• 0 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 25th, 2023
  • solarbabies@lemmy.worldtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Caitlyn Jenner’s rumored trans girlfriend is apparently really transphobicEnglish
    13·
    10 months ago

    wow aren’t you just a ray of sunshine.

    what does that have to do with deadnaming people?

    I guess you’re the expert here since you Googled a condition & now you know everything there is to know about it, right?

    let me break it down. over 12 years ago when I was diagnosed, among the better-known symptoms like mixing up numbers, “misremembering names” (especially those that start with the same letter/sound) was a frequently published symptom of dyscalculia (and dyslexia, FWIW):

    fast forward to 2013, in the DSM-5 they changed the definition of dyslexia and dyscalculia, removed them as diagnoses and instead replaced them with a more general diagnosis: “Specific Learning Disorder”, which among other things now requires that a person is “unable to perform academically at a level appropriate to their intelligence and age.”

    in my opinion, and this is just my non-professional opinion:

    1. if I tell someone I have a “Specific Learning Disorder” they’ll generally have no idea what I’m talking about. it’s easier and feels more self-consistent to tell them the name of the condition I was diagnosed with, even if it’s outdated.

    2. the new DSM-5 diagnosis doesn’t account for people like me who were able to excel academically despite difficulty with numbers and names. did I have to read numbers 10+ times to make sure I knew I had the right one? yes. do I still struggle immensely to do basic arithmetic in my head? absolutely. am I also a software engineer who sometimes has to work with numbers? yes. did I get straight A’s in all my math classes? yes. people with dyslexia and dyscalculia excel all the time by discovering and using their own coping mechanisms, so this diagnosis seems overly reductive to me.

    again, I’m not a professional. is it possible that my symptoms which were previously attributed to dyscalculia are just a part of my ASD? sure. but I’m pretty sure if I said I have trouble remembering Elliot Page’s name because I’m autistic, people still wouldn’t know what I was talking about, and I’d have an even harder time explaining it. so there you go.

  • solarbabies@lemmy.worldtoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Caitlyn Jenner’s rumored trans girlfriend is apparently really transphobicEnglish
    374·
    10 months ago

    for real, I’m pro trans rights and I still sometimes accidentally deadname Elliot Page because I have dyscalculia. if you ban me for that aren’t you being ableist?

    also yes context is very important.

    if I say “when Caitlyn went by the name [X], and she used [Y] pronoun, [Z] thing happened to [Y]”, I assume I will still get banned for deadnaming even though I’m innocently adding clarity to a conversation.

    to make things worse, if someone is trans and gender fluid, and I call them by a name or pronoun they used last time I knew about them, now I’ve committed a crime of which I had no knowledge.

    this blanket condemnation of deadnaming is just dumb. it requires nuance.