Ableism Tw - Tumblr Posts
hey, this is all /not mad, but could people please start tagging genders that use “freak”, such as -freak genders as something such as “fr slur”, or (preferably) try to find alternative wording?
freak is an ableist and intersexist slur, and it’s honestly rather triggering to me and others i know. please correctly trigger tag it if you must use it, thank you
(im suggesting “fr slur” instead of “f slur” since the latter is commonly used to tw for the queer targeted f slur)
the thing that gets me the most about ableism against pd’s is that ppl will be like “these disorders make you an ASSHOLE!!!!” and then turn around and pretend that other disorders can’t and don’t make you act shitty.
depression and anxiety can make you irritable and snappy. they can cause you to refuse to listen to people and to be distant and withdrawn. they can cause you to seem angry, bitchy, rude, uncaring, etc.
ptsd causes an array of difficulties in forming meaningful relationships. it pretty much shakes up your entire worldview and sense of self a lot of the time. ptsd can cause you to get angry often. it can cause you to yell and scream. it can cause you to withdraw from others, run away, or cut them out. it can cause general changes in demeanor and more cynical worldviews. it can make you seem grouchy, negative, explosive, impolite, difficult, needy, controlling, etc.
and yet when people with personality disorders have symptoms of that nature, suddenly we are irredeemable monsters. when it’s npd, bpd, hpd, or aspd instead of ptsd or depression and anxiety, people suddenly and magically lose the ability to be understanding.
mental illness is an explanation, not an excuse. i firmly believe that. hurting others is never justified simply because you have any disorder.
but if you can be patient with people who have depression, anxiety, ptsd, ocd, or any other more well understood mental illness, you can be patient with us.
I wrote some poetry about autism when I was younger but now looking back on it I don't think I really liked acknowledging the fact that I was disabled by my autism. If anything I was desperate to prove how undisabled I am and now that I'm older and having more frequent meltdowns I'm starting to think I have some sort of complex around accepting the fact that I am in fact developmentally disabled
I wrote some poetry about autism when I was younger but now looking back on it I don't think I really liked acknowledging the fact that I was disabled by my autism. If anything I was desperate to prove how undisabled I am and now that I'm older and having more frequent meltdowns I'm starting to think I have some sort of complex around accepting the fact that I am in fact developmentally disabled
I wrote some poetry about autism when I was younger but now looking back on it I don't think I really liked acknowledging the fact that I was disabled by my autism. If anything I was desperate to prove how undisabled I am and now that I'm older and having more frequent meltdowns I'm starting to think I have some sort of complex around accepting the fact that I am in fact developmentally disabled
Probably has some sort of fugly face mutation lmao
imagine scraping at the bottom of the barrel for somebody you don't even know lol
; I actually didn't think about this ... I suppose I used the phrase because people around me used it, and I never realised how damn ableist it was. Will not be using it again !! Thank you for the educating, dear poster !! /gen
Reminder from someone with actual literal brain damage from a brain injury to stop fucking using "brain damage" and "brain injuries" as a means of describing someone whose opinions you don't like or deem as stupid.
It's ableist and offensive as fuck, and for some reason a lot of leftist people think it's okay to use. I've seen posts replying to right wing racists calling them "brain damaged if you believe this" and "do you have a brain injury? do you not understand X?". Just now I saw a beautiful post about fat people throughout history that was absolutely ruined by opening with "How do we break it to boomers with actual brain damage and nostalgic brainrot, and the 'tradwife' thirsting Andrew Tate fans..." before continuing to say that fat people existed throughout history.
Brain damage does not make you racist. A brain injury doesn't make you stupid, or fatphobic, or unaware of history and politics. Stop fucking using my disability as a catch all to describe people you think are shitty. Y'all use it like it's a replacement for how people used to use the R-slur, which shows you learned absolutely nothing about why the R-slur was wrong to use and decided to throw in other disabilities instead. Fuck off and stop doing it.
(And don't do it with other disabilities either, because I know y'all do.)
