my parents once to express concern when I repeated to the whole class everything my dad had told me about how to kill chickens for food. (I was also the only kid who had chickens.) My dad is from a farm in the central valley, where his relatives originally came from Oklahoma and Arkansas. People from there were immediately hated even by the existing local residents of California. While prejudice towards “Okies” and “Arkies” in specific had waned where I lived, prejudice towards the general idea was definitely everywhere. People mocked the accents and speech patterns I heard from my relatives on both sides of the family, as another way of saying stupid without actually saying it. It’s still painful to think of how I tried to eliminate the traces of those speech patterns that showed up in my own speech (and sometimes even tried to “correct” my parents, which feels even worse), because I was so mortified by things like that. I actually had teachers tell me it “sounded uneducated” as well. It only got worse when I went to a school that was mostly for rich kids, because then it was both class and urban/rural stuff to contend with. (Because you can be raised in the city and yet still be influenced by the rural-based culture of your family. Which has always made me feel a weird sort of in-between status, regardless of whether I was living somewhere urban or rural at the time.)

Both my parents lived in rural areas or small towns growing up. They live in a rural area now, in the real north of California, not the Bay Area that everyone calls Northern California as if the state stops anywhere near that far south. (People have actually asked me why they’d want to live in the mountains “cut off from everything”.) I live in the largest city in Vermont (one of the most rural states in the country), which was still called a “small town” by CNN. (I’d actually be living in a rural area if I didn’t need the frequent medical care.) And meloukhia is right that rural Vermont was one of the areas most devastated by the hurricane, even declared a disaster area. Entire towns have been underwater. Even in Burlington, which got off light, everyone knows people from the more rural areas who lost a house or a workplace or a town. The idea that the hurricane didn’t really do much damage is… I was going to say ludicrous, but more like grossly offensive.

There’s a naked, ugly, almost angry contempt people in urban areas reserve for rural communities, and it’s a twisted, unpleasant thing. In the wake of the hurricane, some ‘progressives’ suddenly claimed to care about rural issues, taking care to excoriate each other for belittling Irene while there was serious damage in Vermont, but almost immediately afterwards, they returned to their ways, again ignoring rural areas and rural issues in favour of topics they found more interesting. They totally ignored the impact of the earthquake on rural communities, even though that information was made readily available; instead, both Andrea and I got hate mail for the piece that ran here.

I live at a strange straddle of the urban/rural divide, something I’ve discussed before. Most people who read me casually or only see a few pieces of mine assume I am a resident of the Bay Area, since they see I’m from Northern California and the Bay Area is the only thing there, right? So people feel very comfortable letting their contempt fly around me, assuming that I am one of them and will join them. And when I point out that no, their assumptions are actually wrong and I am living in a rural area, there’s not even a hint of embarrassment, just a little ‘well of course you’re different.’

I’m very glad that ou wrote that. Because it says things that have existed in my head since forever but haven’t been possible to say.

Letter to Occupy Together Movement by Harsha Walia

It describes some things I’ve been uneasy about with the #occupy movement, and some I hadn’t thought of, but it’s well thought out and fundamentally about the necessity of involving the perspectives of everyone in the “99%”. (Including the people whose land is already being occupied without acknowledgement from most of the people involved. I don’t see how people can ignore what my inner senses always perceive as this murky ooze of genocide and slavery that practically permeates the American landscape to the point it seems impossible to not notice it. But people do.)

While I don’t know when I’ll have the brain to put it together, my friend (the one who wrote the post about this movement that I linked to before) has requested that I make a video dealing with concerns we have about making sure that disabled people are likewise fundamentally respected by people who probably haven’t thought of it before (and probably don’t respect us now as full human beings). I’ve got ideas on what to put in it, and my friend has helped, but it’s really hard to make a video when you’ve got this little energy. Fortunately she suspects this will be around for long enough that I’ll have plenty of time to put it together. (And who knows, sometimes I say something like that and put everything together in a frenzy of energy one day and collapse for a week or two after. That’s what life with fluctuating skills and energy levels is like, you never know the exact moment when everything will come together right in order to get something done.)

But basically… most people (and therefore most people involved in this movement) fundamentally don’t grasp that disabled people are people. They’ll deny it, and they may believe they think we’re people, but their actions treat us differently than their words do. Even people who are against capitalist greed in theory, have usually not worked out that part of capitalism is valuing people differently based on the kind and amount of work they do, and the creation of a system that figures that if it can’t manage to exploit disabled people then we’re basically trash. And they generally also haven’t thought through the terror of becoming disabled (especially but not limited to cognitive disability) that drives them to the ultimate danger for us — that they’d want to die if they were like us, and therefore we are better off dead. And those two distortions of reality (because reality is that we are valuable because we exist, end of story, there can be no “buts” added to that) combine to horrific effect to both devastate and outright kill disabled people.

