Why is it an insult to call Barron Trump “autistic”?

So…Rosie O’Donnell made a comment about Barron Trump possibly being autistic. We’ve all heard about it. And if you haven’t (if you’ve just crawled out from beneath a rock somewhere), you can just google “Rosie O’Donnell Barron Trump comment” and you’ll be up to speed in about 10 seconds. It happened back in November, so it’s hardly breaking news.

But…with the latest round of “don’t attack the president’s kid” comments reverberating through the internet, it’s been on my mind again.

Here’s why.

I’ve been feeling pretty uneasy about the whole thing ever since November. I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I finally figured it out. It’s because calling someone “autistic” creates an uproar. Apparently, being “autistic” is an insult, and that is NOT okay.

I work all day with people on the autism spectrum. Some of them are awesome. Some of them (sorry, kids and parents) are assholes. Neither is the direct result of their autism. If you ask people with autism how they feel about being people with autism, you’ll get a variety of responses. Lots of people like themselves the way they are. Lots of people want to change some things about the way they are. You know…kind of like everybody else. I, for instance, am fat. I don’t particularly like it, but this is not the only quality I use to define myself. If someone were to call me fat, I might feel offended, not because it isn’t true (it absolutely is), but because the intent of the speaker was likely to marginalize me in some way.

See, it’s not that people are not autistic (by the way, you should really say “that people have autism”–person-first language helps change the conversation). It’s that, by having autism, that a person is now considered in some way defective, less-than, and undesirable. It’s less about the comment, and more about our immediate bristling at it.

I’ve been Googling away, looking for other people responding to the situation who share my concerns. I didn’t find much. I’m not sure if that’s because nobody else said it or because I’m crappy at doing Google searches. Nevertheless, I figure it could use saying again.

When it comes to how we relate to people with disabilities, we’ve made progress. Calling someone “retarded” as an insult is no longer considered acceptable. Yet, somehow, calling someone “autistic” in a effort to convey insult is still acceptable. You see, the Trumps and their supporters were not offended that Ms. O’Donnell called this child “autistic” because she was making assumptions about an (alleged) neurological difference, diagnosing a person without the benefit of data or a medical degree. They were offended because, in their view, Ms. O’Donnell had labeled this child as “inferior” or “less than” by speculating that he had autism.

This tells me that, as a culture, we still have a long ways to go in working through the dialogue about disability in this country. A person with autism is still, first and foremost, a person.

 

About sara

I have spent the last 18 years in various classrooms, most of them in alternative education working with criminal, at-risk, or behavior-disordered students. I am just a regular teacher like you, who learned a lot of quality information the hard way. Currently, I work with students, families, and teachers to formulate effective and creative plans for helping students change problematic behaviors into productive ones as we work together to reintegrate students back into a general education high school setting.

3 comments on “Why is it an insult to call Barron Trump “autistic”?


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    I have several little comments. I use people first language, yet in an inservice this weekend, an autistic woman told the teachers that autistic people don’t like the people first language. They do not separate their autism from their essential selves. I am sure that this varies from person to person, but she was pretty emphatic.

    As regards Barron Trump, I am firmly of the opinion that the less written about him, the better. He is a child and should be completely left out of adult affairs. The media just needs to butt out of his life.

    Rosie O’Donnell did offer us a chance to dialogue about labeling people. Autistic people are different, not inferior. The more people know about autism and autistic people, the more that they understand that. We need to keep promoting understanding. Some folks will never rise to that occasion. Ignorant people and bullies try to marginalize people based on differences. The rest of us just need to keep trying to break through their cycle of ignorance. Here is a video that can help.

    https://youtu.be/Lr4_dOorquQ

    • Thanks, Connie. You always know a lot of good stuff. So…now I’m wondering–should school districts mandate person-first language as their default? Right now, that’s the standard for bigger districts and for the college where I’m getting my ed leadership degree. I guess that, as with a lot of things in life, you can always ask the person what they prefer, right?

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