So earlier we were assigned mod for the community “queer defense front” on this instance.
The person didn’t ask us to be mod or communicate with us at all, then promptly banned us for asking people kindly to not use ableist language.
The rules clearly said zero tolerance for hate, and ableism is hate to us. Plus it seems the person didn’t ban those who were being hateful to us (at least not that we can see in the modlog), so double standards we guess?
If you want something specific you have to actually, you know, communicate.
We don’t care about the ban (it’s not a community we particularly care about), or whatever, just the sheer strangeness of it all and the fact that the person didn’t apply the same rules to others as they did us.
We’ve blocked them and the community. But yeah, maybe don’t assign people mods if you’ve never even asked them or communicated what you want? That’s not a gift, that’s a terrible responsibility you haven’t given them any information or preparation for.
Is assuming everyone is capable of everything not in it of itself ableist? It denies that people can have disabilities and assumes all just simply need to try harder. It denies that intellectual disabilities exist, and denies things like adhd that can cause a difference in learning. You are explicitly saying, everyone can do it if they just try. That’s ableism, denies that accommodations are in fact necessary for people.
Okay, hopefully this is in good faith and we will respond in kind.
So, yes, when taken at face value and explicitly what we said it could indeed be seen as ableist, so well done for calling us in. However, if we may, we’d like to add more thoughts on this.
We completely understand that people may not always be able to do things on their own all the time, though some people are not given the opportunity to try because they cannot operate on the same timescales others expect them to, which is something that has happened and continues to happen to us.
So there’s some nuance there in that, a lot of people could do things even with some disabilities if they were not expected to do it like everybody else or on the time scales of everybody else.
As for other people, yes, it is likely some people will need assistance either forever, or for a while until they either learn how to do something or gain the confidence to do something.
For example: We used to know another mostly nonverbal autistic person who a lot of people thought would be unable to do things, but their family cared and encouraged them to do things and they slowly learned that they could do things and were given the confidence to do so as well.
For the other side, sure, maybe some people will never be able to do things, especially with certain physical disabilities, but that doesn’t mean we should automatically write them off and not give them the chance to try or think they are not worth time, encouragement, understanding, cooperating with or friendship etc.
The point is, there’s a lot of assumptions in society and amongst individuals that people with certain conditions or ways of being can never do things or aren’t worth listening to and that leads to both horrible abuse and a lack of those people being given the chance to try, not pushed, not saying “they can do it!” if they clearly can’t but to figure out what they can do, what they can’t do, the time, environment and other such variables it takes them to do it if they can, and if they can’t, well, yes, we should help them, but it shouldn’t be an automatic assumption that we should do so or we will always have to.
Hopefully you have a better understanding of where we are coming from now with this.