“Like You” Still Equals “Blind”?

When people I encountered casually, like taxi drivers, used to refer to “people like you”, I always knew immediately what they were meaning, even though I didn’t like them using this phrase: “like you” is supposed to mean “blind”. This is despite the fact that I have many other characteristics besides blindness, and when we’d just been discussing some political event I’d attended, context would suggest them to mean “socialist”. But never mind; it’s easier when you don’t have to worry about such things as context anyway.

Unfortunately, the “people like you” statement is not a neutral statement. It connotes some particularly interesitng assumptions: especially, that blindness is my core characteristic. Would anyone be able to mention one single core characteristic of theirs? I wouldn’t, and if it were the first characteristic I mention when introducing myself to others, it’d be my age – but that is just a convention of introducing yourself (if you choose to mention it, state your age right after your name), and I don’t identify strongly as 21. Or is it a characteristic that you mention of yourself even when context doesn’t dictate it? Blindness used to be such a characteristic, that I mentioned in introductions even to teen forums (and then inevitably had to explain at least five times how I used a computer), but I no longer hang out on most chit-chat boards and don’t mention it on politics boards (but do on autism boards, because we’re talking about disability anyway). Currently, I say on my profile on Hyves, the Dutch equivalent of mySpace, that I’m in psychiatric hospital, but that is just to avoid the “What do you do for a living?” question – and most communities I am a member of at that site, deal with politics.

Of course, blindness is the first thing people will notice about me, because people tend to notice deviations from the norm first, and blindness is my only visible deviation from the norm (apart from short stature, but people always think I’m taller than I really am). People just won’t notice my political or religious persuasion or my college major when they first meet me, and “blind” is far more obvious when having to identify me in a large crowd than, say, “very dark blonde hair and blue eyes”.

But I don’t care what other people think my core characteristic to be. If you’re the only muslim in a christian community, you shouldn’t be surprised by being referred to as “that muslim” either. What I do care about, however, is when people assume my every experience is vastly different because I am blind. And, of course, that may be true – I can’t be sure, since I don’t know what it’s like having the same experiences I have while being sighted -, but I don’t walk around thinking “Hey, I must have a very different view on this from everyone else because I’m blind” all day. I have that experience, of course. To give a very simple example: I will not be searching the entire living room for coffee cups when it’s my chore to load the dishwasher, because I would have to feel all over the place while others could be overseeing the whole room at a glance, so I make it a requirement that if others want me to take their cups to the kitchen, they need to place them on a particular table. Right now, the majority of my “but my experience is vastly different from yours” moments deal with autism, because, heck, I’m in psychiatric hospital and that’s my (main) label. But I guess I would have such an experience with socialism or agnosticism if I’d been at a pro-life event.

It doesn’t matter some of the time. For example, I don’t care about the teen forum members constantly asking how I use a computer – even when we’re discussing politics, but they decided to check my profile from reading a reply I wrote. I care a little more about people making completely off-base assumptions about my experiences, like the fellow psychiatric patients who automatically assume I mean blindness when we’re discussing our symptoms ninety percent of the time – ninety percent of the time, I mean the state I’m in when approaching a massive meltdown or shutdown. What I do truly care about, is when people attribute some experience of mine to a disability in a tone as if to imply that, since I have that disability, it’s logical that I ended up in that (negative) experience. Of course, “like you” still means “blind” to most people, and therefore, it’s pretty easily communicated that it’s logical for someone who is blind to end up in psychiatric hospital. Well, it’s NOT. It’s not logical for an autistic, either, even though it’s more understandable. I mean, I wouldn’t mind if people asked whether I’d been committed cause of depression resulting from vision loss, or something like that. That would not be logical – most people depressed from vision loss, don’t get committed -, and it isn’t true in my case, but it would be understandable. I would care that someone assumes that I’m committed because of blindness, and I would care as much if someone assumed that I’d been committed because of autism. I usually explain that I was committed cause of a crisis when I became overwhelmed from going to university and living independently – which is, I might say, a pretty common experience even among non-disabled college freshmen, with the reason they don’t end up in hospital and I do being more related to their coping skilsl that I lack. (Oh, for clarity’s sake: this is to people who know I’m committed, like taxi drivers taking me from my home back to the hospital; I wouldn’t spontaneously announce to a casual stranger that I’m in a psychiatric hospital.) I have a problem with people assuming it’s logical for an autistic to be committed as much as I have a problem with people assuming it’s logical for someone who’s blind to be committed, but that former assumption is less prevalent cause people don’t generally know that I’m autistic. For some reason, I generally do end up mentioning autism somewhere while explaining my reasons for being committed, probably because I don’t want them to think that every blind person they meet is a potential psychiatric patient – neither is every autistic they meet, and I may be doing a disservice to the autistic community by mentioning my ASD, but I’m not sure how I’d address this otherwise. Or would it be best if I said it was a personal issue and I don’t want to talk about it (not that I personally care, but to avoid stereotyping) and just be sad for being a bad example of one disability community already (the blind) and not making it worse by making myself a bad example for the other, too? I guess I’m going to do that in the future. At least I’ll avoid stereotyping the autistic community then – even though in my case autism-related characteristics had more impact on my reason for being and remaining committed than did blindness-related ones. That’s none of a casual stranger’s business. Now how would I avoid automatically answering people’s questions (like I automatically inform anyone who asks about the details of my blindness, despite it being none of their business) cause I’m used to doing it all the time?

