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padparadscha reviews a novel about her mutant power:
And the badge on the cover saying that this book won the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, which honors the “artistic expression of the disability experience,” is just bizarre. When the hell has synesthesia ever been a disability? I mean, yes, it’s unusual, and yes, for some it can be distracting, and yes, it can give you strong opinions about really weird things. And, yes, every once in a while somebody reacts with slight hostility when you explain what it is.
That, my friends, is not a disability. You can’t say, straightfaced, that synesthesia is anything like those real disabilities, the ones people really have to work around. A synesthete can’t tell someone with, say, severe ataxic cerebral palsy “Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re going through with your disability, with the falling down and the speech problems and the writing problems and the morons who think you aren’t intelligent and so forth. Why, just the other day I saw a poster with the letters all mixed up, and it was mildly irritating.”
Hell, I don’t think synesthesia even counts as a condition. It’s pretty much a sensory bonus.
Context is pink, not yellow.
And the badge on the cover saying that this book won the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, which honors the “artistic expression of the disability experience,” is just bizarre. When the hell has synesthesia ever been a disability? I mean, yes, it’s unusual, and yes, for some it can be distracting, and yes, it can give you strong opinions about really weird things. And, yes, every once in a while somebody reacts with slight hostility when you explain what it is.
That, my friends, is not a disability. You can’t say, straightfaced, that synesthesia is anything like those real disabilities, the ones people really have to work around. A synesthete can’t tell someone with, say, severe ataxic cerebral palsy “Oh, yeah, I know exactly what you’re going through with your disability, with the falling down and the speech problems and the writing problems and the morons who think you aren’t intelligent and so forth. Why, just the other day I saw a poster with the letters all mixed up, and it was mildly irritating.”
Hell, I don’t think synesthesia even counts as a condition. It’s pretty much a sensory bonus.
Context is pink, not yellow.