If We Stopped Washing Our Clothes in Urine, We Can Stop Using the R-Word.
- Trisomy21 Project
- Jul 5
- 3 min read
Imagine waking up in the morning, walking to your backyard and grabbing one of your T-shirts to throw into a bucket of stale urine to wash it. Or gluing 2 fuzzy strips of mouse hair to your forehead because you were told that it was the absolute pinnacle of high fashion. It sounds bizarre and unhinged, yet a few centuries ago, these were perfectly normal routines. Over time, these practices were looked at by society, leading them to one simple conclusion...They had to evolve.
It's easy to believe that society had finally completed the full cycle of evolution. Decades of advocacy, cultivated in massive wins like Rosa's Law in 2010, which officially stripped "mental retardation" from federal law and labour statutes in the United States, replacing it with the term widely used today, "intellectual disability".
But over the last couple of years, the language of inclusion has suffered a massive regression. Driven by high-profile social media pages, hiding under the pretence of edgeginess. The r word has clawed its way back into the mainstream Internet slang. In fact, recent data shows that the social media usage of the words skyrockets to over 200% during periods of high political and cultural tension, becoming an easy way for people to mock or disregard an opposing viewpoint/ Prespective.
When confronted, the standard defence always goes along the lines of, "I didn't mean it to degrade individuals with Down syndrome; I was just using it to mean stupid"
But that defence overlooks how language actually works. The harm of a disability based slur does not depend on who it is directed at. Using a medical diagnosis as a synonym for failure, incompetence or worthlessness just reinforces a toxic culture baseline. You are loudly telling the world, and the people with intellectual disabilities who are listening to you, that the condition that defines their very existence is the ultimate measure for being a loser.
As the legendary self-advocate John Franklin Stephens said years ago, “You don’t have to aim the word directly at me to hurt me and millions of others like me At best, it is used as another way of saying 'stupid' or 'loser.' At worst, it is aimed directly at me as a way to label me as an outcast."
To understand why this word hurts so much we have to look at its origin. The words society now throws around so casually: idiot, moron, imbecile and, ultimately, retarded, didn't start as playground insults. They were sterile clinical labels born of the dark eugenics movement of the early 20th century. These were the very medical terms used to legally justify institutionalising human beings, to remove their civil rights and forcibly sterilise them.
Today, when someone reaches for that vocabulary, they are hauling forward the heavy, painful baggage of an era that saw people with Down syndrome as inhuman.
In the short video, Just Evolve, it shows us a man who vehemently defends his freedom of speech. Technically he is right... the law’s not going to put you in jail for using a slur. But true maturity is realising that the right to say something doesn't make it right to say.
Choosing more inclusive language is not about giving in to "word policing" or extreme sensitivity. It is an easy recognition that the words we choose construct the physical world we have to live in. We can choose a world where we reduce our fellow human beings to cruel punchlines, or we can choose a world where we see them with dignity and respect.
Time to update our lexicon, leave the slurs in the past,
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