For clarification, I'm not saying disabled people who are or are seen as smart aren't oppressed. All disabled people face ableism to one degree or another.

I'm saying no disabled person is oppressed specifically because they are or are seen as smart.

When I asked for accommodations in school and they wouldn't give them to me because I'm "smart" (which is a social construct btw), I wasn't actually being oppressed because I was smart. I was being oppressed because I was disabled.
If the school didn't see me as smart, I would've been put into special ed, which is often extremely abusive and really its own layer of oppression. I would've been able to advocate for myself even less and much of my autonomy would've been even more stripped away.
I've experienced only the tiniest slice of what people who aren't perceived as intelligent have experienced and even then there's a marked difference.
People often don't see me as intelligent because they mistake my Tourette's for an intellectual disability or severe mental health issue.

For many, I am immediately more humanized as soon as I can speak coherent sentences and they recognize me as smart.
There are many people who society never takes seriously or respects. People who have literally no rights because society dehumanizes them so heavily due to lack of or perceived lack of intelligence.
Not all ableism is the same and we are not oppressed for the disabilities we don't have. We are not oppressed when we don't face intellectual ableism.

In fact, if you don't face intellectual ableism, you probably usually act as an oppressor.
"Smart" is an oppressor class, sorry not sorry. Intellectual ableism is one of the most severe and ingrained types of ableism in this society. And disabled people who are part of this oppressor class will often use this to throw other disabled people under the bus.
All the while crying about how we got so screwed over "because we're smart".

Yet we're often seen clamoring over each other to prove how much we're "not like *those* disabled people".

And I'm just saying we can't have it both ways.

More from Society

Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at


Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.


We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).

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