[ SECRET POST #4267 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4267 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________


03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.











Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 36 secrets from Secret Submission Post #611.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I worked in a mental health agency and at a hospital both (fairly recently), and "mental retardation" is still very much in use. "Retarded" is used in a medical sense all the time, whether talking about intellectual or psychical development.

[(Anonymous)]

It is within the realm of possibility that the medical community would continue to use it even after the people to whom the term refers would have rejected it.

[(Anonymous)]

A medical word has meaning, whether you like it or not, tbh. It's like using "blind" as an ablest slur. As a slur, it's unforgivable, but that doesn't mean the word becomes invalid as medical vocabulary.

[(Anonymous)]

Medical terminology is actually extremely changeable, and there's nothing stopping anyone from using another word.

We don't use "cretin" or "Mongoloid" as medical terminology any more, for instance.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure. But "retard" is a verb that has a meaning which is completely relevant to medical and psychological research. It's pointless to throw out a word that has a relevant meaning because it's morphed into a slur. Obviously, it's not acceptable for medical professionals to call a patient "a retard", but that doesn't make "mental retardation" or "retarded growth" irrelevant concepts.

And actually, "Mongoloid" is still used in academic anthropology. It's another example of a word that has a meaninb.

[(Anonymous)]

Sure. But "retard" is a verb that has a meaning which is completely relevant to medical and psychological research. It's pointless to throw out a word that has a relevant meaning because it's morphed into a slur. Obviously, it's not acceptable for medical professionals to call a patient "a retard", but that doesn't make "mental retardation" or "retarded growth" irrelevant concepts.

Sure, there's an argument to be made, and I'm not saying that every use of the word is intentionally offensive. I do think that, in practice, those distinctions to fade away very easily, and one usage slides into another, especially if you're not in a specifically medical context. The medical usage of the concept doesn't at all disprove its offensiveness outside of that strict frame of reference.

[(Anonymous)]

Not by any anthropologists that I know of, and being a professor of anthropology, I know a lot.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you? What kind of anthropology? A quick search on JSTOR comes up with loads of recent articles and exerts that use the term. I just found a number of articles published in 2017 that use "Mongoloid", in fact...

[(Anonymous)]

In what sense? No biological or forensic anthropologist in the US would or should use it anymore, IMO, as the use I'm familiar with is considered a derogatory and outdated term for racial classifications (along with Caucasoid and Negroid). A quick scan on Google Scholar shows a number of results that I would guess are not by US authors, so it might be more acceptable or still commonly used in other countries.

[(Anonymous)]

Most of the world isn't America and this may surprise you but the US isn't the centre of the universe nor the end all be all of everything.

[(Anonymous)]

What?! How shocking! This is completely new information to someone in a career devoted to biological and cultural diversity! You'll notice I never claimed otherwise. All I said was that no anthropologist I knew (alas, I can't know everyone) would use that term and why it's out of favor within American anthropology (alas, even anthropology tends to be less of an international academic discipline than it should be).

[(Anonymous)]

I would argue that it's possible for a word to be

1) strongly dispreferred by the community
2) something the medical system should move away from
3) still not hate speech

all at the same time. Things, including words, can be bad without being the worst thing. And words can have very different impacts in different regions and populations. It's counterproductive to insist that every variant of "retardation" is always hate speech when some of the people using it are demonstrably trying to provide support and services to the community effected concurrent with their use of the word.

(And yes, doctors can also be hella ableist sometimes, but not all [x]ism is hate speech either. I think hate speech really communicates a level of malice that's higher than garden variety systemic blind spots.)