If you’ve been following some of the recent discussions about speech therapy on this site and some of our other platforms, you may have noticed that we’ve been very firm in questioning speech-language pathologists about the validity of speech therapy, and at the same time we have said repeatedly that we are not opposed to stutterers seeking out speech therapy and want to leave room for that in our community.

I understand that this stance might seem contradictory, so I’d like to address our reasons for it. They could perhaps be best summed up in a phrase by blogger realsocialskills which we recently posted on our tumblr:

“Marginalized people are not revolution objects.”

The phrase is used to resist something that can happen within activist communities: Groups of marginalized people decide that they should not have to change their bodies or practices in order to accommodate ableist (or sexist, racist, etc.) social pressures. However, for many reasons, some marginalized people choose to continue to change themselves, and when they do so they can be judged by others in the community for “giving in” to ableist (sexist, racist) pressures rather than embracing their bodies as a form of activist resistance. 

In our context, this might look like attacking someone who seeks out speech therapy for not embracing their stutter.

Activist communities are capable of being just as exclusionary as the social pressures they are resisting, and this is not the sort of community we want to develop. Marginalized people are not revolution objects.

So I want to recognize upfront that there are many reasons people seek out speech-language pathology. I also want to recognize that my choice to reject speech-language pathology personally comes from a place of privilege. For one thing, while my stutter has led to a good amount of social shames and exclusions over the years, the tension in my jaw and tongue caused by my stutter has never caused me physical pain. For another, I am white and male, which can allow my stuttered voice to be taken seriously in ways that other stuttering voices may not be. I am otherwise able-bodied and do not have a parent or caregiver that opposes my stutter, or will speak for me if I can’t speak fast enough. The list could go on and on, because stutters are diverse and part of recognizing the ableism of our society is recognizing that not everyone will be affected in the same ways or to the same extents.

Others who do not have the privileges I do may still choose to reject speech therapy. And others who share my privileges might have their own reasons for engaging in speech therapy. That is okay, because dysfluent speakers are not revolution objects who needs to proudly stutter in every time and place—to be sacrificed for “the cause.”

This is what we mean when we say that people who choose to engage in speech therapy are welcome here. We are not here to police your body or tell you how you should speak. That is, after all, the entire point.

Yet even though some of us may choose to go to speech therapists to increase our fluency, or to learn to accept our stutters, we shouldn’t have to. As a community, we need to be able to decide for ourselves what role speech therapy gets to have in our lives, and that just will not happen when the entire discussion is dominated by the language and terminology of speech-language pathology and when able-bodied professionals continue to define our voices for us. We want to open up space to imagine a world that is different, a world where stuttering and non-normative voices can be heard and appreciated on their own terms. 

So I will continue to be firm in questioning speech-language pathology, because this is not their space. There are very important conversations to be had with speech-language pathologists in the future (as the thread on the forum has indicated) and we do want to keep these communication channels open, while retaining the right to discuss our speech on our own terms.

At the same time, we desire Did I Stutter to be a space where we are generous with each other and our specific needs, circumstances, and bodies. If we are moving forward together it is in stuttered and halting steps.

-Josh

Let me start off by recognizing that speech therapy is an incredibly complicated issue. We want to make space here for those who desire speech therapy while at the same time being able to stand back and question some taken-for-granted assumptions. So I have a couple of disclaimers up front. First, these are simply some thoughts on speech-language pathology, not final nor sedimented beliefs. I am very much still working through this issue. Second, as the amazing disability writer and activist Eli Clare pointed out to Zach and I a couple months ago, speech therapy enables people with “severe” communicative disabilities to access education and (thus) other social opportunities that would be denied them otherwise. Because of these complexities, it is not our intention to dismiss speech therapy outright. However, we are nevertheless concerned with the way in which speech-language pathologists, even at their best, exert subtle yet very real power over people who stutter.

