Anonymous
asked:
One of the things that really bothers me about all this is the weird assertion Pengo's supporters are making that Pengo has issues with paranoia, but it shouldn't be part of the discussion and you're ableist to bring it up. Or, conversely, Pengo has paranoia and thus is not responsible for his actions. I agree with you completely: Both of those views are totally ableist, and it's gross to me that a chunk of tumblr seems to view that as the correct stance to take on mental illness.
there is rather a large and nuanced conversation that could be had here but it doesn’t look likely to happen
i feel like the reasoning is that any sort of generalization about ability must be equivalent to, say, “girls are bad at math”
but we define illnesses by these traits?? without them the illness is meaningless
i get that it’s a common thing to assume that having any mental illness means a person is unreliable or erratic or otherwise dismissible
but this is very specifically: a person with a particular attribute is doing something characteristic of that attribute. while onlookers comment that anyone without that attribute couldn’t possibly be doing the thing.
like
really.