I know a lot of people with brain injuries. They're smart, and funny, and compassionate. They learn about the world and care about social issues and wish they could go to protests if their disability won't allow them to. Are there right wing people with brain injuries? Sure, absolutely. But they are not right wing because they have a brain injury, and using any disability as an insult is still fucking ableist.
Tldr - stop using brain damage and brain injury as an insult. It's ableist and incredibly offensive.
Love, your local brain injured/brain damaged pal
I'm wishing a very Happy Pride Month to all the queer people who:
are disabled
are chronically ill
can't celebrate for health reasons
disability gets in the way of their gender representation
disability got in the way of a relationship
don't have anyone to celebrate with
have homophobic caretakers
Happy Pride Month to all disabled queer people
; what really pisses on my parade is when people try to act all high and smarty party by saying " yeah well YOU did this that one time !! We're basically the same and you're no better than me !! " in response to being called out on being ableist. Because while I am not saying I am not even the slightest ableist, ( as that'd be ridiculous, I've spent the entirety of my life being raised in an ableist environment with daily ableism that little ol me might not even fucking notice being taught to me, and younger me sure didn't. Like hey I'll admit I said shit like that because I was taught it was okay, I'm not saying I'm squeaky clean. And I apologize to anyone I've hurt in my stupidity ) the difference is you don't even care, and can't be bothered to begin unlearning the ableism so heavily integrated into our society and into your life, while I and many others AM trying actively to do that. You're ableist now by choice, you've realised your ableist ideologies and have done fuck all to change them !! That's the difference between you and me. ( pt: That's the difference between you and me :end pt ). You don't care because you've been taught not too and now can't be bothered to enact the magical concept of self education and personal thought, I'm teaching myself to be a better person to those around me. Please know the difference before deflecting " call outs " by turning it on the other person, because we're focusing on YOU right now and what YOU'RE doing. Thanks.
Since the r-slur is making a comeback (you know, the word that starts with R, has six letters, and ends in D), I'm gonna make a little PSA:
Yes, it's an ableist slur.
Terms like "asshat," "head-up-ass," "up their own ass," and "high on their own farts" exist. There's also words like crap, dogshit, half-assed, assclown, and chucklefuck. And on the less vulgar side, there are terms like ridiculous, nonsense, train wreck, pointless, insipid, self-absorbed, pretentious, annoying, boring, contemptible, vile, and disgusting.
Substituting words like restarted, poptarted, brain damaged, smoothbrain, etc. is still ableist, because either 1. you obviously still mean the r-word, or 2. you're still using disability as an insult.
You can tell I’m doing good because I’m at a place where I’m remembering how my parents used the r-slur so frequently that I thought it meant just meant stupid and was using the word before I even knew a single swear.
You can also tell I’m doing good because I’m now thinking about how my parents most certainly were not living with that assumption yet very frequently called me and my siblings the r-slur and “special”.
Why does that actually sound like something that would happen? Because something like that has to have happened at some point.
A TikToker faked being blind and tried to avoid being canceled by making up that he had a mental disorder that makes him believe that he’s blind.
No fucking way yall are suddenly meatriding Urbanspook because he did the bare fucking minimum.
"Oh yeah he did use CSA and Bestiality for shock value/fetish projection in his series, threw temper tantrums over anyone who criticized it, and used 'Autistic' as an insult, but he hasn't touched kids like Alex did and therefore he's a swell guy!"
No actual fucking way.
Mid-continuum VS. Median
Disclaimer: This is a post covering a deep dive of archived events that took place in the past. DO NOT harass or send hate towards anyone mentioned.
Introduction
Mid-continuum was an early label created on the Internet sometime in 1996 by a plural named Vickis. Many individuals, both dissociative and non-dissociative, felt drawn to this term and it became quite popular. Unfortunately, it also ended up grabbing the attention of the anti-DID/OSDD movement. Later in the 2000′s, an anti-DID/OSDD organization coined the term median to replace mid-continuum. Median became more popularized, and mid-continuum subsequently fell out of usage. This post will be going over what I discovered while deep diving Internet archives regarding this subject.
