this is a collection of tumblr posts so it may get longer

Maybe you know what's going on. If you don't that's okay. I don't want to use the person's name and maybe that's dumb but it just seems like such an archetypal situation that I don't see the point of causing drama. He seems unreachable. If you know who this is you already know. It's a non-disabled parent vs. disabled people internet drama thing. It is taking a lot out of me and I'm not even directly involved.

Zero

[I deleted this post immediately after making it]

has ted ever considered treating other people with 1% compassion? just do it! it'll be great!

One

also, before I go back to sleep, because I can’t yet thanks to this ridiculousness.

it happens to be a fact that at one point You Know Who wrote in an email to either Z or me (I don’t remember which, because it was a while ago and it was an incredibly horrible series of days in my life for reasons that had little to do with him but definitely exacerbated how much the situation upset me) something like this:

“when this started happening my friends started telling me that I shouldn’t try to talk to self-advocates because it wouldn’t end well and they wouldn’t listen but I tried to anyway and I’m really regretting this because everyone has been so mean to me and not listened!!”

okay dude, so let’s look at this.

basically he’s setting up the fact that he tried to engage with self-advocates (also known as disabled adults!) as, like, some kind of awesome favor. like, the baseline thing that you would expect would be that he wouldn’t do it. and his friends told him not to do it because self-advocates are not nice, or maybe just don’t understand these issues because they’re not smart enough. (but when it actually matters, we are smart and NLMC.) I mean, this is what I already don’t get, because if your work is about disability and making things better for disabled kids, how could you think listening to disabled people is anything other than vital? because one day your kid will be an adult who people are trying to decide if it’s worth it to listen to, or if engaging with them ~won’t be worth it~ or whatever.

but you’re trying to figure out if disabled adults are going to be nice/cool/~understanding enough to deserve your time. yeah okay. I hope you engage with your kid even if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed and aren’t reasonable or in a good mood. (disclaimer, my impression of You Know Who is he would do this because he seems like a really good dad, but I have NO IDEA why I am required to say this when I am disagreeing with him or why he thinks people are required to take his advocacy work into account when disagreeing with something he said especially because he clearly doesn’t give a fuck about what any of the ~disabled adults~ arguing with him experience or what our work has been like.)

anyway, this guy decides to be an epic saint and actually answer/talk to disabled people who disagree with him even though someone told him that the disabled people would just be dicks. and the disabled people in question…were dicks, in his opinion. so his conclusion is to like try to guilt-trip us because HE LISTENED TO US EVEN THOUGH HE WAS TOLD NOT TO BOTHER. because he’s the nicest guy in the world. and we weren’t nice back!!

but if you really care what disabled adults have to say then you just would listen and you wouldn’t think you deserve something for listening! AND if you think someone wasn’t nice to you (which I couldn’t disagree with more in this case) you would still want to engage because it’s important! you definitely wouldn’t be like “ooh this is starting to prove that I shouldn’t have engaged with you”

IN CONCLUSION, this is a really good way of making it sound like you want disabled adults to shut up and practically all you have done is say things like this!

Two

[obviously, this was also a direct comment on one of his posts]

Hi R, it’s Amanda. We talked a bit in comments and by email when this first happened, and (as I probably said) I can’t do this conversation well because it’s a big emotional/psychiatric trigger for me to hear people being told their disabilities aren’t significant. (I understand if you think I’m misinterpreting what you said or taking it too much to heart, but you said that Zoe lives independently and that isn’t true. That is a perfect illustration of why parents should not try to bring in personal information when having these conversations with self-advocates.)

So I apologize for messy/badly thought out parts of this comment. But I would like to point out that I’ve never seen Zoe try to represent the point of view of someone with a disability that’s different from hers or more severe than hers—just her own point of view. I feel that we start having this conversation where we argue the legitimacy of things that haven’t actually happened. I actually see you acknowledging/agreeing with a lot of things that Zoe said in her letter and I don’t really think there is a lot of disagreement when it comes to actual ideas. And obviously Zoe cares a lot about talking to you and engaging with you, because she is making an effort to do so and has initiated most of the conversations you’ve had.

The biggest difference of opinion that I see seems to be that you feel attacked but no one I know feels like they have attacked you. I didn’t think Zoe’s original post was that mean or aggressive, except for one word choice that she later apologized for. But you’re saying she turned you into a “bogeyman?” And that you wish you could have heard from her when you first made the post with suggestions of how to make it be more inclusive—but that’s exactly what her original post WAS. She linked it in the comments of your post because she intended for you to read it and think about it.

