[Courtney] Hello everyone and welcome back.

My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple.

And we are back again for maybe the round of ableist language that I am most afraid to talk about.

I’ve been putting off this episode for literal years as well as several weeks.

[Royce] Hence why this became part three.

[Courtney] [Sighs] It’s important though.

And I have thoughts and stories and feelings.

And so we’re just gonna come out of the gate with the promised conversation about phobia.

Especially in the Queer Community, we use -phobia as a suffix to describe bigotry and hatred against us.

We say things like homophobic, transphobic, acephobic, aphobic.

These are words that we use a lot because they are very useful for identifying a very specific type of discrimination.

There are some disability thinkers who believe that using -phobia as a suffix for meaning any kind of hatred is ableist and that we should not use it.

And I want to talk about a specific story with hopefully as few pinpointable personal details as possible.

I don’t want a single person speculating on who any of the people in this might have been.

If you know any of the people involved, just leave them alone.

[Courtney] The individual parties here are not the problem or the purpose for sharing this.

It’s the overall thinking behind language and the way we talk to each other and the way we treat each other.

So I obviously use words like acephobic, homophobic, transphobic.

Even in terms of like racism, I have used xenophobic, especially when talking about our current political climate and our current administration.

These are words that I do find politically very useful.

Especially, especially in the Ace and Aro Communities, when we’re talking about things like acephobia, arophobia, when we’re not talking within our own individual specific niche communities, if we’re trying to get outside of the A-spec Community and talk to other people and educate them about the issues we have, saying something like acephobia in a similar context that you might say homophobia – which is admittedly a discrimination that far more of the general public have at least heard of – being able to draw that parallel to something that is a more familiar phenomenon is useful.

[Courtney] I had been privy to the fact, prior to the events of this story, that there are some disability advocates who prefer to not use the suffix of -phobia at all.

One alternative that has been proposed is to instead use -misia as a suffix.

So instead of saying, for example, acephobia, some prefer to say acemisia.

The logic being: -phobia has a connotation of mental health, a diagnosis, psychiatric disabilities, whereas misia, instead of, you know, generally fear and a diagnosable type of fear, misia means hatred.

So some people will make the case that it’s more accurate.

It’s literally more accurate to say -misia than -phobia anyway, and I see -phobia as being ableist as a suffix to use when you aren’t literally talking about somebody’s phobia.

I had seen these arguments, and I’ve had conversations with people who make these arguments that have been very interesting to me.

I personally never thought the cases were strong enough that it was language that I was going to adopt myself.

[Courtney] But I think if you even go to maybe some of the earlier episodes of The Ace Couple podcast, I am sure that I have mentioned, in talking about disability and ableist language, that I have even thrown out there, if you’re ever talking to someone and you see someone use -misia as a suffix, this is what it means.

This is why they’re using it.

Because even if I don’t use it myself, I think it is an important skill as a communicator, as an activist, as an advocate, as just a member of a community to be able to communicate with a variety of people.

That’s something that is important to me and is always going to be important to me.

So I think it’s good to know that some people use this language and why they do.

And I want more people listening to me as a voice within the community and say, “Oh, maybe I didn’t know that.

I’ve never seen someone use -misia as a suffix.” Maybe then a couple months down the line, if they see someone use that word, they at least know what it means.

So you have some kind of common ground to observe that conversation and see what that person has to say.

[Royce] Yeah, and -misia getting more common in certain circles of people online can be a little– a little confusing for native English speakers, or at least American English speakers – I can’t speak for the other predominantly English-speaking countries.

But we don’t hear a lot of -misia as a suffix over here.

We do hear miso- as a prefix, which is the same underlying source.

[Courtney] It took me a couple months after becoming privy to this conversation before I realized what was bothering me so much about -misia as a suffix, and that was exactly what I figured out.

Because to me, I was like, okay, so homomisia, transmisia.

I was like, a lot of people aren’t going to know what that means if they hear that word out in the wild.

That does not inherently mean it is a bad alternative because any change in language, like, has to start somewhere.

And there are words that even 20, 30 years ago were a lot more common that you almost never hear anymore because of disability justice becoming a little more common in the public consciousness.

So I never want to write something off just because it’s fringe immediately.

[Royce] Yeah.

It’s– [Courtney] So, I was trying to figure, why is this not sitting right with me?

And one day it just kind of clicked.

I was like, we don’t have any words I can think of that uses -misia as a suffix, but we have misogyny, we have misandry, we have misanthrope.

Like we have miso- as a– or as a prefix.

And I spent a long time trying to find any commonly used word in the English language that uses -misia as a suffix.

And I could not find one after actively searching for it for a while.

[Royce] Yeah.

And it’s because the underlying Latin or Greek root has manifested itself primarily in English as a prefix rather than a suffix.