But the video I’m trying to make, while it will obviously go into those subjects in enough depth to get the idea definitely across, is fundamentally about the value of all people (and specifically the value of disabled people because we are people). Because without understanding that, this movement will end up reproducing all the screwed-up dynamics that already result in the oppression of disabled people as well as many other sorts of oppressed people. So it’s really, really important that while we support this movement, we also make our voices heard as firmly as possible to get things across so that it is reflecting values that will substantially change things for people already currently oppressed in ways a little more complicated than most people think of when they think of this movement. I absolutely support the general idea of the movement (because if someone doesn’t do something to stop the people with power, there will be destruction much worse than if they don’t do something, even if the something ends up being destructive to people like me in many ways), but I also know that without disabled people’s voices getting heard the outcomes could still be quite bad for us even if their goals are totally met otherwise, and I want to do everything I can to make sure things don’t happen that way.

(And if anyone’s going to get on my case about making a video while I’m supposed to be resting — I’ll try really hard to be careful. I have much more energy than I did when I first mentioned needing to rest, although it’s still a pretty fragile level of energy that can go away fast if I’m not careful. Today I had a doctor’s appointment so I’m really wiped out and can’t even think of making a video without brain-pain, especially given that right now all words I read are affecting me like Words That Bite My Brain, and the words I write are coming out much more scrambled than usual so then I have to read them over and over, biting my brain as they go, until I am fairly sure I didn’t get them in the wrong order. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve read through this and found words like “by” and “from” and “with” and “about” and so forth mixed around, so if I haven’t caught them all, that’s why.)

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m referring to an earlier post called Story, Story, Story, WHAP!. I’m not suggesting that the title of the post become a long-standing name for the phenomenon.)

So for me at the moment it’s any of the many different ways of saying:

“I have this [insert relative here], sort of. But we only visit her [insert ridiculously small amount of time], because she’s got [insert diagnosis here] and she naturally [without us even questioning whether this is okay or necessary] lives in [insert type of institution here].” Bonus points if they don’t treat her even remotely like a part of the family except when they want to make the character in question look sympathetic or like they have a “tragic past”. Extra bonus points if the person has never even met or made the smallest of token efforts to meet their relative but still want to angst about this person’s existence on the planet as far as I can tell. (While never, not even once, thinking of how their relative herself might feel, about any of that, because we don’t have feelings or reactions to not being treated remotely like part of our families.)

I’m not talking about instances where the person is institutionalized for reasons beyond the character’s control, the character has tried to do something about it, and is actively prevented from seeing them for more reasons beyond their control. Like in Lest We Forget (a sort of documentary-on-CD put together by the brother of one of the former inmates of an institution being covered by the documentary), the only times the guy annoyed me more than slightly were for… other things.

It’s more when it’s “This person is barely a part of the family and that’s because that’s how these things work, period, end of story, and this is only ever brought up to manipulate the audience, and the injustice of the situation is never questioned whatsoever.” Or when it becomes all about that one person’s suffering with no comprehension at all that whatever they’re suffering, it’s nothing even close to what their disabled family member is suffering by being in that situation. Or other things along those lines.

That’s not the only thing that pisses me off on sight, but it’s the one that I’ve run into more than once recently, so it’s what I remember right now.

What sort of things (please read the original post so you know what I mean) affect any of you this way? I’ll probably throw more in, in comments, as I remember or run into them.

Edit to add: I’m less concerned with what specific books/movies/etc. people have seen these in, and more interested in what they’re actually doing that provokes this reaction. Although of course people can reply however they want, I just thought there might be some misunderstanding.

I’d been meaning to write a post on this myself, but I couldn’t figure out the words. Fortunately a friend has figured out those words already, so all I have to do is link to her post. She also gives some ideas for people who can’t go to these things. (Like me. If I can barely get out of bed, I can’t exactly go to a protest — which is pretty infuriating right now. But I can send these links about it so other people hear.)

Here’s her post:

Every thoughtful, moral individual right now belongs in the streets

Some other links on this issue that people have sent me:

Articles:

Behind the Scenes of #OccupyWallStreet
The Best Among Us
Occupy Wall Street Protest Migrates to Montreal
Europe Stunned After Being Told “Obama Is Not In Charge”

Livestream (not captioned, don’t have transcripts):

Global Revolution

Youtube (not captioned, don’t have transcripts):

Occupy Wall Street (FULL) Interview with Chris Hedges Part 1
msnbc video Rewriting Occupy Wall Street protests Lawrence O’Donnell The Last Word
Unbelievable protest footage. NYPD drag girl across the street
The People Occupy Wall Street While Wall Street Dreams of Another Recession
Countdown With Keith… Michael Moore on support of Occupy Wall Street protest

I’ve seen other videos but I can’t find them anymore.

Apparently the best places to follow all this are on Twitter (#occupywallst, #occupytogether, #globalrevolution, and others) and on that Livestream video. One video I saw (can’t find it now) said that — at the time the video was made — CNN was covering a small Tea Party meeting in a Denny’s but wasn’t covering any of this at all. And many media reports that do exist have false or misleading information.