Posted on Thursday, 17 December 2015 Source brevoortformspring Via brightcoat

brightcoat:

andrewhickeywriter:

sonnetscrewdriver:

andrewhickeywriter:

brevoortformspring:

I’m sorry that you feel that way, but you must realize that I reblogged Jordan’s articulate and well-reasoned reply to you yesterday, so you know where I stand on this conflict.

Just to add to this as an autistic person who doesn’t just go around harassing writers and editors on Tumblr anonymously…

The original joke in the Deadpool issue, as described, is mildly irritating, but on a scale of 0 to Autism Speaks fundraising campaign it’s no more than a 1. Not “hateful”, just a bit clueless.

Mr White’s response to the original questioning was, again, a little bit clueless, but he admitted this himself – he doesn’t know much about autism, or autism rights. That, also, is not hatred.

Mr White’s use of person-first language is unfortunate, but again not hatred. Person-first language is widely regarded as being more respectful. The fact that Mr White was unaware that many autistic people do not like person-first language is, again ignorance, not hatred.

Yes, no doubt he could do better on these issues, but on a list of reasons to boycott Marvel “one freelance writer used person-first language about autistic people” ranks about with, say, “there hasn’t yet been a Fin Fang Foom film in the MCU”.

What’s ‘person-first language’?

For best results, please imagine me tugging your sleeve as I ask this.

Person-first language is when you talk about someone with an illness or disability and say “a person with”, so for example “a person with a visual impairment”, “a person with schizophrenia”, “a person with autism”, rather than “a blind person”, “a schizophrenic person” or “an autistic person”.

The thinking behind person-first language is that when you use adjective-first language you often end up eliding the word “person” altogether, and saying “a schizophrenic” or “an autistic”, and that that in turn makes one forget the humanity of the people one is talking about. The argument is also made that one would not say, eg, “a cancerous person”, and so one shouldn’t use the adjective to describe something someone is, rather than something someone has. And also, in many cases, the most common adjectival form of the condition can be one that’s used as an insult, so you wouldn’t say “a spastic person”, you’d say “a person with cerebral palsy”.

The counterargument is that for many of us, our condition is part of who we are, and that in the same way one wouldn’t refer to “a person with blackness“, or “a person with lesbianism”, because one’s skin colour or sexuality are not something other and separate from oneself, in the same way autism, for example, is not something removable, and so shouldn’t be talked about in the same way we talk about cancer. Along with that is a perception that person-first language is patronising, because no-one should need to be reminded that people with disabilities are people.

Note there though that I said “people with disabilities”. The thing is that different disability and illness communities see the issue in different ways, and those communities aren’t uniform. The autistic self-advocacy community, which is what I’m most familiar with, tends to prefer adjective-first, but it’s not a clean 100% preference – more like 70% adjective-first, 20% person-first, 10% don’t care, as I recall (been a while since I looked at the research). The community of parents of autistic children on the other hand prefer person-first language by an overwhelming majority (which is one of the many reasons that autistic self-advocates get annoyed by the parenting groups which claim to speak for their autistic children, because those groups don’t listen to autistic people even on very simple things like this).

So it really does depend on which groups you’re talking about. I prefer adjective-first myself, but that’s because I prefer it for autism and my legally-blind wife prefers it for visual impairments. Other groups go the other way.

And the important thing is that person-first language was drilled into everyone in mental health services, disability services and so on, at least in the UK and I believe elsewhere, from about 1990ish onwards. Certainly when I was volunteering with people with learning disabilities in the mid-90s, when I was briefly working with them professionally in the early 2000s, and when I worked on a psych ward in the mid-late 2000s, person-first language was the way you had to talk about patients or clients.

So anyone using person-first language, unless (as with the parents-of-autistic-children advocates) there’s a very good reason for them to know better about their specific case, is someone who should be presumed to be making a good-faith effort to be respectful. It may be a patronising effort, or one that misunderstands the nature of the condition they’re talking about, but it tends to be used by people who have been told that this is how you act respectfully. It is, at worst, evidence of ignorance, not hatred or malice.

I’m a person whose autism/aspergers/neurodivergence operates in such a way as to be a discrete burden and impediment. I don’t consider it part of my personality, and as a result I tremendously prefer person-first language. I’d rather be rid of my ADHD and autism altogether.

So you know. It’s not even REMOTELY clear-cut and person-first language is by no means inherently hateful.