And you mentioned a few there.

Misophonia is another one.

[Courtney] Yes.

And we’re gonna get to that.

That’s, that’s going to come up in my personal feelings about this story I’m prefacing all of this for.

So this is all something that I had had privately, just assessing my own language, assessing the conversations I was observing.

Because the most important thing about communication at the end of the day, in any language, in any medium, is to be able to convey and understand ideas.

That is the point of communication.

That doesn’t always mean that the lowest common denominator for a word that will be universally understood is always going to be the right answer.

But thought experiments I had with myself about, okay, what would it look like if I did change every suffix of phobia to misia?

Well, I do actually have conversations with people in real life quite frequently about asexuality, about disability, about lots of social and political issues that I care about that are near and dear to me.

And I have, now very good friends, extremely good friends I talk to, I see in person every single day, who before meeting us didn’t know really anything about asexuality.

[Courtney] And if I, right off the bat, still in a new enough conversation that they were not comfortable asking us, like, really deep questions about sexuality, which is fine, sometimes there’s a learning curve and sometimes you want to get to a certain level of relationship before you start asking those personal questions.

I get that.

But sometimes I would need to talk about, you know, someone said or did something extremely acephobic and I’m upset about it today and here’s why.

And if I went to this friend of mine and just someone who didn’t even know that ace was short for asexual yet, as an example, and I was like, “Man, all the acemisia I’m facing today–” That person’s gone.

That– All of a sudden I have said a word that every element of that word is so far outside of the realm of their experience that now we can’t even continue the conversation without now I need to break down what ace means, and I have to break down what -misia means and why I’m saying it.

Whereas like, this is an allosexual queer person I’m talking to, if I say, “Yeah, ace is short for asexual, and we face a lot of acephobia.” All of a sudden [snaps fingers] they are there.

[Courtney] They have a frame of reference.

They have personal experience that they can draw parallel to.

It is very useful language.

And in the grand scheme of like all of the outspoken ace activists out there, at least the ones with very large followings, almost everybody says acephobia.

Almost everyone.

But I have not seen almost everyone harassed for using that word.

I have seen some people use the fact that she uses the word acephobia to try to discredit Yasmin Benoit, very prominent Black ace activist.

And then people have come for me personally, kind of The Ace Couple as a package, but mostly me.

That’s another really interesting thing that happens online.

I personally have gotten like hate threads about things I have said that Royce’s name never comes up in.

Which is really interesting because you actually, on the whole, I would say probably are a little more lax about some of your language rules and you come to a decision on how you feel about language probably quicker than I do.

Like I will sit on these things for months and months and months thinking about it.

[Royce] Yeah, both of those statements are true.

[Courtney] And so like, in a– in a, you know, last episode we were talking about stupid as a word.

You use that word a lot more often than I do.

I haven’t personally seen anyone go, “Royce from The Ace Couple podcast is so ableist because they use the word stupid.” And we both use -phobia as a suffix, and yet I am the one that I have seen, many occasions, people say, “Courtney from The Ace Couple podcast is so ableist, you should not listen to them.

She’s a terrible disability activist because she says acephobia, because she says transphobia.” So I’ll be extremely honest, there is a huge amount of misogyny behind that.

I do think there is a little bit of internalized ableism about it.

Racism is always going to be an enormous factor anytime you are holding individuals to exceptionally high standards that are not being set for the general population.

Because this was all happening during a period of time where I had said, not only in the podcast, on social media, back when we were still doing social media, I had mentioned, yeah, if you do ever encounter a disability advocate who’s using acemisia, I want you to know what they’re saying.

I want you to understand.

So that you can engage with that conversation.

[Courtney] So I was privy to this, I had come to my own conclusion and my own decision, but I was still trying to amplify the voices of people who were using this language.

And yet, white, able-bodied, aces within the community, ace men in the community, or male-presenting or AMAB people in the community, at the time didn’t even know about this conversation about the -misia suffix.

And I know this because, a year later, people were like, “Wow, this is the first time I’m hearing about this.” I did not see anyone going, “Wow, this person who always says acephobia, they’re really ableist.

Let’s tell people we shouldn’t listen to them because they’re so ableist.” And yet over here, like, we’re founding Disabled Ace Day.

We’re talking to disabled aces.

We’re doing a lot of work to get interviews out there, to get panels out there.

[Courtney] We are volunteering for accessibility behind the scenes to make our conferences more accessible.

And having lived experience as, you know, disabled people, it seems so, so leftist-infighty to be like, “This is the nitpick we are making, and these are the people you shouldn’t listen to.” Because at the time, several years ago, there were very few people talking about disability and asexuality.

And as soon as like one or two of us start getting enough of a voice or enough followers that people are starting to engage in the conversation about disability, it’s other disabled people who are trying to tear us down over language that is so popular and common in the community that it was very frustrating and it was very demoralizing.

