It might just be my use case. I shop for 7 people and it’s a lot of unpaid labour to do it myself.

This is a really great article for an underreported problem. (The system, not the kids!) Thanks for posting!

ABA, which the article suggests, is also inhumane.

It’s exhausting to be the research assistant for people who aren’t willing to put in the work. (Not saying that that’s OP.) It’s more within my capacity to point out where someone is making a gaffe and have them do the work to figure out why. I’ve been internetting since Telnet days and nothing has changed: people aren’t interested in sources you find for them, esp. on highly charged topics like this.

Both are about impact vs intent. Both are about harm. I’m sorry you can’t see that.

If I accidentally spill hot coffee on you and say that it was an accident, you’re still going to be upset. You’d be more upset if I said I did it on purpose, but let’s not pretend that being offensive accidentally is okay.

Have you heard the expression “white lies and black truths”? The intent behind “simply stating a fact” can indeed be hurtful.

But I really don’t think we’re going to run out of words. There’s at least a half million in English, and even counting obscure ableist terms, we’re talking about maybe thirty. Pretty small percentage.

But what’s great about this is finding new and creative ways to express yourself! “My points fell on rocky ground” — Biblical allusion. “They believed me as if I were Cassandra” - Greek. “My words fell on them like the sun under an umbrella.” If you want to keep the synecdoche, “Their ears weren’t ready to hear me”. There’s opportunities to be really creative and poetic if you’re interested in language as rhetoric!

Colloquially, nobody will blink at “They refused to listen” or “It was like I was talking to a tree”.

It’s really not that many words. If you google ableist terms, you’ll find maybe what, ten? I think it’s reasonable to stop using ten words. What you’re saying by refusing to do so is that you don’t think that some people or groups deserve respect.

Nobody is asking you to protest, or to write letters, change your diet, change what you do with your free time, change your job… Just stop using a few words. Hell, I’d be happy if you just considered cutting some words out of your vocabulary. If you’re at least willing to think about it, I think that’s reasonable. :)

If you fully support trans rights, then you’ll know that policies like this discourage kids from coming out and leads to unsafe schools. If a kid tells their parents, then it doesn’t matter what a school does. If a kid doesn’t, however, that means it’s not safe to do so. And I can guarantee you that a school with this policy will call home as soon as a child tries to use a different name/pronoun. The point of this policy is to out trans kids and discourage trans folks from coming out in the first place.

Corporations acting all parentally “disappointed” because they were too cheap to properly code it isn’t okay.

Yep, looks legit.