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Teacher Has Class Vote Kindergartner Out

A few weeks ago, a 5-year-old suspected Aspie student was voted out of his Kindergarten class by his fellow students. Many autistic bloggers have posted their views on this matter and called out for action. The teacher, who led the vote, has been removed from the class while an investigation is pending.

As an Aspie and a former student who’s been bullied quite a lot, I would say that, for someone who is somehow “different”, bullying is often thought of even by teachers to be something the bullied child brought onto himself. If there is no noticeable difference between the children except for one child, say, not liking the same soccer team as the others, no teacher would tell the child that if he’d just join the other team’s fan club, he’d no longer be bullied. Likewise, a teacher would always stick up for a child being bullied because they had red hair. Not so with students being bullied for being different socially or behaviorally, as Aspies usually are.

I was bullied in sixth grade at the school for the blind and then again (sort of, not too badly) in sventh and eighth grade in public school. In sixth grade, my teacher did discipline my bullies. The reason may be that the things my classmates were saying about me while bullying, had nothing to do with my behavior. They called me “dwarf” for my short stature, for example. My mother told me that if only I wore jeans rather than trainign pants – I hated jeans for sensory reasons -, I would be bullied a lot less, but I was very rarely called names for wearing training pants. The teacher did tell me that I ought to react differently. “Let it roll off your back.” That kind of nonsense that teachers who have no idea what bullying feels like, will always advise their students. But, between this, at least it was made clear to the bullies that bullying was not acceptable.

Not so in high school. The teasing was not noticed in seventh grade, and I was told repeatedly that I ought to be glad that students were still willing (not really, but teachers forced them) to take me from class to class. I was dependent and tried to learn. A very bad thing was that I didn’t get mobility instruction till nearly the end of the school year – okay, I’d had one lesson before the school year started, but you don’t learn to navigate an entire school building in only one lesson. It was not my choice that I didn’t get mobility instruction, and when I had finally gotten the instruction, I made sure not to need any more sighted guides in eighth grade – which meant I got lost on occasion and had subsequent meltdowns, but that was better than having to be dependent on a classmate all the time.

I did not choose to automatically get extra time on tests, either. I was a slow reader (still am) and really did need the extra time on certain tests, to the point where at one time my teacher forced me to take the extra time on a close reading test. I did not choose for the teachers not to send me to the office when I misbehaved. I never asked: “Hey Mr./Mrs. X, I know I misbehaved but I’m such a poor little blind kid, please don’t send me to the office.” It was teacher behavior, and as soon as my tutor found out, he instructed the teachers not to treat me favorably. But before then – and after then, cause teachers still on occasion would give me unjustified special treatment and even if they didn’t, students perceived them to do -, I was picked on for this. Was it my fault? If I said so and relied heavily on wanting to do everything the exact same way that my sighted fellow students did, I was accused of not accepting blindness – by the same adults who communicated to me that I brought the teasing onto myself.

They sure had their reasosn for believing I brought it onto myself. I had (still have, though less so) poor frustration tolerance and my angry comments when some little thing didn’t go my way, annoyed my classmates. I did not have the most empathy in the world – my definition of taking into account another person’s poitn of view consisted of letting classmates make tiny everyday decisions for me. I had bad body odor and didn’t pick up on hygiene rules. And so on and so on. But is this something that will change if you just inform the bullied student that this is the reason they’re bullied? My classmates, two months after being asked (without my presence) to inform my tutor of what they didn’t like about me and my tutor then having communicated it to me, somehow decided I’d improved. I still don’t believe this is quite true (except for perhaps the hygiene, cause I knew that hygiene had something to do with showering and decided to have a daily bath). I didn’t improve just from being told what was wrong with me. Two years later, when my tutor decided that social skills lecturing would be the solution to a very different problem I’d been facing, my teachers and classmates still made largely the same comments about me.

Of course, it is a good thing that I knew what I might work on – if I’d known how to, it would’ve been even better. But social skills classes are not the solution to every emotional problem a student with social cognitive deficits faces. I refuse to participate in anything remotely like social skills training for this reason: I may have a social skills deficit, but there is no need to tell me (I already know) and learning how to chit-chat (which I don’t have a desire for beyond my already quite sophisticated abilities for an Aspie anyway) is not solving most of my problems. And besides, every social situation will be different anyway. I do benefit from Social Stories or something similar, but the lectures my tutor gave in tenth and eleventh grade, have not been particularly beneficial.

Besides, bullying is wrong no matter what. There is no way anyone would choose to be bullied. A child with social cognitive deficits doesn’t have a sticker on their forehead saying: “Please bully me.”

And, of course, the news story is about a Kindergartner, not a middle school student. Kindergartners have even less skill to reflect on their own behavior, even if they were neurotypical – so don’t expect an Aspie 5-year-old to change his behavior when his classmates say that he’s “disgusting” and “annoying”. The child likely won’t learn from it, and it’s no excuse for bullying.

