Moving Beyond Ableism: Verbal Diversity on Proud Stutter
For as long as I remember, having a stutter was not something to be proud of. Simple things – making friends, scheduling appointments, ordering food on the phone – was a hundred times harder when the syllables of my own name clung stubbornly to my tonsils. I have bungled numerous interviews, not because of qualifications but because my stutter made it near impossible for others to understand me. But a few months ago I summoned the courage to do the unthinkable: I was going to talk, out loud, about a part of me I hated, on a podcast, to a national audience.
The sweat was real. But a strange thing happened instead: each morsel of anxiety I hammered into my nervous system went quiet. As I spoke to the host – who also stutters – I felt an indescribable sense of ease that I did not have to hide. Speaking in first draft is encouraged, taking a moment to pause and breathe is nothing to apologize for, she reminded me over and over. Some point in the middle of the conversation it dawned on me that this was the first time I had ever been treated as normal when it came to stuttering. No one was here to pathologize me. I didn’t have to maneuver around difficult words or sounds. I could just be me.
And that feeling stuck as I dove into the annals of Google to learn more about this thing I had ignored for so long. I realized, thanks to the brilliance of some disability advocates that the onus should never have been on me to fix anything about myself. Rather, it is up to the listener to challenge their own assumptions of what speech “should” sound like. Because this is The Melanin Collective – where we talk about disability – I started to do more thinking about how verbal diversity plays out at work, and what it says about who is valued in our everyday systems.
We can start out through an examination of what speech fluency – and disfluency – quietly connotates about a person’s competency within Western society. Several studies show that adults who stutter are perceived to have lower cognitive abilities, to be less likeable, and to be more anxious than non-stutters. Thinking about the workplace: we know that ability has no bearing on competence, but attitudes around speech disfluency still demonstrate that ableist assumptions are alive and well. For example, as with other historically marginalized communities, stutters experience higher rates of unemployment (despite having just as much knowledge and skills) than non-stutters. Other research explains that there’s an aesthetic component to these assumptions; in the workplace, listeners perceive that stutters cannot meet basic standards of sounding “good.” This could be further reflected in the experiences that stutters have in the workplace. One study found that two-thirds of survey respondents agreed that their capabilities have been misjudged by their supervisors because of their stutter.
I have had similar experiences in the workplace. As a stutterer, I have a roster of words and sounds I struggle with. To cope with this challenge, I’ll come up with creative ways to speak around words I cannot say. At times, this means I can be long-winded – the most straightforward path is often not the easiest route. But it’s a coping method I have adhered to because of the judgment and ableism shown towards “non-normal” speech. More times than not, however, what happens is that colleagues will restate an idea or suggestion I just made. It’s not just the idea that is taken, it’s also the reinforcement that I did not say the thing the “correct” way. This small example shows how deep ableist non-listening runs: anything outside of the norm is not listened to because it does not adhere to those basic standards of sounding good that I mentioned above.
Here are a couple of other examples. One, we can look at hiring process for examples of how disfluency is discouraged. How many job applications have you seen that list “good communication skills” in the requirements? And how often do you think stuttering falls into that description? We can also see how disfluency is discouraged through the professional advice we hear and give. One that I have particular disdain for is the advice that we should always aim for brevity in our communications as a sign of maximum understanding. But as I explained before, sometimes brevity isn’t an option.
The ableist insistence on such narrow construct of what effective or good communication looks like can lead to discrimination against stutters and others with verbal disfluency, it is not surprising that members of the workforce who are unable to live up to the standards of effective communication face negative employment outcomes, and organizations may miss out on their abilities to contribute to positive organizational outcomes.
So what can we do about this? For starters, organizations could interrogate what is precisely meant by effective communication and interrogate if there are people and perspectives that are being unheard or left out within that definition. I have also found that encouraging team members to “speak in first draft” can alleviate pressures to sound perfect when speaking. Finally, non-stutters can interrogate their assumptions of what speech “should” look like, examining their biases and feelings when they hear a stutter or other types of disfluency.