Tumblr’s @aylonit [now @disabilitiez]
From a physically disabled, wheelchair user: stop using the word “crippled” to describe your experience with anxiety, depression, etc

“I have crippling anxiety” “i have crippling depression” “the stress from it all is crippling” you are using a slur. You are disrespecting every physical disabled person. Just use “disabling”. Why are slurs so engrained in how people talk about mental illness.

Just because you have a mental illness doesn’t exempt you from being ableist towards physically disabled individuals. Shut up and listen when physically disabled / chronically ill people talk about how you are being ableist towards them without saying “but i’m mentally ill so I understand” because you don’t. You don’t understand. Learn to live with that.

We are not here to teach you how to “not be ableist” you should fucking catch yourself on your own. I’m tired. I’m disabled. I’m in pain. Do the work yourself, stop making disabled people do it for you.

The same person goes on to suggest these replacements:

• debilitating
• severe
• disabling
• immobilizing
• incapacitating

So, in short, this person is saying there are better words to use than “crippled” to get across what you mean and that don’t involve a still-extant slur used against visibly/physically disabled people.

But to be clear: It’s not a matter of better or worse conditions, more or less noble suffering. In fact, it’s not that there’s a hierarchy of disability at all. The point is different disabilities are completely different. However, people often use the term “cripple”, “crippled,” or “crippling” just to mean “really bad”.

It should be obvious why using a term that way that gets applied to a whole group of people without their consent is not something we should be extending into metaphor. Again, it’s not because depression can’t be debilitating; it’s because that’s not the same thing as being crippled.

Historically, Ivar the Boneless was able to get out of bed in the morning and razed half of England. However, he had the sort of physical disability that would be pointed at as “a cripple,” and this is distinct from being “an emotional cripple”, from his army getting ill and being “crippled by dysentery”, etc.

Dysentery is really bad! Lots of people still die who get it every year. But when you use “crippled” as opposed to “immobilized”, rehabilitated”, etc., you’re still just using it as a pejorative.

Clearly, words do change over generations, and certainly over hundreds of years. But it’s still instructive to see where this one came from:

Old English crypel, “one who creeps, halts, or limps, one partly or wholly deprived of the use of one or more limbs,” related to cryppan “to crook, bend,” from Proto-Germanic *krupilaz (source also of Old Frisian kreppel, Middle Dutch cropel, German krüppel, Old Norse kryppill). Possibly also related to Old English creopan “to creep” (creopere, literally “creeper,” was another Old English word for “crippled person”).

EtymOnline.com

Anxiety can be incredibly debilitating, more debilitating than lots of physical and mobility disabilities. Absolutely. But it’s not an issue of severity: it’s an issue of the difference between the thing itself versus analogous or poetics senses.

One more attempt in case it is not clear to someone yet: No one would disagree that the Irish have been historically mistreated by the English or that Ashkenazi Jewish people have deeply suffered from antisemitism in Europe for more than 1,000 years, culminating in the Shoah. But it should not take further explanation to understand why “we’re like white [n-words]” isn’t something those groups get to say, and that’s without getting into any comparison or ranking of historical mistreatment. It’s not relevant because it’s just not how reclaiming slurs works.

It seems an implicit understanding that you would not call someone on crutches who is missing a leg by that term, certainly not to their face. “We have a bus full of people with physical disabilities that will be here in half an hour, so let’s make sure the entrance is fully accessible” is something anyone could say, whereas “we have a bus full of cripples…” would make most people catch their breaths, and glance at a wheelchair user for reassurance that what they heard was OK.

If we’re not the sort of person who would have that very slur slung at us by rude children, drunken men, or anonymous Twitter users, it’s not ours to reclaim as if it were slung at us.

All of that said, more important than changing our language is changing our practices, making sure the world is actually accessible to everyone rather than just to the ableds. Language as a substitute for material change is worse than nothing because it’s wasted energy. But “you are what you do repeatedly”. How we use language reveals how we feel, and how we feel guides how we act. What you are feeding back into the system of yourself and what you allow to pass from and before you without additional thought impacts how you act in the future, automatic and without thought.

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After this was written, the original poster apparently deleted some of their blogs and added this addendum, trying to clarify some of the negative pushback but talking about the anonymous harassment targeted at them:

alright, I’d like to clear some things up now that I’m out of the hospital and recovered from surgery. I never stated that mental illness was not something that can be disabling, it can be, depression can disable you, anxiety can disable you, in general mental illness CAN and DOES disable people, my point was that it does not have the same connotations as cripple does to physically disabled folks.
…
calling oneself crippled as a physically disabled person is wildly different than an able-bodied person using it, yes language changes and fluctuates, but the original meaning and power it had does not. Forgive me for the use of “slur” here, the proper term would be derogatory language, but I don’t understand able-bodied people refusing to listen to disabled voices

not “one” disabled person speaks for the entire community, no, so if you are physically disabled and see nothing wrong with it, that’s personal to you, but you have to acknowledge other disabled folks feelings on the matter

I was very sick and angry at the world when I wrote this textpost, I was in the hospital and had to get surgery a couple weeks after this was posted, I was being constantly bombarded with ableism from doctors, people i thought were friends, and family members.

I’m not “gatekeeping” language, I am trying to get people to understand etymology and the power words have, language matters, and our use of it means different things for different people. Able-bodied people (while being ND or mentally ill) have been ableist to physically disabled people. That’s a fact. I was sharing that fact.

I genuinely do not care if you have no issue with using those terms, but I have issues with it, other disabled people have issues with it, their voices should not be drowned out either.

and just to finish this little “clearing up” up, I am also severely mentally ill, It disables me at points, but I will never say it cripples me, because it was an entirely different experience to becoming physically disabled.

I am sick of the anons i’ve gotten from this post, blatant ableism, threats of hurting me, suicide baiting, some even stooped as low as to spout nazi rhetoric because I am jewish. I do not care if you disagree, my voice is not the “end all be all” it’s just one voice. just that. The post would not have gotten popular if there were not some people that agreed with my anger.