Blogging Against Disableism

Us in rainy car

This Blogging Against Ableism post is devoted to challenge patronizing people with disabilities. In my experience, it's one of the more common and typical manifestations of (dis)ableism, and also one of the most slippery and insidious. How can you check an attitude anyway? Yet, as far as abuse of power, the dismissal of someone is a major action.


I define patronizing as:
Treating someone as if you think they are dumb, pedantic, annoying, or otherwise less valid of public contribution and participation. Behavioral examples include eye rolling, private looks of condescension, dismissing, erasing, cutting off, babying, or otherwise invalidating.

I kept returning to this idea of posting against patronizing, and kept talking myself out of it. What about the ways in which many people with disabilities are systematically oppressed as among the most poor, least employed, and least educated in the world? What about the ways in which our "social security" systems lead people away from contributing to society and trap people in poverty? Globally, what about the lack of even basic access to health care and sanitation, to basic mobility equipment and medications?
What about the ways in which psychiatric system survivors are among the most frequently homeless, due to the decentralization and then unfunding of support services? Patronizing just seems like such an unimportant issue. Who cares if we get patted on the head or treated as children occasionally?

Well, why is it exactly that people with physical, communication, intellectual, and psychiatric disabilities are undereducated? It could be that the educational systems have systematized patronizing by undervaluing, underfunding, and underestimating students with disabilities.


And why is it that people with disabilities are more often than not un-employed or under-employed? Just thinking of a few friends, I can only guess that discrimination based on appearances and prejudices outweighed the Masters degrees, years of professional experience, and demonstrated competency had something to do with an attitude of patronization. After all, even if someone with an obvious disability could do a challenging job, it surely couldn't be as good or beautiful as anyone else, and wouldn't the customers question the business's competency then, too? It's interesting that bosses and HR departments' patronizing have often been inaccurate when people actually have the chance to interact with customers and do the jobs.

The de-institutionalization movement was probably a good thing, but as community services were never funded enough to fully develop or to be sustainable, people were left without services or options. So the jails, hospitals homeless shelters, and streets became the institutions. But what could we expect from psych survivors? Perhaps if our patronizing attitudes didn't write people off as hopeless failures, we would see the injustice in these broken systems.

Patronizing can be babying, bullying, or talking down to someone...
but it can also be violating another person because we can't quite see them as fully human.

My own experiences of being patronized are memorable but limited. When I am patronized for looking too young (as an autistic FTM) or too autistic (which is sometimes misread as intellectual disability, anxiety, psych disability, or even younger age), I have the privilege of opening my mouth and quoting theory or showing diplomas, and I have the skin color and class markers to back up my claims along with the privileges of medical care, technology, and diagnoses. But what would it mean to use this privilege in a way other than simply showing that people were mistaken in their categorizing of me as one of the patronizable ones? I've often gotten angry not that my characteristics were misread, but that there was a different way to treat people based on how we are viewed. Yet, I must say that in the moment, I don't know that I've ever challenged those assumptions in a more universal way.


As my blog title alludes, I am a postmodern Lutheran who believes myself to be a redeemed sinner in a broken but re-creating world, made whole by the love of God shared through other people. So when I confess my own patronizing when I feel annoyed or bored by someone else, usually having something to do with disability (my own, theirs, or both), I am both taking responsibility for my own part in it and acknowledging that our world is one where the brokenness of patronization and corresponding devaluing of people is endemic and also in need of repair. With that, I pledge to attempt to check my own patronizing.

Here are some ideas of how I intend to challenge to act of patronizing:

• Find and express ways that all contributions are valid and important, even those that seem impractical or simplistic, overly-emotional or naive
• If nothing else, what one person voices is an indication of their experiences
• Take the time and effort to listen critically to ideas that seem strange, pedantic, or simplistic
• If behaviors or ways of being are annoying, dull, or odd, have a direct and respectful conversation with the person to find ways to work out understanding and respect
• Call out and stop the patronizing of others
• If all else fails, try to save eye rolls for alone time

Anybody have more experiences to share or ideas to challenge patronizing?