[Royce] Well, I think the phenomenon at play here is more than just leftist infighting.

Because this isn’t the first time this has happened and the pattern seems to be a white, AMAB, neurodivergent person exclusively harassing Women of Color under the guise of disability advocacy.

[Courtney] Wow, you’re really just gonna say the true thing, huh?

Which, like, yeah, there actually is misogyny in the Ace Community that I don’t feel gets properly discussed.

Because everyone treats these self-reported statistics of there being fewer men who identify as ace, almost start to treat that as its own pseudo marginalized community within the marginalized community, but that is so a podcast for another time.

This will be three hours long if I go down that tangent first, and we’re talking about -phobia in language right now.

So we’ll put a pin in it, shall we?

[Courtney] So there was a community discussion I was trying to help facilitate, the main topic of which was racism within the community.

But when you get a lot of ace and aro people together, naturally, conversations about aphobia is going to come up.

And sometimes even directly relative to issues of racism when you start talking about the intersection of racism and various queerphobias.

So in this conversation about racism, a white ace person came in having not engaged in this conversation yet at all and basically said, “Hey, can we not use phobia to mean bigotry?

Can we not use that language here?” To which the conversation was sort of restarted again about who are the people we hold to higher standards.

When you take these large societal issues and discriminations and overly focus on individual actions, it’s usually People of Color who are going to get more heavily targeted.

[Courtney] And this community member had no interest in engaging in that conversation, although I was very open to it.

I saw this as the point of the conversation was to try to have open hearts and open minds and have these tough conversations together.

But that turned into extremely angry Twitter threads.

At first tagging us, tagging The Ace Couple account, to talk about exactly how horrible we are, and specifically Courtney.

A lot of “The Ace Couple who claim to be disability advocates actually say acephobia sometimes.

How dare.” And at first, for a while, I actually tried to continue to have an open conversation, but the other party was not at all interested, not only in not engaging with me, but also not engaging with anyone else who was a part of this community in this conversation.

But what I was able to glean from the many, many angry social media posts was that this individual has a phobia, and when they see someone say acephobia, their interpretation is, “You are equating my mental disability to bigotry.” [Courtney] By using phobia to mean bigotry, you are calling me a bigot because you’re equating a diagnosis I have with bigotry.

And I am not a bigot just because I have a phobia.

But that’s the implication if you use this word.

Which is not at all my association.

But I did get a lot of, “How dare you not listen to people with phobias?” That sort of vibe was, “I have a phobia.

I have this lived experience, so why aren’t you listening to me?” And it was, you know, kind of interesting because I heard social phobia tossed around a lot during these conversations during this period of time, which I don’t know which country this person’s from, where this diagnosis is, nothing like that, but I know where I’m from social phobia is an antiquated diagnosis.

It is not something that is really being diagnosed right now.

I actually know some people who think saying social phobia is itself problematic because they’re like, it is anxiety.

That is actually what this is.

[Courtney] And of course even within, you know, the medical world or the psychiatric world, like even diagnosis– even diagnoses, like, change and the language around them evolve, sometimes not parallel with language at large, but occasionally.

And since this person refused to speak to me one-on-one about this and have a conversation as a peer and a community member, I didn’t get the chance to tell them that I am probably about as healed as I possibly can be, which is good, but I at least had aftophobia, which is fear of ears.

That’s a silly one to have because everybody has ears.

Very unfortunate when everyone has ears and you just viscerally detest them on such a profound level.

But of all the things I advocate for and talk about, that one is like it’s never come up organically, I’ve never felt the need to be like, “Let me educate people on what this thing is.” So I probably hadn’t ever said it publicly, and I’ve never shared this story I’m about to, publicly.

[Courtney] But when I was in high school, in the marching band, we were out on the field during practice, and a guy who I thought was a good friend of mine, who was a drum major at the time, just came up and was like talking to me and just chatting casually.

And he just, like, absentmindedly started tugging on his own ear.

And that was extremely bad for me.

Like when other people would mess with their own ears, that was a huge issue I had.

And so I, like, cringed, I recoiled, I had my little, like, visceral thing, and he was like, “Oh, what was that?” And so I just sort of told him like, “I’ve got this thing about ears.

Just, I don’t like that.

You were pulling on your ear.” And he was like, “Oh, interesting.” Well then, this asshole decides, what if I classically condition her to recoil every time she hears the word chicken?

So this fucking guy, day in and day out, would start walking by me, pull on his ear and say, “Chicken.” And he did this for a while, and it freaked me out so bad.

[Courtney] But there was one day at SPAT camp where we’re learning our marching band field drill, and it was like on a lunch break or at the end of the day or something, he had convinced, like, a ton of other people.

