cross-posted from: https://discuss.divergentparenting.space/post/29407
Take a moment and imagine that someone calls you disabled. Ask yourself, do you agree or disagree? What feelings come up for you? Based on your lived experiences, like your interactions with family, teachers, doctors, friends, and society more generally, how has your relationship with the concept of disability been shaped?\n > \n > Even though many governmental organizations officially recognize autism as a disability, this doesn’t mean that all autistic individuals identify as being disabled. Members of the autistic community have such varied lived experiences, which contributes to whether we each identify as being disabled or not. Moreover, how we relate to the concept of disability differs as well.
Your claim about left-handedness sounded pretty weird to me, so I looked it up, and
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-23988352
Surprise, surprise, it turns out that it’s around the same degree of bad science as the people who muddy the facts around transgender people to deny them healthcare.
You have assumed that being atypical is intrinsically negative to the point that you don’t demand the right for you to have equal dignity, rather than demanding a bigoted society that pushes you down to stop mistreating you, you have assumed that the solution to your woes is to no longer being different, as if the solution to racism was people of color painting their skin white.
You are torturing yourself in your own pit of self pity, and I have no respect nor compassion for that.
That is what I said. I ascribed no value to being atypical. That’s you and it might reveal what you think.
I read your link and it’s basically like “I mean that was bad then, this is now. I don’t have any data to prove it, but left handed people totes don’t die younger” C’mon, that’s a ridiculous article that’s all conjecture about how it used to true before that left handed people died young, but now it’s totally different. They don’t provide any hard evidence that it’s different, but it totally is!
Let’s say you’re right because honestly I don’t feel like arguing this point, but it’s not my greater point at all. Let’s say that left-handed people suffer no physical afflictions from being left-handed. Very cool, except every left handed person I know has suffered from being left handed and had to “mask” and accommodate the world being right handed. My point is that realistically, you cannot be accommodated all the time 24/7. It’s all great and shit to say that you should be accommodated, but in reality that doesn’t happen. Sometimes it doesn’t happen because people are callus but sometimes it doesn’t happen because it’s not actually a thing that is possible.
For example, realistically when I was in grade school and the internet didn’t exist how was someone going to accommodate my visual and auditory processing issues? When I was in college, most of the US had dial up and smartphones weren’t ubiquitous. How was I supposed to be accommodated and also lead an independent life because those were my choices. Being shadowed by an able bodied person or sucking it up. There was no actual way for me to be accommodated beyond the experimental therapies that I have no fucking idea how my mom found before the age of the internet.
Being typical is easier. If you are 7ft it sucks. if you are 3ft and an adult it sucks. The world is not made for you. And you have to pay in ever time or money to get a great many things that other people effortlessly get. I would wish that on my kid. I don’t care whatever fucking super power you think she’ll get. I want her to spent her time at the park with her friends instead of at doctor’s offices. I want her to hang to go to summer camp without me worrying if whatever aid will quit and then she’ll have to come home. I want to spend my money to sent her to her fancy ass school and not worry that they’ll tell me that she can’t have the best education because she’s too much trouble and she can go to the public school where she’ll be accommodated all day long and isolated and miss out on so much.
Fuck that. I want my kid to be typical. I don’t want her to need any kind of accommodation. I don’t even want her to need glasses or braces or any other acceptable kind of accommodation because that’s living life a little harder and what parent wants that for their kid? That’s my point. I don’t want it to be harder. And when you need accommodation, it’s harder. Even something as minor as needing glasses for the rest of your life is harder than never needing them at all. If you can’t understand that point, then you’re just delusional.