I think you’re a great parent who has done a lot of important work for AAC users. At one point in an email you said that my reaction really bothered you because I was a longtime reader of your blog and knew about your work. But I don’t see why or how someone is supposed to take your work into account when responding to something you said that they thought was offensive. A person can do good work and still say something that other people find worthy of addressing. Personally I’d be really happy if this conversation stuck to opinions and ideas and stopped being about anyone’s life or work.

(I have to say that when in posts and comments you have tried to talk about what any of us know or experience in our personal lives, you have often been wrong, as with the comment about living independently. Which is one reason I’d like you to stop.)

Anyway, I’m getting off track, but I have seen you say that you were turned into a bogeyman, take words out of context to turn them into examples of how you were insulted (like when someone wrote a post saying that you and Zoe had both made “dick moves” in the conversation, and you said that you’d been called a dick), Tweet about things that self-advocates have said to you in emails that you think were stupid or offensive, and tell people like Zoe who have been fairly polite that you would have happily listened if they’d been MORE polite. To me, it looks like you think you’re in this situation where people don’t like you and are trying to bully you. That is what is most confusing to me because I think you are wrong. If disabled people didn’t care about you we wouldn’t be trying to reach out to you and talk to you! Most of the things you’re calling attacks happened because A DISABLED PERSON WANTED TO ENGAGE WITH YOU. I can see why someone would say that this really makes it hard for disabled adults to talk, because no matter what we do, you react as if we’re punching you in the face. I really don’t get it, with the work you do for your daughter, that you make it seem like disabled adults have to meet an impossible standard for it to be “worth it” for you to listen. To me your work/parenting and your reaction to this situation seem like they belong to two completely different people.

Three

“People who are struggling just to live every day don’t have the luxury for discussions like this.”—one of Ted’s friends on twitter


HEAD MEET DESK
FOREVER

but….but….HE IS HAVING IT!!! so therefore he ALSO sucks

and you’re talking about it on twitter so you suck too!

everyone sucks! we all have luxurious not-really-disabled lives!

[Savannah reblogged this and pointed out it's kind of like "poor people can't have nice things if they're poor." it sort of reminds me of people taking pictures of homeless people who have cell phones and maybe that explains why it feels so hateful. the constant desire to assert that people in a situation that blows are actually having a great time.]

Four

you know, when ted and I talked by email he sort of (very unenthusiastically) apologized for doing the whole YOU’RE SO MILDLY DISABLED thing to Zoe, Julia, and me. I basically spilled my guts to him, I linked him to the page from the passing project where people talk about wanting to hurt themselves or become injured to opt out of “invisible disability.” (I have to make a new version of the passing project at some point because there is so much I left out, particularly in this area, because about three times more people talked about this kind of thing than I had room for.)

I tried to say, hey, I might be jealous of someone with limited speech because they get assumed to need support, while I’m presumed to either not need support or to be able to ask for it! But that is just a feeling coming out of my own shitty circumstances and it’s not VALID. And it’s really hurtful! So it’s not something I need to go around announcing, especially as a way to silence someone with limited speech.

so ted was like…okay. That makes sense. I was jealous too.

yeah, no. here ted was again yesterday, saying that people who can “live independently and self-advocate” (even though he’s talking to someone who doesn’t live independently, well never mind, SHE HAS A BLOG, obviously the most important ADL) have “privilege.”

now, the truth is I don’t really want to argue with this. I have privilege over, like, another lesbian who gets regularly perceived as a lesbian by strangers. for example I’m moving to Cincinnati which I’m told is kind of conservative/homophobic in some places, but for me, that doesn’t matter at all because no one on the street is going to assume that I’m gay. whereas someone who looks “more lesbian” has to think about this stuff when they think about where they’re going to live.

it’s complicated because passing can be tough, and especially in terms of disability, passing can lead to all these real problems of not getting support. being treated like I don’t have a disability, or seeing other people treated that way, actually sickens me, it’s just really horrible. so I’m not sure I’d use the word privilege when it comes to disability? but I’m not sure I wouldn’t either. what I do know is if I was talking to ted’s daughter about disability, I’d be aware that we have way different stigma experiences because she’s more “visibly” disabled, and that would probably be something I was thinking about just as much as I’d be thinking about how best to listen to/communicate with someone who has more limited speech and uses AAC.

