Bring Back Invalidation

Questioning the Labels of Others isn’t Wrong… it’s Increasingly Necessary

When you create shortcuts to status, credibility, sympathy, wealth, or power, people will use them. The people who will avail themselves of these social loopholes tend to be the weakest, most unstable, and most manipulative (borderline, Machiavellian, narcissistic and psychopathic) individuals. This is one of the most prominent downsides of a victim status hierarchy.

Status hierarchies are an integral part of human social existence. They are often ignored by those who discuss politics or public policy but they are everywhere… and always will be. Humans tend to form themselves into hierarchies within every group, for every task, and at every level. The idea that hierarchies can be completely levelled is a fiction. We have never gotten anywhere close to this state of affairs and if we did it would be at the cost of all human interaction and cooperation. Any effort to sweep hierarchies away simply results in the erection of new hierarchies.

Sociologists speak of ascribed (innate) and achieved (worked for) status… but there is now a third kind: assumed (my own coinage-status based on pretension or artifice or narrative). Assumed statuses can only exist in large, wealthy, technological civilizations. They rely on diffuse social groups and a great deal of surplus material prosperity. If people are forced to work and live closely together they will quickly realize who is deservedly valued and who is not, who is intelligent and who is not, who is friendly and reliable and who is not. Similarly, a society on the edge of deprivation or in the midst of existential struggle has no time or resources to waste upon mentally unstable individuals or chronic malingerers pretending to have serious conditions to win sympathy or leverage. Such people are immediately seen as the deadweight they are and their status drops accordingly.

If you have a few minutes, please watch this video. It is an exasperating (and extreme) example of a young woman trying to leverage several major kinds of assumed status in one brief interaction:

The people who use C-PTSD (not a real diagnostic category but one which millions of young people have appended to their online profiles) and neurodivergence and racial trauma and generational trauma (any kind of trauma, really) and social anxiety and depression and the many flavors of identarian self-categorization (BIPOC, fat, non-binary, femme… the examples are endless and constantly profusing) are relying on social mores of politeness and sympathy to avoid being challenged or questioned regarding these claims.

If these were simple medical indicators, used to treat people or explain their own behavior (without aiming for extra legitimacy or set-asides) then they could function as the unsupported claims that they are. By using these labels as claims to special knowledge and moral righteousness and social status and public accommodation, however, they become ripe for use by losers or people afflicted with self-pity and so they must be interrogated. They should be examined, generally and specifically, for without that examination they continue to be the status shortcuts which I already described, and which are deeply corrosive to the functioning of a healthy society.

This issue intersects with the medicalization of human existence, as well. Someone with an ‘autism’ diagnosis might feel entitled to special consideration or sympathy… consideration or sympathy withheld from someone who’s merely socially awkward and obsessed with trains (for example). Yet these might the same person, at different times. We are well past the point when medical designations have become useful for public policy indicators or as treatment modalities in many cases.

Autism is certainly a potentially very serious and life-altering condition… but when the label is applied to people who don’t extend very far outside the normal range when it comes to professional or social functioning its meaning is diluted and its significance as a social label is undermined. Some people believe that autism is not a disability at all. Some people believe it can be a kind of superpower. Some people believe that it demands special dispensations and understanding. Sometimes these are the same people!

This piece, by Freddie DeBoer, usefully examines the labels or ‘normal’ and ‘disabled’ and how they’re used (and misused) today. I agree with most of it:

Disability and Normal, or "Normal"

The sad fact is that mental health professionals have now diagnosed so many people with ASD and DID and PTSD and social anxiety (etc. etc.), or people have diagnosed themselves, that these labels are no longer very useful as meaningful qualifiers to understand the lives and capabilities of people.

Here are a few general rules I use:

1. If I can’t tell that you have a serious learning/emotional/functional disability within 30 minutes of meeting you then, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t have it.

2. If you do have it that is a matter for your healthcare providers and your friends. You don’t get extra time on a test or extra status or extra credibility or extra weight to your opinions simply because you got a psychiatrist to affix a label to you. How do I know that happened? How do I know that psychiatrist is competent? How do I know she wasn’t just trying to get you out of her office or profit from a medication regimen? Even if all of those factors check out how do I know the condition was diagnosed properly? How do I know it’s at all relevant to what we’re doing or discussing? The range or professional opinion and subjectivity for many conditions are frankly ludicrous. You can tell me that you were diagnosed with ______ but I will probably not regard that as useful information.

3. Your personal labels probably don’t help you heal. This has nothing to do with my interactions with you but it’s something to keep in mind. Nurturing a diagnosis and treasuring it as part of your identity must be the absolute worst possible behavior to achieve relief from your symptoms. Perhaps you don’t want relief? Perhaps you just like the label. If that is the case then you do not have a real condition or disability.

4. If you tell me you have trauma, don’t get upset when I ask: from what? When you tell me you’ve suffered from racism don’t get offended when I ask you to tell me about the most extreme instance of racism you’ve personally ever faced. If you tell me you have ADHD don’t be surprised when I reply: so what? So do I. That has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Resolve those issues with your doctor or therapist or family. Don’t bring them into the public square. We’re trying to get work done and build a world out here. If you can’t keep up you should consider inpatient treatment, or a walkabout, or a monastery/nunnery. Your personal identifiers have nothing to do with me.

5. Your labels should not (and will not, when it’s up to me) get you any special treatment or status. You’re expected to deal with the world on its terms. Life can be a very difficult place and it’s difficult for everyone in different ways. Your label doesn’t mean it’s more difficult for you and, even if it is, good. Use that challenge to learn and grow and build yourself in a dozen secret and worthwhile ways. Just don’t ask for shortcuts. That way lies only weakness and stagnation…

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