I want to say they were saxophone players, if that matters to you.

He was a saxophone player before he became a drum major, so I think he collected some other saxophone players and got them all to, like, stand around me in a circle so that I could not leave.

Told everybody to like grab and touch and rub and pull on both of their ears while just saying chicken over and over again.

And I couldn’t handle it.

I was on the ground sobbing and scratching the ever living fuck out of my left arm.

Like the underside of your arm, wrist to elbow crease.

I was just furiously scratching with– Oh Royce, you can attest to this, I have really sharp nails.

[Royce] Yeah, abnormally sharp nails.

[Courtney] And they did not stop until they saw exposed muscle in my arm.

Cut open wrist to elbow crease.

And I was crying on the ground.

And somehow, still, as an adult, I still have this knee-jerk reaction of like, “I was never bullied as a kid.” [laughs] Like, this doesn’t even feel like my childhood.

I was, like, 15.

And it was extremely annoying because that took, as you can well imagine, a while for my arm to heal.

I hardly even really have a scar anymore.

I had a slowly shrinking scar for a really, really long time.

I think I just have a tiny bit of discoloring in the middle of my underarm now, but it’s really not very noticeable.

But I literally, at the time, like I just took Band-Aids.

I think I needed like seven or eight of them just lined up side by side on the underside of my arm.

Which was also really upsetting when like a couple weeks later I got pulled over by a cop and he was, like, interrogating me about like, “Why do you got all those Band-Aids on your arm?” [Courtney] And so having had that experience, only to years and years later, have someone make all of these hate threads talking about how ableist I am and how terrible I am because I won’t listen to people who have phobias.

It was like, no.

It really got me thinking about wider, broad language about anything mental health related, anything, like, crazy as an example we talked about in part one of this.

Like, who has the right to claim my voice matters because I have this thing?

Because, like, crazy is so wide and diverse.

And honestly, at this point, I fully believe almost everyone has lived with some sort of mental health issue either now or previously.

Things like depression, things like anxiety are on the rise.

[Royce] And a lot of people can experience, like you said, depression or anxiety or something like that in a more temporary state without it being a chronic diagnosable sort of thing.

[Courtney] Right.

And it occurred to me too.

Because I was fully prepared, if this person will have a one-on-one conversation with me, I was prepared, let’s try to find some common ground.

Let’s try to talk about language and what it means and why we use the words we do and try to at least get a better understanding of each other as a means of entering, or like re-entering, this conversation about racism, which was the point of this whole community conversation to begin with.

I was fully prepared to be in DMs with this person saying, “Yeah, I do actually have a phobia.

Here’s my experience with it.

Here’s this thing I have never shared publicly.” But for you, if this will add any level of trust in my intentions with the way I’m using these words or the way I see them, I was prepared to be vulnerable and share that story with this person, and then they didn’t even want to talk to me one-on-one at all.

They just wanted to make a fuss on social media about how bad I am.

So that was kind of a, you know, I guess, lesson learned for me.

I am very naive in the sense that I always try to see people in the best positive light, and I always try to find common ground.

And I find that doesn’t work online.

That seems to only work in real life.

[Courtney] And so I had hoped, I did not think that I necessarily had to share that story or my experience with my own phobia in order to be taken seriously with the language that I used.

So for those maybe third parties witnessing this conversation who wanted to talk further with me about, well now I don’t know, should I use this word?

Should I not?

I use sort of the other reasonings that I had already come to on my own months or years earlier with, like, the fact that I think misia- is a prefix in this language.

And I think it’s already a hurdle to convince people to change the language they use.

That is a hard thing to do.

Language is such a big part of our culture that if someone’s already reluctant to change, if it’s already difficult for them to change, if it’s someone who isn’t particularly skilled linguistically and it’s literally harder for them to make those changes, I think that it’s hard to force words to evolve.

And to me, this one feels like forcing a word to evolve because it breaks the pattern that’s already established in the language that we do use every day.

[Royce] There are some interesting notes about this as we’ve talked about it back and forth across time.

Because, I mean, I don’t know what the right answer is for intentionally changing language over time.

Sometimes some changes are definitely an uphill battle.

But it seemed like from what we could find, and some of this was difficult to track down or find a concrete answer for, but it seemed like a lot of this -misia suffix thing was coming out of certain countries or certain cultures.

I believe the German language was a big one, possibly also French, but I’m not sure if that was just proximity association.

[Courtney] Well, it was a direct result of this conversation that someone who was a German speaker finally explained this to me.

And I’m not going to know exactly what the words or suffixes were because this conversation was several years ago at this point.

But as a result of this, when I said, “Well, I can’t think of another word where -misia is used as a suffix.

