Have you ever experienced 'Ableism'?

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From early childhood where i was errantly diagnosed as ret*d where i was outright denied rights other children had, after finding out i was being lied to a lot about it.

Then as an adult, very hard time getting past the interview stage for work, as i found out i did not fit their perfect profile. Now can't even get an interview as i never did advance to a management position i could not handle.

My earliest memory of experiencing ableism is when I was in the first grade. That would be 6 years old.

I think my earliest memory of ableism is also first grade. I have some interesting memories of elementary school. The whole 2e thing they couldn't deal with very well.

I wonder if expecting me to talk when I didn't have that much advanced speech like other kids my age would at five years old count? People would sometimes expect me to talk and I didn't have the words to tell them because of my speech delay.

I restarted the chess club in my high school when I was in eighth grade, but then I was told I couldn't be allowed to run for president of the chess club. They claimed it was because I was too young or something, but I've always had my doubts....

There were lots of microaggressions and outright aggressions from teachers and other students, but the thing that stands out to me is my mother insisting that I couldn't possibly have a learning disability. Another is when I had to go through intensive handwriting stuff because it took me way longer than everyone else my age to learn handwriting, and I was treated as if I was just too lazy to learn. I mean, I taught myself to read and I'm too lazy to learn? How does that make sense.



Yeah, I think it does. I mean it doesn't always have to be people deliberately being all "Disability bad!" Often it's people not taking one's limitations into account or accepting them as real - just expecting people to function to the same level of ability.

Or even telling you that you can't do things you're capable of because of you not being capable of other things - that was happening to me as young as 6. And is being quite common now as an adult.

Not only "You speak, so you can't have any issues anywhere - speaking is the only thing that matters" but also "You struggle with speech, so you must not be capable of reading". Both are ableism.

(I did have the "you struggle with speech so you must not be capable of reading" when I was young - I couldn't pronounce the words when I was reading aloud so because of that I clearly was not capable of understanding the words or the book, and was forbidden to read things that were "above my level", even though it was an issue with no matter how well I knew those words I couldn't pronounce them)

I think once reason I had it so hard from teachers from my first moment in school until my last, was that i always scored very high on standardized tests, but I had trouble following instructions and doing homework. Looking back I think they just all thought I was willful and were determined to break me, they really didn't believe I was in any kind of mental trouble at all.

Yes all the time, especially from family. whenever I am with a member and we meet someone new, a family member has to feel it is ok to whisper about me behind my back that i am ret*d and then i endure disrespect and condescending sympathy before anyone has met me. Every job i have applied to I have been rejected because I wrote about having autism on my form. When I left that off once, I got an interview for the first time. The list goes on

I don't think I had it all that hard from teachers, and few were determined to break me as such. They certainly expected me to perform the same as any other student, but it was rare for them to get nasty about it, beyond the occasional barb. I received more crap from my father about my academic performance, though, and said performance precisely matches what you describe.

It was pretty rich for my father to do that, as he was exactly the same in school by all accounts including his own. Anyhow, yep, real trouble following instructions and doing homework. A mitigating circumstance here was that in engaging subjects I'd have some pre-existing knowledge, and I was also able to retain far more information from lessons in these subjects than my peers seemed to. So I was often able to get away with not doing homework in those subjects, but frequently did fair to terrible in the rest.

I did at times get questioned on why my academic performance was so uneven. Good students have good grades in most everything and bad students have bad grades in everything, they said, and I had no idea how to respond.

This aspect didn't happen to me to my recollection. It was always "You're smart so you should be supercapable of everything despite the plain as day evidence before one's eyes that shows you have trouble with basically everything. That just means you're lazy, though, not disabled."

I'm struggling to see how you can call that 'ableism'.

Is there any aids that your employer could give you in order to allow you to interact with customers better? The point of disability discrimination acts is that they provide reasonable alterations for you to be able to do your job. If there aren't any alterations that are reasonable that would get you to do your job better (let's say, I don't know, allowing you to touch a special object whilst on telephone customer service, say), I'm struggling to understand what you want your employer to do.

And asking to be excused from doing an integral part of your job is massively unfair on everyone and your employer.

Is there anything reasonable that your employer can do? (When volunteering I make sure that I opt out of dealing with the public, so you might want to look for a job where you can do this. Or at least find a job where you deal with a limited number of people each day.)

If it's that painful for you and difficult for you to do your job I suggest you look elsewhere.

Mind you - I probably have been guilty of ableism myself when dealing with some particularly irritating autistic people. (Not directly to their face, though.)

The problem with the qualifier "reasonable" next to "accommodations."

It's not the idea that there are reasonable accommodations, but rather that people use that qualifier as a reason to express strong opinions on what isn't reasonable, even when it is.

Teachers sure hate me. I don't exactly know why, but I'm confident that they hated me the day I set foot in their classroom.

Special ed teachers are the worst because as soon as you set foot in their room, they think you know absolutely nothing about the real world. There was a low-functioning autistic boy and our teacher, whom I will call Ms. Kim, who would lecture him forever. But when I talked to him, he sounded like a normal person. I guess he just couldn't find his way around the Ms. Kim and NT world, rather than his own world.

Something needs to be done about unions in public schools. If it goes on, teachers will continue to think that you are a complete idiot.

My point is that he has a job that requires social skills (dealing with the general public), and he has a disability that makes him crap socially.

What can the employer do? Dealing with customers is an integral part of the job.

Teachers thinking one is a complete idiot is certainly a real and all too common problem, but have you seen any actual evidence that unions have anything to do with it?

I think unions are overall a good thing, even if there are major exceptions.