The Precursor to Mid-continuum
In 1997 and earlier, many of the DID-focused websites at the time, such as Astraea’s Web, were spreading around a psychological model known as the dissociative spectrum (or continuum). This older model was conceptualized by Braun in 1988. His model suggested that dissociation lay on a continuum from normal experiences (daydreaming, zoning out, etc.) all the way to polyfragmented DID.
Archive of article by Joan A. Turkus, M.D. (1997)
Proof that this article was shared on Astraea’s Web.
Note for readers: Sources on this post do not reflect up-to-date research and treatment on dissociative disorders.
What was the Mid-continuum?
1. It was based off of the psychological model.
At the time, many individuals in the dissociative community felt drawn to Braun’s dissociative continuum model. One individual in particular, named Vickis, came up with a term for people who identified somewhere in the middle of this continuum. They called it mid-continuum dissociation or just mid-continuum for short. They called those who identified under the label mid-continuum dissociatives. Vickis eventually created a webpage dedicated to this concept called the Wonderful World of the MidContinuum.
2. It was created for dissociative folks.
It was sometime in 1997 when Vickis announced their new webpage to alt.support.dissociation, a Usenet group that was created for people with dissociative disorders. In their message, they stated that mid-continuum folks were dissociative folks who did not fit all of the DID criteria.
You can find an archive of this message here.
You can find an archive of the mid-continuum webpage here.
On their webpage, Vickis explained that mid-continuum was a label for anyone who felt like they had dissociated parts and fell somewhere in the middle on the dissociative continuum model. A quote from the homepage:
“Everyone dissociates. At one end of the dissociative continuum is ‘normal’ or ‘common’ dissociation that nearly everyone engages in[…] At the other end are the behaviors that characterize ‘classical’ multiples, who may have large numbers of very distinct insiders with little internal communication, serious difficulties with time loss, amnesia, and so on.
Between these two extremes, there is a lot of gray. Ranging from having different ‘roles’ that you live out in different situations, to having an ‘inner child’ or ‘inner children’ with varying degrees of separateness, to having ‘ego states,’ ‘parts’ or ‘fragments’ that don’t seem to be whole people, to having some but not all of the diagnostic criteria for what is now known as DID[…]”
3. It was created out of respect for folks with DID.
At the time of mid-continuum’s coinage, the DID diagnosis was still usually called MPD or multiplicity in the online dissociative community. Several people, including Vickis, believed that it was disrespectful to call themselves multiple if they didn’t have DID. This seemed to be another reason why Vickis coined the mid-continuum. They believed that calling their own experiences multiplicity would minimize the struggles of those who experienced DID.
From their essay on the subject (archive here):
“[…] someone elsewhere in this thread said something like ‘I don’t want to call myself multiple because I don’t want to minimize the sufferings of those who are really multiple’. And I can really relate to that. That’s why I say I’m not-quite-multiple usually. Because I don’t lose time and never have, I can’t possibly know what that’s like… I don’t have barriers that prevent communication between parts… I don’t have the struggles that people who are further down the continuum from me have, and I would never want to minimize their issues by claiming that my own are the same.”
4. Mid-continuum folks often had OSDD.
A lot of Vickis’ writing on the mid-continuum reminds me of OSDD (formerly DDNOS). It makes me wonder why they did not mention it more. The only mention I could find was made in 1999, where Vickis offhandedly expressed that mid-continuum folks usually ended up diagnosed with OSDD if seeking a diagnosis. (X) It’s likely that they didn’t mention it more because there wasn’t a lot of recognition for the disorder back then, and Vickis also seemed to prefer less clinical labels for themself.
The Precursor to Median
Over several years, mid-continuum had gained quite a bit of popularity across the Internet. Many anti-psych websites began to take issue with this due to mid-continuum’s origins. For example, many psych-related words such as DID, alter, and host could be found listed as derogatory to empowered and natural multiples on Dark Personalities. (X) Mid-continuum was unfortunately subjected to this as well. “Since many people feel the idea of a continuum to be inaccurate, many are seeking a new term instead of mid-continuum,” Dark Personalities stated. It wouldn’t be long before some anti-psyches tackled this challenge.