So this is just, I don’t think, going to work in the English language.” A German speaker said, “Well, in German, we have a suffix for -phobia, that means fear, and we have the suffix of -misia, which means hatred.

And there are already words that use this as a suffix.

And so a lot of disability advocates have made the change.

And even when we talk about things, like we’re no longer saying our version of xenophobia, we’re saying xenomisia because that was a natural change to make.” And that, to me, was interesting information and kind of started to put some pieces together for me about at least why this had become a proposed change in the first place.

But I liked learning that.

I still don’t think it makes it a better word in English knowing that background.

[Royce] In my mind, it sort of makes the broader online push to change this in English.

You could almost consider it a translation error.

[Courtney] Yeah, I can see that.

[Royce] But going back and, I mean, looking at the usage of words in different languages and different cultures, the old words for what we now refer to as anti-Black racism created by American abolitionists were negrophobia and colorphobia.

[Courtney] That was a thing I talked about a lot during this period of time when we were having these conversations with race.

Because the camp of people saying, “Don’t use -phobia, use -misia,” at least in the ones I was having direct communication with, were saying they were using homophobia as sort of the start of phobia being a psychiatric term and the start of this, which is relatively new in history.

And I was being quoted incorrect history pretty frequently, where people would say, “Oh, well, the first use of phobia in the English language was…” And it was driving me a little bonkers, because as far as I knew at the time, the first use of phobia being used as a suffix in the English language was a diagnosis, but it wasn’t necessarily– it wasn’t a psychiatric diagnosis, it was, hydrophobia to mean rabies.

[Royce] Yeah.

[Courtney] And hydrophobia is still used for, like, fabrics and things.

Like any material that repels water.

In fact, I used hydrophobic a couple years ago when the moss on my bonsai tree dried out so heavily that the water would just sit on top of it and run over and I couldn’t water my tree anymore.

I was like, “Why is the moss hydrophobic now?” [Royce] Yeah, there is a– there is pretty broad use for that term in, like, physics or a material sense.

But, yeah, the term hydrophobia is very, very old, going back to Latin and Greek, but being, as far as I can tell, several hundred years older than the other things that we’re talking about.

[Courtney] The modern psychology.

[Royce] Yes.

[Courtney] As a concept, yes.

Which, when people are first exposed to this conversation of “Phobia is ableist, don’t use it,” the average person, disability advocate or not, tend to go for that, like, “Well, there are hydrophobic materials, and that’s not implying that the materials are bigots.” Like, so -phobia is a more diverse suffix than that, because I can think right off the top of my head of another situation it’s used for.

To which the rather infuriating rebuttal I’ve heard from some people is, “I’m a human.

I’m not a fabric.

I’m a real person.

I’m not a science experiment.” And nobody said that.

No, no, nobody said that.

No, no, no, nobody said that.

[Royce] That’s been one of the more frustrating aspects of these kinds of word discussions.

Because when we were talking about adjectives, nouns, descriptors, that’s one thing.

But when you’re talking about prefixes and suffixes, they’re modifiers on words.

They have to have different connotations.

[Courtney] Yeah.

Yes.

And I agree with that.

And so when I will have someone who will very literally be like, “Well, the first use of phobia in a modern psychiatric context is homophobia.

And that was problematic because it’s not actually a fear of gay people, it’s a hatred.

So that’s wrong.

And–” But then I, to the point you mentioned, I have seen that there are actual political social justice uses of -phobia that do predate modern psychology as we know it and understand it.

And as we discuss it when talking about the origins of the word homophobia.

Because there are anti-slavery roots where the only common -phobia word in English at the time was the word that meant rabies.

So people understood this as a disease of sorts.

I mean, this was sort of pre-popularization of germ theory, so different understanding of science altogether during this period of time.

But abolitionists saw the power of using this word and did use colorphobia and negrophobia to advocate against slavery during the Civil War era.

[Courtney] And especially in a conversation where the original framework is meant to be racism, and it’s getting completely derailed by a white disabled person who’s saying, “I don’t like this suffix that you’re using,” and not even hearing out the anti-slavery roots of this word that predate homophobia and xenophobia and transphobia, and the actual political power that came from abolitionists using these words and using this suffix this way…?

Let’s take, for example, an article published in 1846 titled A New Kind of Phobia, which posits that negrophobia and hydrophobia have similarities, quote, “Both are apt to bite and tear their species, being filled with a most unnatural hate against them.” Hate being that word.

Because every time I have said in these conversations, “Well, -phobia as a suffix can also mean hatred,” I’m told, “No, it doesn’t.” 1846, someone is using -phobia and saying it’s because of hatred, and it’s bad and we need to fight against it.

[Courtney] But yes, in my mind, -phobia also can mean hatred.

It can mean resistance to.

It can mean a fear.

Usually when you use it as a fear, it is like a diagnosable fear.

