i do not believe these words should be abandoned!
in this post i hope to call attention to the same destructive processes happening to “neurodiverse” as to all the other terms. particularly i want to call out the ableist motivations behind it. my intent is to critique society’s weaponization of words, not the words themselves.
One of these things is not like the others.
I can see the argument how there could have been an attempt to reclaim it, much like the n-slur, f-slur, or queer. Not sure if there was actually an attempt or not to reclaim, just to be clear.
The difference is that Something like Retarded is used by someone else, someone who isn’t like that person. It was a clinical term used by clinical people who would never know and could never know the feeling. That is to say it wasn’t great to begin with. People who were “retarded” weren’t embracing that for what they were, it was imposed upon them by medical professionals who don’t really understand them as people (many were studying them like specimens). It was primed for derogatory use.
Neurodivergent on the other hand is a term embraced by the community, it’s used as a self-identifier. It doesn’t have the same oppressive connotations the others did. To turn it into a slur would be like turning transgender into a slur. It won’t work because the group identifies as that, and will keep using it.