What was Median?
1. It was created to replace mid-continuum.
In 2003, the natural multiplicity organizations Lancers & Pavilion decided to take action. (Read my post on Lancers/Pavilion here.) They stated that it was a mistake for the mid-continuum to be based on psychology and dissociation. (X) Furthermore, they seemed to be a bit perturbed that Vickis believed multiplicity was exclusively caused by trauma. (X) As a way to right what they saw as wrong, they came up with the term median to replace mid-continuum. (X)
On the Pavilion website, Astraea’s Web wrote an essay on the midcontinuum and why they came up with the median label to replace it. You can read that essay here. This excerpt sticks out to me the most:
“It’s important to allow the concept to be inclusive of everyone who fits, regardless of past abuse history or origins, much as is currently being done for ‘multiplicity.’ With its roots in the abuse-dissociation model, midcontinuum is too limiting; it is no longer useful to us. Median creates a certain measure of psychological distance and gives the concept a fresh start, without the dissociative baggage of the past, and embraces all who feel they are more than one.”
To summarize, mid-continuum was a label that was created by dissociative folks for dissociative folks. Non-dissociative anti-psychs decided to replace it because it wasn’t useful or inclusive enough for them, and it was too psychological. That’s why they came up with median.
2. It was created to exclude people with DID/OSDD.
The Lancers/Pavilion did not intend for people with dissociative disorders to use the median label. Their philosophy was that people with DID/OSDD could not actually be plural, multiple, or median. The organizations believed that only “functional” and “non-disordered” individuals could be plural, multiple, or median. If a person with DID/OSDD was able to function up to their standards, then Lancers/Pavilion considered the person to no longer have DID/OSDD.
More can be read here.
And also here.
3. It was meant to be more vague than mid-continuum.
Unlike the mid-continuum, which viewed plurality on a psychologically-backed linear continuum, the organizations presented plurality as a more loose idea. From the archived essay on Pavilion:
“Midcontinuum is helpful, but it’s rather too limiting. One can dispense with the dissociation bits at once, but you’re still left with plurality as a linear continuum, with singlethood at one end and multiplicity at the other. The concept is thus two-dimensional.
It’s probably much more realistic, given social and personal diversity, to think of plurality as a sphere, with a potentially infinite number of points; and, to remember that at different times in one’s life, one may reside at any of those points, or at no fixed abode. Postmodernist notions of identity as fluid and nonlinear may be helpful in understanding this. If you experience yourself as selves, but feel that your others are not independent of yourself, you can probably describe yourself as median.”
Their descriptions of plurality and medianhood are extremely vague and unclear. Due to all of this, it’s no wonder to me that people with DID/OSDD ended up identifying with the concept anyways, despite the organizations’ intentions.
Median & OSDD
Before ending this post, I wanted to mention that I have met many folks with OSDD who have previously identified as median systems due to the misconception that it was a synonym for OSDD. I remember, when I first joined the online community, someone told me that “median system” was actually coined by people with OSDD. As you can read above, this definitely isn’t true. If you have OSDD and you identify as median, that’s fine, but I still occasionally see people spreading misinformation about it which is why I felt that it was important to include this note here!
Sometimes I remember I experienced my first microaggression as an infant and get really upset about it.
Obviously I have no personal memory of the events, but I was at a parent-child class of some sort and when everyone started singing in a group I started crying. I was clearly, in retrospect, overstimulated. When my parents were leaving, they heard another mother say, "What's wrong with that baby?" referring to me, and my dad had to stop my mom from knocking the woman flat.
Anyway, nothing was wrong with "that baby." "That baby" just turned out to be autistic. But knowing people felt that way about me from the beginning does cut pretty deep, even though I'm in my 30s now.
Filming people without their consent is a massive issue of not only privacy but ableism that's been going on for many years.