But I’ve also heard people use -phobia to mean something more casual.

Like, what are some of the more common ones?

Like arachnophobia.

Like, I know some people who just a little bit I don’t like spiders who will be like, yeah.

Or claustrophobia, like small spaces, where perhaps the level to which they are experiencing that, seeing that phobia is not so outside of the norm that it would actually be, like, put in your patient chart.

But I do think it can still, you know, be useful to use sometimes in those situations.

And some people may disagree with me on that, about whether or not you should use phobia casually to fear.

And quite honestly, I’m a little more open to having that conversation than I am the social justice side of things and phobia being used to mean hatred at this point in time.

Because I have heard all of the arguments, I have thought about them, and I disagree with them.

[Courtney] And it is a weird position to be in when you can say, well, -misia is not a suffix in this language.

If that’s not good enough, point out, well, there actually are social justice roots of this word also that were used by abolitionists.

Phobia was specifically said to mean hatred as early as the 1840s, before modern psychology even.

And you’ve got things like hydrophobic fabrics, hydrophobic mosses.

And if someone still is not receptive to any of those and still says, still under no circumstances, “You shouldn’t say this because I have a phobia and I don’t like it.” My only response now is like, if I’m still having this conversation with you, I now have to tell you my traumatic history about my phobia, and maybe I didn’t want to.

But the weird thing is, I haven’t even gotten that far in most of these conversations, because normally the other person just decides, “I’m done with you, and I want other people to be done with you.

So not only am I gonna make an angry thread on Twitter, but I’m gonna make an angry thread every single Wednesday.” [Courtney] Every single day there’s a new episode of The Ace Couple podcast.

Maybe I’ll tag them, maybe I won’t.

Maybe I’ll just vague-tweet, but it’ll be about something very specific that they said in this new episode today, and I’m gonna do that for a long time.

And I’m gonna write one star reviews on all of the platforms about how horrible and ableist they are.

I’m still gonna listen every single week, just so I know new ways to attack them.

Because then– then I made the mistake of saying the phrase ‘blind and visually impaired’ at one point.

And this same person/same small group of people said, “How dare you say visually impaired?

Impaired implies there’s something wrong with me.

You should say ‘hard of seeing’.” Which was the first time I had ever heard that.

That one I had not been privy to.

[Courtney] I had never in my life heard someone say ‘hard of seeing’.

And I was like, I’ve heard of ‘hard of hearing’.

I have heard of that one.

Yes.

So I was like, presumably it’s the same logic, but I– So I– I searched it.

I was, like, hard of seeing, is this, is this a new push?

Are more people saying this?

The only organization several years ago that I saw that was advocating for using ‘hard of seeing’ was an organization whose tagline was, like, the hard of seeing and visually handicapped.

And I was like, well, I know a lot of people are advocating away from saying handicapped, so I– this– this doesn’t seem like language progress.

This seems confusing.

But then, like, having no personal association with being hard of seeing and/or visually impaired, except for, I guess, maybe my very brief stint in an eye patch that I had as a kid– [Royce] I think both of those phrases can independently fit me through different meanings.

Because I would describe myopia having, like, I don’t know what my actual vision score is like 2400 maybe something like that.

It’s low.

I need corrective lenses.

But color blindness is another one that you would describe with a different set of terminology.

[Courtney] So what language do you prefer for yourself?

[Royce] I don’t care.

[Courtney laughs] But I would– that thought just hit me that in some cases people might find those two words redundant, but I don’t know that I would describe colorblindness as hard of seeing, but as an impairment.

[Courtney] Hard of seeing red and green.

[Royce] The green… cones…?

Rods?

I forget how eyes work.

The green parts of my eyes don’t work like they’re supposed to.

[Courtney] So what you’re saying is you’re hard of greening.

[Royce] Let’s push for that terminology.

[Courtney] [laughs] But it really– Because I am open to these conversations and I like to learn about different intentionality behind words, I genuinely wanted to see if hard of seeing was something that was being strongly advocated for now.

And it was one organization that was using language that is more widely frowned upon.

More widely frowned upon.

Which, I suspected the person telling me this probably wouldn’t like ‘visually handicapped’.

But I was seeing that right alongside ‘hard of seeing’.

And I fully respect everyone’s individual association with words, but hearing the, “I don’t want to hear visually impaired because impaired implies something wrong,” that felt very reminiscent of many years ago when you’d maybe hear some disabled people saying, like, “Don’t call me disabled, because that implies something’s bad.

I’m differently abled.” Which is now something we’re moving away from.

[Courtney] And more people are starting to see things, like, differently abled as being ableist in and of itself.

And so at that situation, I was like, well, I’ve always heard blind or visually impaired, I have more recently come across blind or low vision.