but no one is talking to ted’s daughter! we’re talking to ted. so please someone explain how this is relevant.

different experience of stigma DOES matter, but I don’t think it means such a clear-cut, huge different in privilege that any non-disabled person needs to be telling disabled people about it over and over. or like going on his Twitter (seriously is he a high school girl??) and posting about how we’re “ignoring our privilege.” what does that even mean? what would not ignoring our privilege look like? do we have to start every post/comment we make with a little checklist of our privilege over ted’s daughter (as far as we can tell, since we’ve never met her, and like I said these things are far from clear-cut)?

now, here’s what I think. ted, despite being aware of what privilege means from a social justice standpoint, isn’t actually using it that way. ted just means that he thinks we have it easier than his daughter. which, as I said, is totally fine, people play those little games in their head and resent other people all the time for having what they think are easier lives. it’s when you decide that those feelings/games actually represent FACTS or are somehow political that…you become a huge fail.

imagine if I thought it was relevant whenever I argued with someone to be like, “You’re straight! You’re a man! You’re better-looking than I am! You’re from England, I wish I was from England, so you’re PRIVILEGED! Your parents sound like more fun than my parents are! STOP IGNORING YOUR PRIVILEGE.” now obviously in some ways this person is more privileged than me and in other, non-privilege-related ways they may also have a more fun life than I do, but like, this isn’t related to what we’re saying! also what if their parents aren’t more fun than mine are or they don’t feel like they are? aren’t I just making them feel upset and playing this weird game with them for no reason?

not only is ted saying all these kind of nasty and insensitive things about how great he thinks other disabled people have it, but he actually seems angry that we either choose not to respond or point out he is being ridiculous? like, he’s personally offended?

this really hurts because I am personally offended by being told I have it great and I very sincerely and unguardedly tried to explain this to him. and he was kind of like “I guess I don’t know as many diverse pwds as I should” or some other half-apology. but I would say it’s not just that he doesn’t know a lot of diverse pwds, but that his understanding of disability is really simple and flat.

his daughter is disabled and has a hard time, so therefore she has it the worst. even though she’s on the unified sports team for the most independent kids. even though she can walk and run. even though she can use AAC and can use some speech. even though she doesn’t look different like a lot of kids with brain formation conditions (like microcephaly and lissencephaly) do and therefore experiences less stigma in that area. keep in mind there’s no way I’d ever want to have this kind of contest with anyone, but there are plenty of ways that ANYONE has it better than someone else. his daughter is really disabled, he knows that because he knows her, so therefore he categorizes her disability as real/severe/significant and the rest of us who he disagrees with, or who have abilities he wishes his daughter had, are in the only other category he knows of, which basically amounts to “not real.”

what if we were all really disabled?

what if we all just looked different from each other, some people looked like conventionally cute kids and other people had different-shaped faces and heads or different facial features; what if some people could talk and some people could talk a little and some people could talk sometimes and some people could only say one word or no words; what if some of us could live on our own and some could but ended up hungry and unwashed and some people would die if they lived on their own; and what if some of us could stand up for ourselves in school and fight back if someone hurt us and some of us could write in a blog and some of us could give a speech and some of us were seen as fucking geniuses/miracles because we “made a full recovery,” but didn’t even have the “self-advocacy” to say no to unwanted sex because we were too scared or well-trained; and what if a lot of us had all these predictions made about us when we were kids, he will never type on a keyboard, she will never drive, she will never go to college, he will use a wheelchair, she will have seizures, he will never live on his own, and to some extent it doesn’t MATTER what we went on to do anyway because we still were kids who were talked about that way and when you make decisions about a kid you don’t know what they will do, if someone tells you that stuff about the kid, you accept it—so we live with that anyway. What if all of these people were disabled?

I worry, precisely because ted’s daughter, still very young, is gaining skills that were not predicted and is very conventionally normal-looking, that someday people will try and tell her she is not really disabled. and he has set himself up to be totally blindsided by that because he used to say that to other people, and he doesn’t understand why it is wrong.

Five

from my favorite story:

Lupin looked down at him with soft eyes. "He's hanging in there. Between the nightmares and the Dementors and the Death Eater attacks-- but Voldemort can't take Harry out. No matter how much he throws at him, Harry always pulls through."

"The Boy Who Lives and Lives," Neville echoed weakly, because that's what the Prophet was calling him now.

Lupin shook his head angrily. "The damn Prophet. Only a Qwik-Quotes Quill would call it living."