As the name suggests, speech-language pathology or speech therapy “pathologizes” our voices. In other words, these practices begin with the assumption that our voices are abnormal or deviant, and then medically intervene, either to increase our fluency or to offer therapeutic and emotional supports. With this in mind, I would suggest that speech therapy has three effects:

(1) Entering into a client/therapist relationship produces a specific kind of identity for the stutterer (in academic terms, it is a form of “subjection”). I enter into a relationship where I become someone who is pathologized. This is a relationship where a therapist has the authority to speak the “truth” about my body and my disability, which includes the seemingly obvious fact of my physiological/medical condition. At the same time, entering into this relationship limits the kinds of responses and control I can have over my body. Individual speech-language pathologists seek to use this authority in positive ways, and I want to stress that the vast majority of speech pathologists I have encountered in my life have been incredibly wonderful and well-intentioned people. However, this is not about individual intentions. As I have mentioned in another blog post, I just don’t think the medical, physiological difficulty of producing sounds is the best way to understand what stuttering is and what makes it a so-called “impediment.” Because pathologization is built into the client/therapist relationship—because my stutter is defined upfront as a medical issue that the therapist is given authority to help with—the option of deciding for myself that there is nothing wrong with my voice is severely limited.

(2) The client/therapist relationship is “depoliticizing.” That is, speech pathology assumes, and convinces stutterers, that what stuttering is (when we get right down to it) is an individual and biological thing. This process of medicalization covers over the ways that the very idea of normal and abnormal speech is produced by cultural values and expectations—and of course, by speech pathology itself. Because of this depoliticization, the stutterer is left with the belief that ultimately (a) stuttering is something that only I can manage (whether it be through fluency reduction or reducing avoidance, fear, etc.), (b) being able to communicate is primarily my responsibility, and (c) these are not political and social, but individual psychological and physiological issues. Speech pathology can thus distract us from getting at the root causes of our oppression.

(3) Speech pathology is a massive industry that makes money off of our bodies. Or, more specifically, it makes money off of pathologizing our bodies and reinforcing the idea that we, rather than society, are the ones who ultimately need to change. On an individual level this isn’t such a big deal. We pay people to provide us with services all of the time. However, stepping back a little and looking at the big picture, the speech pathology industry rests entirely on the assumption that our bodies require intervention. Besides traditional speech pathology, this industry includes pharmaceuticals, technology such as Speech Easy, psychology, neuroscience, and genetics. Contemporary speech-language pathology cannot therefore be separated from capitalism—or what has been termed “late capitalism.” There is big money being made by exploiting our bodies.

In my own life, I have found speech therapy both helpful and unhelpful. Even while it treated my voice as broken and needing to be fixed, it encouraged me to speak up in ways I had previously avoided, and I am grateful for that. Whether or not to participate in speech therapy is a personal decision, and if you choose to engage in it you are very welcome here. Our hope is simply that as a community of stutterers we can begin a critical conversation about the pathologization of our voices. 

-Josh

I am tired of avoiding my stutter.

My parents put me in speech therapy in the second and third grades and I hated it. “All we ever do is play games,” I told my parents. “It’s useless.” At the end of third grade, I found a letter from my teacher to my parents about my stutter “problem.” I got mad and ripped it up, and never went to speech therapy again.

In the fifth grade, I had only one line in the school play. In the eighth grade, I convinced my English teacher to allow me to abstain from the speech contest. Throughout school, I would look for classes that I knew didn’t have any oral presentations. Of course, this wasn’t always possible. In ninth grade English class, we were going around the room reading passages from Julius Caesar, which is already difficult enough to recite without a stutter. When it was my turn, I stumbled through a few words, and eventually hit a roadblock. The room was silent for a few seconds, until another kid yelled out, “Spit it out!” Everyone else in the class laughed. I was humiliated, but I also felt confused. What did I do wrong? Sure, I don’t sound like most other people when I talk, but so what? It took me a while to realize the other kid in that class was the one really saying something wrong.

I became good at avoiding my stutter after that. I even stopped referring to myself by my hard-to-say name. It was a skill, but it was also something that I knew I had to address at some point. It was affecting me inside and out of school. The way I was dealing with my stutter was simply making my life worse.

I have just now turned 22, and I'm finally going to do something. I'm going to own my stutter.

To use the cliché Bernard Baruch quote, “Those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind.” Why should I cater to other people by hiding what I sound like?

A quote from another blog post on this site resonated with me: “It takes two to stutter.” My stutter is a social construct that does not exist on its own. It exists in the context of a ripped up letter or a ninth grade bully. But it doesn't have to.

- David Kramer