And I was like, “Oh, I like that one.” I was like, that, to me, makes more sense than blind or hard of seeing.

Because now, having done this search myself, I was like, if I were to change this language and start saying blind or hard of seeing publicly on social media, on a podcast, I can imagine at least a few of you are going to be like, “Huh?

I haven’t heard that.” And you’re gonna search it just like I did, And then you’re gonna come across this organization that, in my eyes, is using even more ableist language.

So I didn’t exactly want to put more eyes on them.

[Royce] I’ve seen some assistive tools on computers be described as techniques to help people with low or no vision, or low to no vision.

[Courtney] Yeah.

And I’ve seen that a little more.

And to me, that’s an easy change.

But I also do know– I literally personally know blind people who still say blind and visually imprepared.

So I don’t have any issue changing to blind or low vision if that has the chance of upsetting fewer people on a public scale.

That’s not a problem to me.

But I guess I don’t know what would happen now if someone were to search ‘hard of seeing’, but that is the one and only person who I have ever known who’s advocated for that phrase.

And they were actively antagonistic against me for years.

It got to a point where other friends of mine in the community were seeing just how often this person was speaking poorly about me.

And they were like, you should just block them.

Because I was certainly not following them, but I had not blocked anyone.

[Courtney] And I was like, “I can’t block someone in my own community.” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, you can.

Yes, you can do that.

You absolutely can.

And you should.

And at this point, we’re telling you.” And I think that was one of maybe only three people within the Ace Community that I ever blocked while we were still on Twitter.

And that resulted in, like, extra accounts, different accounts, finding us on different social media platforms, commenting on YouTube, sending us an email, like, the week we set up a Tumblr account, getting harassing DMs on Tumblr.

Saying exactly the same things in exactly the same extremely niche language so I know it’s the same person.

And at that point, that is harassment.

[Courtney] If you’re circumventing blocks, if you are actively antagonizing someone and finding them on every single platform you can, and like that, that is harassment.

That is harassment.

And as someone who, literally in my real life, has a stalker that I have known, former friend, used to have a real friendship with this person and has been stalking me for well over a decade, that is re-traumatizing.

This was not as immediately dangerous as my actual real life stalker situation.

But it feels similar.

The walking on eggshells, the being afraid to open social media, being afraid to open your emails, because did this person who is antagonizing you find a new, clever, creative way to try to weasel in to your attention?

It was very upsetting.

[Courtney] And yeah, it is very strange to be a voice who very intentionally tries to talk about disability, disability justice, ableist language, ableism within the Asexual Community, and the specific considerations that the intersection of asexuality and disability have, and to see people try to say, “No, Courtney is ableist.

You should not talk to her.

You should not listen to her.” And to say that all of the work I do is now fundamentally flawed because I do not agree with you on this language.

Meanwhile, I had been getting harassed for months about using the word -phobia and then later the phrase visually impaired, where other abled ace voices, white ace voices, voices who are much louder, had many more followers than we did, just to see them months later be like, “Huh, I didn’t know people used -misia as a suffix.” And then not get any heat at all from anybody at all for it, and then not change their language either?

Those are folks who still use -phobia as a suffix.

It’s baffling to me, it really is.

[Courtney] And I really do think at the end of the day that intention matters a lot.

Intention and true community.

If you are genuinely in community with someone, even if you might have a disagreement with them on something, if you have enough common ground and enough mutual respect and working toward a same shared goal, you should still be able to work together.

You should still be able to inhabit the same spaces.

And there is a little bit over, like, online borderline academic thinking, and like boots on the ground activism too, because while I want to give space for the fact that I don’t know everybody or what their day-to-day looks like, it absolutely crosses my mind if you are spending so much of your time online, watching me like a hawk with the specific goal of calling me out, of harassing me, of telling people not to listen to me.

I don’t think you have enough time left over to actually be doing anything that tangibly helps the lives of disabled people or other disabled aces.

[Courtney] In fact, you’re actively making the life of one disabled ace worse.

And you’re trying to take attention away from the real work that I am trying to do.

So yeah, I honestly, I would take someone who means well and is actively trying to work for the social and material benefit of disabled people, but has very imperfect language, than someone who is going to be harassing others over the language they’re using and not doing anything else.

It’s kind of like how– it’s kind of like how I was recently quickly serving food at our local chapter of Food Not Bombs.

And while we were waiting for the volunteers of, like, the tables to show up, a couple of us volunteers were just standing sort of in the parking lot waiting to assemble.

And this guy walks up to us and what– And specifically looks me in the eye and was like, “Do you believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?” And I just silently shook my head no.

[Courtney] And then I maybe shouldn’t have done that, because then he wouldn’t leave me alone.

He was like, “I need–” He’s like, “Can I pray with you?” He’s like, “I want to save your soul.

