olennawhitewyne:

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