This is a mess tone-wise and says nothing the people I learned these ideas from haven’t already said but I wrote it and I’m tired.

I follow someone on Tumblr who often says (and I THINK this phrase is actually hers, but she might be quoting someone else) that: The biggest stereotype about disability is that it doesn’t really exist.

And I think this is a very important idea, and it’s been on my mind since I went to this panel about autistic characters in children’s/YA lit.

A lot of the topics the panelists discussed come down to balance and nuance between extremes– portraying a character as so Different and Strange that it’s alienating, vs avoiding labels and stereotypes so completely that people don’t realize the character is autistic.

Corinne Duyvis talked about acquaintances who’ve told her she can’t possibly be autistic– based on their pop culture knowledge of autism– and Lyn Miller-Lachmann talked about being treated by teachers as a troublemaker and problem to be solved, as if she was only her problems.

This is what that phrase is about. Disability doesn’t really exist, in many people’s minds, because they think about it in such a polarized way. People with disabilities are either Just Like You And Me, in which case they aren’t really disabled, or they’re profoundly disabled, in which case they’re nothing like the non-disabled viewer.

Both of these views have some truth to them, and they both have problems, which makes it difficult to critique one without reinforcing the other.

The “Just Like You And Me” pole of this polarized view seems a lot more appealing, and a lot of positive, well-meaning stuff about disability pushes people towards it, in an effort to make them more respectful and just generally less awkward around people with disabilities. It reassures people that they don’t need to completely rethink what they already know about dealing with people politely when they meet a person with a disability. It encourages people to try to relate to people with disabilities, and to view them as complex people with interesting things to contribute.

Its flaw is that, taken too far, it leads people to neglect accomodations and belittle PWDs’ struggles. If people with disabilities really Just Like Me, Not That Different, then why would I need to listen to them about disability? And why do they need accomodations? I struggle and work hard, can’t they do what I do if they just try?

That’s what “Just Like You And Me” can lead to.

Accomodating people with different needs can take a lot of work. Really listening to and understanding other people’s situations takes work, too. Assuming that everyone is Just Like You lets people avoid that work; it’s a path of least resistance. [I could have drawn a thermodynamics-esque diagram for this post, but I resisted the temptation.]

The other pole, the “profoundly disabled” view, is sometimes more obviously harmful. It’s easier to intuitively understand the harm of infantilization and pity. But it, too, contains truth, and it too is a path of mental least resistance. Pity is not completely separate from genuine caring, and it’s natural to feel pity for people who are much worse off than you are. The “profoundly disabled” view allows people to conceptualize and “solve” the problem of disability in their minds– by defining it as poor, sad people who need a simple kind of help, people who are certainly not Like You And Me, and who don’t need to be listened to, or deeply understood, or particuarly included in wider society.

Both of these views can be summed up as ways of writing disability out of existence. In the “Just Like You and Me” view, no disability is ever severe enough to really merit being called a disability– people with disabilities are normal people who perhaps complain too much. In the “profoundly disabled” view, any real disability is so severe that it overwrites every other aspect of the person who has it– people with disabilities are not really people. Through the cooperation of these two views, every real, complex person with a disability can be sorted into one pole or the other, and thereby simplified and explained. The cognitive dissonance of a person who is both complexly human and significantly disabled never has to be confronted.