Policy towards the stigmatized disabled such as those with Cerebral Palsy or Cleft Palate

[This is an unfinished draft of an email to an official of the 55+ apartment complex where I live, concerning disability discrimination that masquerades as normal social interaction. (As discussed previously in TPOCP, the civil rights revolution has not yet happened for disabled people; mainstream society usually turns a blind eye to disability discrimination; and many in the mainstream are often clever at contriving subtle forms of discrimination that appear to be deniable.)]

Manager:

I am a recent new resident of [your 55+ apartment complex] who has a cleft palate. While you were helping me fill out the application forms I answered the question, Are you disabled according to FHA criteria. An FHA website said people impaired in a major life function, one of which was ’speaking,’ are considered disabled, so I checked ‘disabled.’

A related HUD site used criteria similar to those at ADA.GOV, ‘impaired in a major life function, … or perceived as such,’ (emphasis added) thus including the stigma or prejudice of being perceived as disabled or defective (as in ‘birth defect’) among the criteria.

In order to participate in the life of the [apartment complex] community, I participated in a small group which plays Scrabble in the Community Room on Thursdays. Another group, which as I recall plays Pinochle, also uses the CR at the same time. In one of the games after Thanksgiving, I remarked on a couple of Scrabble linguistic peculiarities, something like ‘gript’ for ‘gripped,’ and not allowing other common inflections such as ’ing’ or ‘ed.’ The game finished. Suddenly the person who sets up the board and and puts it away left, saying they would come back after checking their pet, and close up.

Everyone else left, so I stayed, covering for the leader. After waiting quite a while I asked the Pinochle people, who were still playing, if the Scrabble game went on a certain shelf. By this time I was feeling embarrassed. Obviously something unusual had happened, and it focused negative attention on a resident who has a stigmatizing disability.

Before the next scheduled game I realized that it looked like I had been discredited and probably couldn’t continue participating in the game, so I haven’t.

My disability has its own defamatory tag line, ‘I don’t care if it [h-words] the governor.’ If the governor, after a lifetime in the mainstream, improbably woke up one morning with a cleft palate, they would find that repeatedly, what masquerades as normal social action turns out to marginalize, exclude, and disenfranchise them from the social groups that constitute our lives: the family, the classroom, the workplace, and the diversions of retirement.