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Need to Be Trained Till You’ve Reached the Goals Set for You?

A judge required a Florida school district to pay $720,000 for private education of an autistic young adult because they allegedly failed to provide him with the necessary education and training he was entitled to. The young man is 22 years old and is facing another five years in private education, in hopes of getting him to achieve the desired academic and life skills.

Details of the case are not given. Allegedly, the school district failed to provide Drew Sammons with a free and appropriate education by making him graduate and leave the school district while he didn’t meet appropriate requirements. The district, however, claims that he did pass a particular test, called FCAT or something (I don’t know what that test is for but it looks like a standardized test). In the Netherlands, it would be ridiculous if a family demanded a child remain in education beyond a certain age (usually 20), and certainly if that child passed a standardized test. Of course, standards in special schools are a little different, cause there training is focused more on life skills than academics, but students will still be made to leave when they’ve passed the standardized test for their particular type of high school, and this may include passing with accommodations. Doesn’t matter whether that disabled student has the life skills to make it in the outside world or even the study skills to carry with him into college – I didn’t either. Further training or therapy is paid for by health insurance or the government, not school districts – and even when the child is still in school, only special education schools will provide such things as occupational therapy or speech therapy, not regular schools.

But there is another, much more fundamental, issue raised within this case: do children or adults with disabilities need to be trained until they have reached a particular level of skills set for them? This man is 22, a few months older than me, and he’s required to undergo five more years of private educatioon and behavioral therapy to equip him (hopefully) with the academic and life skills he allegedly needs. Have the parents bothered to realize how much pressure all this training and therapy and treatment and education may be placing on their son? Can they possibly accept that their son may not reach the standard of achievement they determined for him? I’m pretty afraid that the parents run a risk of having to blame everything their son is lacking that they didn’t want him to lack, on poor education.

My parents are somewhat the same. They will not sue my old training home to make them pay the cost of having me retrained in Deventer – they don’t have any decision-making power over me and, should I’ve gone to that place, the government or my health insurance company would’ve paid anyway -, but they are of the same opinion: because I failed independent living, my old training home failed in providing me the skills I needed for that. They don’t say that my high school failed in preparing me for college, because they apparently know that school isn’t going to teach you how to learn but how to graduate. Training home doesn’t have a graduation exam. There are life skills goals – like an IEP has goals, too -, but if you don’t meet them, that doesn’t necessarily say that your training has failed. I didn’t meet the majority of the goals put on my last goals list at training home. That’s not because no-one tried to teach me or because I didn’t try to learn, but it happened anyway. And while I believe it ought to have sent a message that simply sending me to Nijmegen to live independently, might not work, I’ve never held training home accountable for not teaching me life skills.

And even if I had been saying that my training had failed – which I refuse to say, but many others do say -, that doesn’t mean I ought to be in training for another five years. Even if I did say that high school should’ve taught me study skills and didn’t, I still wouldn’t want to be in “college prep” school for another five years. What if I still don’t have the life skills and study skills I need after those five years? What if Drew still hasn’t met his parents’ goals for him after five years in private school? Will the family sue again, demanding the school pay for yet another training/education program? Please, parents, realize that just because your child has IEP goals, doesn’t mean he will reach them. And just because an education or training may not have been the best it could’ve been – which neither my high school nor my training home nor any other training or educaiton I’ve been in, have been -, doesn’t mean you ought to be in training and education and behavioral therapy programs for the rest of your life.

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Punished for Being too Tolerant?

A few weeks ago, an Ontario facility for people with developmental disabilities, Christian Horizons, was penalized by the Human Rights Tribunal for having discriminated against gays. The reason was that they have a Lifestyle Morality Statement (LMS) that prohibits such activities as lying, premarital sex, illegal drug use and homosexual behavior. A woman was employed by the agency, signed the LMS, but later entered a lesbian relationship anyway. She was disciplined by the agency, then resigned and took Christian Horizons to court.

There are several interesting issues surrounding this case. Firstly, of course, the LMS may be discriminatory, but the former employee signed it anyway. I’m not sure what legisliation is like in Canada, but in the Netherlands, such Statements are invalid if they violate law, even if they’ve been signed. I am not sure, however, how strict non-discrimination legislation is. I have, for example, seen many job offerings that require applicants to be of a certain religion. As far as I understand it, this is acceptable only if the employer has strong reasons to discriminate, and they ought to make these reasons clear and may of course be taken to the Commission for Equal Treatment (our anti-discrimination tribunal) for this.

In Ontario, apparently, an agency is allowed to discriminate only if it only serves people of that particular religion or race or whatever. For example, if Christian Horizons had required that clients adhere to the LMS, too, then they would’ve been eligible for exemption from non-discrimination legislation, cause then they would be serving only an exclusive group of people. However, now that they serve all developmentally disabled people, regardless of religion, race, or even sexual orientation, they are not allowed to discriminate against their employees, either. This may be a useful way of preserving religious freedom while protecting people against discrimination, but I can understand that it sends the message that if only Christian Horizons were a little less tolerant, they wouldn’t have been penalized.

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