Get ready for "Blogging Against Disableism Day"

Reminder- if you haven't seen the call from Diary of a Goldfish, get ready for Blogging Against Disableism Day on May 1.
I've been investigating, and it appears that Disableism is the British equivalent to Ableism. Ever want to join in an international direct action?

Some good ideas to get you motivated:

Jay's Theory of Autistic Theory of Mind

The "Theory of Mind" as lacking in people with Autistic Spectrum experiences has bugged me for a long time. I figured out why awhile ago, and have worked on it long enough to figure out how to say a preliminary statement of it...

The Development of Lacking Theory of Mind
A young kid with AS thinks differently because their brains are wired in a different way from neurotypical.

But, being in neurotypical (in this example American middle class) society, where a common belief is that "everyone is the same," and where being different than the assumed norm/ideal is pathologized as being wrong or sick, the child is told over and over again that they think like everyone else does, and should act like everyone else does.

When the kid tries to explain the differences in experiencing and thinking, (assuming that the kid realizes the differences, can make sense of them, and can explain them to others, which is a stretch for even the most able of AS kids) they are told over and over again that they are just like everyone else thus and should act, think, and cope accordingly.

But the truth is, the sensory experiences and thought patterns, emotional and social processing are NOT the same as everyone else.

So then the person encounters other people, and misreads what they are feeling, thinking, or meaning by projecting their own meanings, because the only frames of reference are:
-their own experience
-the uniform assertion that their experience is identical to that of other people

Therefore, AS kids are trained to become adults who project atypical sensory/thought/perception/feeling patterns on others, not entirely because they intrinsically lack the ability to understand other viewpoints, but at least partially because they have been taught to think that what they are experiencing is the same as what everyone else is.

While I do think that one of the differences in experiencing/processing has to do with understanding socially-relevant cues, I think that this is overemphasized and that many of the methods use to normalize AS people actually lead to greater difficulty in Theory of Mind rather than lesser.

Wouldn't it be a more effective strategy to figure out what a person is experiencing, honor and validate that, and give tools to better understand others? For example, I learned about how to correctly interpret body language (by ASKING what it means without assuming) in MSW school--but this is clearly not a Masters' level task.
A preschooler with limited language can learn to ask "What does that face mean?"

All of this depends, of course, on the recognition and valuing of difference. The cultural value of denying difference in a misguided effort to force unity is a Modernist construct, but it's so deeply embedded in American culture that deconstructing it seems to take enormous effort. It's exactly why Disability Culture doesn't make sense to most people, why Queer Pride seems offensive, and why Christianity has been publicly limited to politically-conservative consumerist moralism. (Enough about that, or this post will never end...)

Some great books about Neurodiversity:

Questioning Organizations' Movement-Labeling

Question Your Gender

There have been some posts to the Trans-academics list, also published at Intersex Pride regarding the variety of ways that people identify/don't identify as intersex, along with frustration regarding the uniformity of some of the organizations' choices and explanations.


One of the issues raised is a concept that I've been working with for a few years, but doesn't seem to have caught on broadly- not erasing the identities of people who identify differently. That means, not saying that there is only one way to identify as X or only one meaning for the identity of X, or alternatively, that to identify as X is different from Y (OK so far) because X is just [insert insulting stereotypes here]. (Some day, I'll look up the references to "not erasing" and list them here). To me*, it seems that intersex communities have a dilemma when it comes to not erasing: how to have the identity mean something different from trans about specific bodily/medical-related experiences, while not erasing anyone within the intersex community who uses the term as an identity marker. In my expereince, this is at least partly in response to some transgender people who feel that their own gender variance is biologically-based and want to idetify as intersex as a means of legitimizing this. While self-labelling and not erasing seem to be in harmony, in this case they may be in conflict, given that someone without the experiences of bodily sex difference and/or medicalization of that difference does not share the experiences of intersex realities, and thus the choice to self-label as intersex by a person without such experiences erases those experiences in using the label.

