By the way, I am not talking about some legal definition of “disability.” I have no idea what the legal definition of disability is, and am not interested in it. I am talking about the word “disability” as it is used in everyday speech by people who speak English.
Your ability to see is impaired.
I think those of you saying that Dio is wrong about how people with involuntary infertility are treated are forgetting what we’ve seen repeatedly on these boards - people starting threads about how they are crushed by not being able to conceive, people who talk about how they feel their life is over because they don’t have a child or they miscarried, the expectations of commiseration, the comments about how every baby and pregnant woman they see is like a knife in their hearts, etc. He may be exaggerating a bit by saying it’s treated as serious as a terminal illness, but there is an expectation that infertile people will be given massive amounts of deference and respect.
I simply fail to understand why the impairment of an ability like reproduction does not “count” as an “impaired ability” in your personal, idiosyncratic definition of “disability”.
You can’t imagine that someone who completely lost her or his sight after being able to see might grieve said loss?
You can’t imagine that someone who has always wanted a child might grieve that inability?
Only if I close my right eye. It does not functional impair my ability to do anything I want or need to do.
Sure. They’ve lost something.
They haven’t lost anything.
You are mixing up those who can’t concieve with those who have had a miscarriage. Some of the latter probably do “grieve” over what, depending on how late in the term, may well seem to them like a dead child and not simply a lack of opportunity.
So that’s like losing ONE ball rather than BOTH balls. ONE ovary rather than both. See?
Thank you.
Exactly. No loss of meaningful function or ability.
Whereas a person who is infertile has lost a meaningful function. This is why your comparision of your loss of vision in a single eye is bullshit.
Your ability to see is impaired. The fact that you are able to compensate for this with your unimpaired eye does not change the fact that you have an impairment in one eye.
You are clearly attaching emotional and moral significance to the word “disability” that is not shared by most people. It is a descriptive term. The fact that you have a minor disability does not mean that you are claiming equivalence to someone who has a serious, life-changing disability. It just means that you have an ability (sight) that is impaired.
If I heard an adult congenitally blind man in grief about being blind, I’d refer him to a therapist. This might sound like an unsypathetic thing to say, but it really is the sort of thing he should have gotten used to by now. If he’s still grieving over something that happened decades ago (being born blind) Then it’s probably an underlying psychological problem and the blindness is just an excuse that his depressed mind is latching on to for why he feels like crap.
Apparently it’s short.
and you’re wrong. Loss is not a necessary component of grief. It’s frustarating that people have humored you on this point (no doubt because the infertile have experienced a loss, of hope for one, and therefore folks have confronted you under the terms of your own eroneous premise). When will you just shut the fuck up?
Personally, I’m looking for support and understanding from other infertile people. Not from people like you who don’t want kids, or people like Dio who don’t care. I would far prefer it if people who don’t understand infertility stay away and focus on what interests or grieves them. See how that works?
Again, I’m making no judgment on a person hypothetically grieving over a lack of ability.
However, if your reason for judging such a person is “they shoulda gotten over it by now”, surely you can see how absolutely inapplicable that is to something like infertility? While a person may be born infertile, they generally do not discover this fact until they attempt to conceive. To them, there is no “getting used to something that happened decades ago”, since as far as they are concerned, it is happening now.
And what of the boy that this man once was?
Not in Dio’s world, they don’t.
You’re as deaf to sarcasm as you are reason. I think we shouldn’t feed the self absorption and entitlement of those who prattle on about being ridden for not being sympatheitc. I am not insulting anyone in particular in this thread or on this board. I am making a comment in the abstract about the emotionaly immature attention whores who feel the need to pout over every perceived slight.