erikahammerschmidt:

Been noticing a certain cycle here, regarding changes in the “acceptability” of various ableist slurs.

I have various forms of neurodivergence, but none that are classified as either intellectual disability or psychosis, which are the subjects of most of the insults I’m talking about here. So I don’t feel that it’s my place to express any real solid opinion on this.

But I think it’s important for someone who’s been here a while, and seen this cycle happen before, to at least point it out.

It seems to go like this:

1. People start getting pretty comfortable using stuff like the R-slur (r—-d, the one that references intellectual disability) as a general insult for anything and everything they don’t like.
2. Others get uncomfortable with this and start announcing how this isn’t acceptable. These statements may also discourage other slurs that are around the same level of perceived offensiveness, including those aimed at people with psychosis: ps—o, del–u, etc. (I’m censoring all the slurs in this post as best I can. This isn’t because I consider them all equal. It’s because I don’t have a clearly decided opinion on which ones are worst, or feel that it’s even really my place to have that opinion.)
3. People begin to argue that, if those words are unacceptable, then logically any insult based on calling someone low-intelligence or mentally-ill must also be unacceptable. This leads to further thinkpieces on how more and more words should be treated as ableist slurs and avoided completely. This is where a whole bunch of much more common insults enter the fray: st–id, mo–n, id–t, d–b, cr–y, ins–e, and anything else that can be taken as a synonym for any of that.
4. Some people begin to complain that they are running out of words they can use. Debate begins over which words can be agreed upon as acceptable, if your goal is to criticize someone for making a careless bad decision.
5. Debate begins over whether such criticism is ever acceptable. Some people will argue that careless bad decisions should be treated sympathetically regardless of whether or not they resulted from a known mental disability, and criticism should be reserved for intentional bad decisions. Debate may even continue into where exactly to draw the line between intentional evil and accidental negligence, or whether either of those can be entirely separated from the possibility of a mental health cause.
6. People begin, en masse, to give up on the whole argument, and just go on using the words that come most easily to them.
7. In some cases, those words are the ones that started the cycle in the beginning, and therefore it starts over again at phase 1.

Now, again. I’m not in a position to reclaim any of these slurs, nor do I want to. I’m still trying to figure out for myself what words I personally find comfortable to use– it has fluctuated over the years, believe me, and is very far from being pinned down comfortably anywhere.

So I do not consider it my business to make a statement on what part of this cycle is the worst, or exactly where it ought to stop.

I’d guess, if there’s a way to stop the cycle, it’ll probably involve some discussion of why words are offensive– how it’s based on both past and current usage, not just origin or literal meaning– and how that may form a basis for where to draw a line. But I very much doubt there’ll ever be a total consensus on that line-drawing point.

However… I do think, at least, we can mostly agree that it being a cycle is a bad thing?

And so it’s probably worth thinking about where it’s likely to go, when we see the beginning phases of it starting up again, like they are now.

I don’t know. Just a thought. Others can start their own discussions off from here, much better than I can.

Yet again. Sigh.

My own views haven’t changed much since the last cycle. I do still feel that there cannot ever be a fully satisfactory answer to the question “where is the line between ableist slurs and acceptable insults for genuinely bad people.”

But in general I’ve been trying to just live by the policy of “don’t insult people. don’t use words for categories of bad people. do call out harmful decisions… but do it by pointing out the harm they do, not by attaching them to labels for types of people who deserve to be mocked or demonized.”

I have not always been successful, because it is sometimes extremely hard to communicate in this world if you won’t engage with name-calling of any kind.

but I still think the attempt is worthwhile. “You are doing (bad verb)” is more likely to change someone’s behavior than “you are (bad noun).”