*The intersex discussion is outside of my own experience. However, the whole discussion seems to closely parallel the ways in which communities of autistic spectrum people have chosen to identify as autistic versus using the person-first construction common in much disability-rights rhetoric. The link above also has articles on responses to organizations that deny autism as an identity, of varying degrees (uncanningly parallel to how there is disagreement within the intersex community not only regarding medicalization/"cure" of intersex, but also disagreement regarding some org.s of people with intersex that limit how intersex is used as an identity).

It's complicated, because the idea of not being a thing that you have not freely chosen, such as medically intersex or neurologically autistic should be a freedom of self-definition (you can choose whether to use a diagnosis as part of your identity or as an external imposition). Yet, the danger in overemphasized this freedom is to disallow people who do claim what has been pathologized as a positive piece of personal identity. So, while I'm generally in favor of referring to others in groups or individually as "people with autism" or "people with intersex conditions," it is equally respectful to use "autistics" or "aspies" if someone/a group asks to be referred to as such, or to use "intersex people" if someone publicly identifies as such.


Part of this whole discussion also rests on the Social Model of Disability discussion. *BIG Caveat- I am not referring to intersex physical/medical realities as disabilities. Some intersex realities are intertwined with other disabled realities, which is also not my point here. Rather, the medicalization and pathologization of intersex bodies seems to closely resemble the ways in which physical/cognitive/emotional variations in humans have become a means of social marginalization. More information on the Social Model of Disability:
ILRU Disability Timeline Analysis
Disability, Identity, Difference
ILRU Youth Training Manual- see pages 13-14



The conflict should not be that there are differences in self-understanding and experiences of similar characteristics, but that there are universal statements made in this. This reminds me of a dialogue at a place where I worked with co-workers of many disability experiences/identities. Some of the workers/people requesting services referred to themselves as "quads" or other such terms, including "crips." Others were offended by this, and asked the people not to use such terms for themselves. Having grown up stating repeatedly that I was not "a diabetic" but a "person with diabetes" (which is how I continue to identify this part of myself), I understood the disability rights implications of humanizing people with disabilities versus pathologized identities. Yet, the piece of deciding for oneself which terms someone wished to use made sense to me too.

As an adult, I've been comfortable identifying as autistic or an aspie since I figured out that piece of my identity/experiences. But I still don't identify as diabetic, even though experiencing diabetes has been a large part of my worldview. I identify as a transguy and to simplify at times, an FTM, but those are about the only words I'll use as nouns for myself. Queer and transgender, genderqueer and "bisexual" when necessary, I do not use for myself as nouns. They are parts of my identity, but adjectively so. I don't feel a need to use "person who is genderqueer," but "a gender queer person" is sufficient.
I think this question is bigger than it seems.

• How do we integrate parts of ourselves which have been pathologized into our identities? Must we?
  
• What difference does it make how our experiences are dealt with, and what exactly those experiences are?
  
• What is the difference between describing an experience/identity piece with an adjective versus objectifying it as a noun?
  
• When and how is it important to stress the humanity of people who have been dehumanized, versus when is it important to reclaim as positive identities the dehumanizing oppressive slurs?
• How can we build communities that allow for self-labeling, while claiming some common identity or experiences? (Perhaps the One Community Pledge is an example of attempting this)
  



• What difference does it make to frame something as an experience versus identity-marker?
  
  I've thought about this a lot regarding so-called invisible disabilities versus more typically apparent disabilities, and it seems to me that there is frequently a social need to downplay apparent disabilities and alternatively to assert less-apparent disabilities. This seems to me to be related to how people with disabilities choose to self-identify. Yet, in my experience, this is only a partial factor.
  
  
  Any thoughts? Especially from people who identify as intersex?
  
  

Post-Covenant -Service Trip

Puddle Reflection On Fire

I posted our post-covenant-service-trip photos. We had a nice time in Wausau, brief but free.


I'm back looking for jobs, volunteering for orgs, and taking photos.
I'm looking to start selling some crossword puzzles, buttons, t-shirts, and/or photos, whichever I get going first.