One of the reasons I really dislike the sort of Everyday-Feminism-esque “don’t use these five words!” model of talking about “discriminatory language” is that it often gives people the impression that that’s what matters the most: which specific words you use. And sure, there are definitely hateful slurs you should avoid, and words with a lot of stigma you should only use in certain contexts… but I think it often misses the forest for the trees in that how people talk about things is usually more important than just what they say. And it means a lot of people who know which words to avoid still promote a lot of oppression or stigma because they don’t question their underlying attitudes.
This is especially common with stuff about ableism/disability stuff, which is an issue where the Internet has given many people the impression that it’s entirely about avoiding certain words. Meanwhile, there are a lot of inherently ableist tendencies on the left (like tendency toward the naturalistic fallacy, and thus automatic suspicion of any technological or medication interventions toward disability and mental illness) that go completely unquestioned and unchallenged by these people. I know very few people with mental illness who care all that much if you call a party or a test “crazy,” but nearly all of them would like to spend more time in activist spaces without hearing some misinformed idiot go on about how the psychiatric medication that saved their lives is “harmful” and “puts us out of touch with our unique selves” and how they should try yoga/crystals/St. John’s Wort instead.*
And honestly I actually shouldn’t get on EF’s case too much because as much as most of their articles make my eyes roll, they actually had a good article recently addressing forms of “everyday ableism” that go beyond just not using words, and that lots of very genuinely well-meaning activisty people miss. Like how many of us just automatically go for the handicapped stall who don’t need it, and what if a physically handicapped person who did entered the bathroom right after us? Or about different ways of making your activist spaces or rallies more accessible to people with various physical or neurological disabilities.
*Not to be confused with people who actually used psychiatric medication and had bad experiences with it
This this this. And this extends to so many topics. Wheres that “trickle-up progressivism” concept that we were talking about a couple weeks back? Where language gets hyper focused on bc its easy to fix in ourselves and feel superior about? And fixing larger problems with bigger consequences is just harder and more demanding?
I honestly dont care if you call me transgendered or a trans all day long, but please help me and my friends keep our healthcare and have bathrooms and not get fired and be protected when doing sex work and not face systemic racism and police brutality and so forth. Like any one of those have a bigger impact.
Like the idea has been you get the language right to show respect to the group youre referring to, and *then more activism would naturally flow from there.* That was the purpose. The language would lead to more. Like the attitude of respecting people’s dignity by using very specific language will trickle through to larger things. But, it hasn’t? We just keep tripping over words.
Sometimes I feel like, in trying to acknowledge microaggressions, we’ve poured way more energy into them than we were previously using to manage them, and done the exact opposite of making them *easier to manage.* Like all of our spoons on tumblr are tangled up now in addressing microaggressions, and then Ive got even less for macroaggressions, and I think this strategy is worth revisiting.
Yup, the frequent updating of what is considered the right language combined with a strong backlash against those who use the wrong language also makes spaces inaccessible to large groups of people, from people who are not used to the constantly learning new words that is standard in academia to people who can’t stand the emotional hostage situation of having to be perfect or get shouted at*.
And honestly, we lose so much more from that than we could possibly gain by enforcing all the right language.
It results in academically minded folk within the movement being considered the most woke when those people are often the least likely to have lived experiences of the worst parts of our oppression and are least likely to come up with real solutions that tackle systematic problems.
(*And yeah, ‘keep perfect track of the changing names and pronouns of 3 dozen people in the local radical queer community without a learning curve’ can create that pressure too. Which is definitely not happening everywhere or all the time but it’s something I’ve seen some queer communities do.)