I want to believe in– I need you to believe in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.” And I was like, “I’m not here to talk about Jesus Christ.

I’m here to feed the community.” And he was like, “Just pray with me.

Can I– Can I pray for you?

I want to pray for you right here and now.” And I said, “I don’t want to pray, but you can join us serving food to the community if you want.” I said, “I don’t want to talk about religion, but you can help us feed people.” And he fucking booked it away.

He just left.

He like ran.

And I was like, this is the real life example of like online activism.

Here’s this guy who’s like, “I need you to believe in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” but will not– like is actively holding me up from feeding the community and won’t join me in feeding people when I invited him to do so.

And it’s like, what?

What good does it do?

[Courtney] Like, there’s so much real life work that needs to be done, and everyone has different skills, everyone has different ways they can contribute.

But I think my patience, based on experiences like this over the last several years, is running increasingly thin for people who are so hyper focused on language and are so negative and bordering on abusive in the way that they talk to people, that I kind of think, like, what is the tangible harm?

What is the real harm that is happening?

But also, like, what is the real good that is happening?

I want more tangible good.

I want a more material outcome that helps people.

Because to some extent, I genuinely believe that in the Disabled Community, in the Queer Community, in any marginalized community, really, a lot of us are traumatized by our lived experiences.

And sometimes I think that manifests in ways where when we get into these vicious conversation cycles online, we are just re-traumatizing each other.

[Courtney] And I think I kind of have lived experience to attest to that.

We’ll talk about this a little more next week.

But OCD, for example, that’s a thing I was under the table diagnosed with years and years ago.

I was frustrated when people would use OCD to just mean like, this person likes things clean or they like things in a particular way.

Because in my mind, I’d be like, that’s not what OCD actually means!

This thing I have actually makes my life worse and you don’t understand it!

But now that I am a much happier person and more mentally healthy than I was at that period of time, I’ve softened on it a lot.

I now err more on the side of giving people the benefit of the doubt, because I didn’t even know the difference between OCD, the diagnosis, and the way it was used colloquially until after I was diagnosed with it and started researching it more and thinking more and talking to other people with OCD.

And I think we’ve all been in that place at one time or another.

And really, the main difference is I am a happier, more secure person now.

[Royce] That’s an interesting way to put it because the only times in my life I’ve had a moment where my brain was telling me this thing has to be this way and it’s worth arguing over are at points where my baseline anxiety is so high I’m struggling to function.

[Courtney] Yeah, I think it’s a very similar kind of phenomenon.

And I think we can pick up next episode talking about that more because we can dig into the OCD thing.

Here on the list, which we didn’t reference too much today because we went through a bulk of it the last couple episodes, but here on autistichoya.com under the ableist language blog, there’s a whole section that is entitled: terms that are not inherently ableist but become so in context.

And I’ll be honest, -phobic as a suffix is on this list.

So I don’t agree with that.

I have given a majority of the reasons why I don’t agree with that.

But OCD is also on here, and I used to agree with that, and I think I still in theory agree with it, but in practice, like there’s levels, right?

Like, some words on this list, if someone says, and I’m in community with them, I will tell them, “You should not use this language.” There are some that I will give a pass to if I think their heart is in the right place.

So these are all different levels, and a lot of people treat these conversations like completely black and white.

[Courtney] Like if you ever say this word in any context, you are inherently a bad person.

You should not ever say this word.

That’s not how I think about things like this.

I like the messiness in the middle.

I like the gray area.

I like the nuance.

So there are some other things on here.

And honestly, now that I’m pulling the list up again, I didn’t have it in front of me earlier.

Impaired is also on here with visual impairment being an example of that.

So I do have some more thoughts on more of the things on this section of the list.

So I think we can pick up next episode talking about OCD and go from there.

But for today, we are going to leave you off with our featured MarketplACE vendor: Control Alt Access; WCAG informed accessibility guidance for everyone and assistive technology training for blind and visually impaired individuals.

Please, if you do need any accessibility consultant services, definitely check them out.

[Courtney] That description, by the way, was written by the founder of the company, who is themself a blind member of the community.

So I’ll say the same thing I said about our musician with the song for aphobia: if I see any of you trying to come for them because they said ‘visually impaired’, I’ll just remind you that I do Tai Chi every day.

Links to find Control Alt Access will be in the usual places on the show notes on our website, as well as the description box on YouTube.

And I also want to put a link to an article about the anti-slavery roots of the -phobia suffix.

Because that’s one of the elements of this conversation that I have always thought has been missing and needs more consideration.

And I have an excellent article from Don James McLaughlin, who is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Oh, well, this article is from 2016, so probably no longer a PhD candidate.

Perhaps a full-blown PhD.

As always, thank you all so much for being here and we will see you all next time.