It started out with filming more visibly disabled people, like high support needs autistic people having meltdowns in public and (especially fat) disabled people literally just using mobility aids, but once that was deemed less acceptable it moved to other things. Filming people acting "weird" in public. Eating weird foods. Falling asleep in weird places. Wearing weird things. Stimming. You get the idea. It's no longer safe to be visibly weird in public and that's an issue for a lot of disabled people. I recently had to lay down on the floor of a department store because I had an ME crash while out shopping. Not only did I have to worry about the normal things like people coming up to ask me if I'm ok, I also had to worry about some video of me at my lowest point, when I'm suffering immensely, being shared around as "haha look at this weird bitch on the floor". It's upsetting. It's scary.
And then there's fakeclaiming. A fun trend where people will film us in public to "prove" there's some kind of huge epidemic of people faking disability. Spoiler alert: there is not. Most of the time the people they film are real disabled people who don't fit into the expected mold for disability, usually service dog teams or people who use mobility aids who don't "look sick". And you would think this trend would be some kind of abled nonsense, but it's not. It's often other disabled people doing the fakeclaiming. Yes, there are some times when it's obvious a service dog isn't trained properly, but other than that, it's damn near impossible to tell if someone is faking a disability, and you're much more likely to target a disabled person than a faker. I'd love to say this trend was new, but it's been going on since the days of "the people of walmart" where many of the people posted were fat mobility aid users, always with the assumption that they used it because they were too fat or lazy to move on their own. In fact, the image of a fat person in a mobility cart has become almost synonymous with "lazy". It's one of the things that drove me to get my own expensive power wheelchair, to avoid the judgmental stares in the grocery store when I was just trying to exist, to avoid the fear of public shame. Even now when I stand up from my chair to walk to the bathroom stall or reach something on a high shelf, I watch the corners of my vision for that telltale phone in the air. I feel like I'm never safe from the judgemental eye of the internet, even when I'm logged off, and I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels that way.
Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram, these places are all great for disabled people, especially those of us without access to the outside world. But it's also become a source of great anxiety for anyone who's uncontrollably "weird", mostly disabled people. Leave us alone, I'm begging you, we just want to go to the fucking grocery store in peace and safety.
Tl;dr
Stop filming people for "acting weird" or "faking a disability" in public. It's ableist, it's invasive, it's creepy, and it's humiliating. People don't exist in public for your amusement and especially not disabled people. You don't know who is disabled and who isn't no matter how many disabled people you've known or how sure you are that the person is faking.
we're not saying people with npd, aspd, ect cant hurt you or abuse you
we're saying disorder =/= abusive
people with npd, bpd, aspd, infact, ANY cluster b disorder CAN abuse you. HOWEVER, having those disorders dosent instantly make you an abuser
dont be abelist.
people with ANY disorder can abuse you. that dosent mean they WILL abuse you. the fact that they have that disorder dosent mean theyre an abuser. it dosent make them abusive. they can be abusive, that dosent mean suddenly every narcissist is evil, suddenly all aspd people are threatening you, all bpd people are rude and abusive. stop throwing around the word abuse like its nothing. stop specifically linking it to personality disorders. thats blatantly abelist.
ihope all cluster bs have a lovely lovely day please ignore the hate and abelism yall are so gorgeous treat yourself to your comfort food
:33 < can we stop with the "oh if youre cringge ? just be yourself !! doont let people judge you !!" speech alterhuman community ? ihave avpd and it really shows yall do not think once about the fact that people could literally be disabled and not able to not let people judge them because yall just assume feeling fear because of judgement is a "silly little thing" and "just being yourself can fix it !!"
:33 < idont care if youre anti or pro endo, if you use "delusional" or "p*ychotic" as an insult towards ANY system, YOU ARE ABELIST. you are singlehandedly showing off youdo NOT care for people with psychosis, youdo NOT care for people on the schizospectrum, and you are ABELIST TOWARDS YOUR OWN COMMUNITY. JUST BECAUSE THEY HAD ALTERS AS A DELUSION OF THEIRS, does NOT GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO BE ABELIST TO THEM. my god, just leave delusional folks alone if youre gonna be uneducated and reality check them.