this is a good time to remind you not to call the police on someone having a panic attack or an autistic person having a meltdown or someone with a psychiatric disorder that is “acting crazy” save a life don’t do it
for the record, yes it is ableist to go on about how Bad People are sociopaths/psychopaths, for a few reasons
- have you ever noticed how people tend to use psychopathic/psychotic (usually followed by killer, bitch, nutjob, etc) synonymously? yeah, that’s not an accident. the image of the psychopath is supposed to invoke Scary Crazy People. hopefully i don’t need to explain why this is ableist
- psychopathy doesn’t even exist in a clinical context. it is literally an invention of the criminal justice system. we don’t like the criminal justice system, remember?
- the idea of sociopaths/psychopaths is that Bad People are just aberrations, people who are somehow “sick” and “twisted” and who inflict harm on others because of ambiguous “mental problems”. this is obviously false; most often, the people we call sociopaths/psychopaths are people who are behaving exactly as systems of oppression want them to behave. violence against women is not an individual problem; police brutality is definitely not an individual problem. the concept of sociopathy/psychopathy deliberately shifts the blame away from institutions and onto individuals. it’s liberal as hell
- people with blunted affect and/or reduced affective empathy aren’t fucking evil. jesus christ. you know these are actual symptoms of a lot of psychotic/personality disorders, right. you know that people with psychotic/personality disorders are extremely likely to be SUBJECT to violence and abuse, right
On Telltale Games’ Ableist Treatment of Sarah
For those who aren’t a fan of this once-amazing series, The Walking Dead Game has always been lauded for its character diversity (with a wide range of different nationalities and racial backgrounds represented, well-written female characters and characters of all ages and body types featured prominently throughout the game).
In Season 2 we encountered Sarah, a Hispanic 15-year-old girl who is neurodivergent and has trouble coping with the horrors of the new world around her.
Now of course, being a female character and being disabled, she was immediately despised by the majority of the fandom. Slurs were tossed around, people frequently referred to her as “a liability”, and there were frequent posts made on Telltale’s forums, Facebook, Youtube, and elsewhere wishing her dead and hoping for a chance to kill her. This was nothing new - we had seen much of this before, with other female characters in the franchise. However, the ableism was rampant, and people would write essays about how she was “bringing the group down” and why her death would be a “good” thing for the other characters.
(spoilers) Her death came after the player was told several times by a pragmatic character that Sarah was dragging the group down, that she was a weakness, and that she “clearly” didn’t want to live (despite the fact that she screams and cries for help the entire time she’s being eaten). Instead of subverting that character’s pragmatism and showing that people with disabilities can still survive an apocalypse, she is killed even if the player chooses to save her (in a horrible manner, where she is partially crushed under a fallen balcony and then devoured alive by walkers as she screams for help). Her death served to further the already-prevalent fandom belief that disabled people are unnecessary weights holding survivors back, and makes total apocalyptic pragmatism look like a justified belief.
Of course, that made us (Sarah fans) angry and upset, especially considering many of us are ourselves neurodivergent (and several autistic teenage fans headcanoned her as being autistic) and the belief that characters like us are just liabilities is extremely hurtful. But that’s not what’s spurring me to make this post today.
"derp/herp derp" is ableist stop fucking using it, it is a term that originated with making fun of kids with down syndrome and being like "ha ha derp face:-P" and it has been used against disabled people for so long after that, please stop using it, get mad at people that do use it, please
"One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why’s she tweakin?" "Yo, is she retarded?" And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. What does she suffer from? We should really pray for her." One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy."
Maysoon Zayid on TEDWomen (x)
Let’s talk about how our language is so ableist we use the word “crutch”- literally something people need to walk- to mean something unnecessary that people use as an excuse.
Autism Speaks Masterpost (new! Updated 6/20/14)
Trigger warnings for ableism, abuse, autistic “therapy”, discussion of a cure, discussion of murder, eugenics, the way Autism Speaks uses their research, etc. All of this is under a cut. Be forewarned.
Non autistic person: “Are you sure you’re autistic? My 5 year old cousin is autistic, and he’s nothing like you?”
Autistic person: “Are you sure you’re not autistic? My 3 year old niece isn’t autistic, and she’s nothing like you? Like, she can barely read, and she likes different things to you? Isn’t it really odd that people twenty years apart in age are different? And that one of them has more skills than the other? In fact, it’s actually really surprising that all people with the same neurotype aren’t totally identical? Isn’t that odd? People are different to each other?”
i don’t trust people who are super into “proper grammar” and “correct punctuation” because what lies just beyond that smug superiority is some sinister classism that gets acutely racist in a red hot minute, so for similar reasons I’m instantly wary of anyone who takes great pride in their love of “logic” and “intellect”
It also intersects with ableism as well so if you think grammar, punctuation, spelling etc. defines a person’s worth, consider yourself a triple threat.
listen.
carefully.
finding diseases “interesting” is ableist at its core. you are fascinated with the otherness of it and usually while you give NO SHITS for the people who live with the disease.
other peoples illnesses aren’t for you to gawk at and go “ooooooooh ahhhhhhhh” at like this is entry level type shit and should not have to be explained but here I am on tumblr.com explaining it to you animals
“The language of pathology, mental illness, madness, disease, and disability, has long been used to reinforce other existing structural oppressions like racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, binarism, cissexism, and ableism. And it is most disheartening when those who purport to work toward dismantling those systems still use ableism as metaphor. Ableist metaphor is all-pervasive in public discourse, academia, grassroots organizing, and left-leaning movements as well as in conservative, neoliberal, and nationalist movements. It draws on the language of disability to characterize, denigrate, attack, rhetoricize, and politicize—and it does so based on the presumption that deviation from typical thought, movement, emotional processing, communication, bodily/mental functioning, learning, remembering, sensing is evidence of defect, deficiency, disorder, and ultimately, moral failure.”
“The language of pathology, mental illness, madness, disease, and disability, has long been used to reinforce other existing structural oppressions like racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, binarism, cissexism, and ableism. And it is most disheartening when those who purport to work toward dismantling those systems still use ableism as metaphor. Ableist metaphor is all-pervasive in public discourse, academia, grassroots organizing, and left-leaning movements as well as in conservative, neoliberal, and nationalist movements. It draws on the language of disability to characterize, denigrate, attack, rhetoricize, and politicize—and it does so based on the presumption that deviation from typical thought, movement, emotional processing, communication, bodily/mental functioning, learning, remembering, sensing is evidence of defect, deficiency, disorder, and ultimately, moral failure.”
hey just a heads up to all of you abled people who are into social justice and shit: if you equate bigotry to intelligence (or lack thereof) you are ableist and are throwing all of the disabled trans, poc, and queer people you say you’re defending under the bus. If you think they deserve better because of one part of their identity then they sure as hell deserve better for being disabled.