And also, from a more personal point of view… it’s hard to gauge stuttering severity because it varies so widely, but I suspect I fall more on the moderate to severe end of the spectrum. I’m not covert and have never been able to pass for fluent except for a short period after speech therapy; it’s only rarely severe enough to really hamper communication, I think, but even in my highly-fluent periods the stutter is definitely noticeable. I don’t mind this so much – speech therapy made me realise that there are things I definitely like about not being able to be covert. It’s easier on my nerves when I don’t have to worry about when people will find out, and I definitely noticed I felt much more ashamed of my speech when I felt as if I had the /option/ to be fluent. So in some ways I’m very glad to have had a more severe stutter and I definitely don’t want to act as if I’m somehow worse off than a covert stutterer.

That said, it really frustrates me when of all the famous role models! and historical PWS! hardly any of them, well, overtly stutter. Maybe they’re covert, maybe they lost it as a kid, maybe they only stutter in certain situations, maybe they ~*~overcame~*~ it (insert the confetti and oohing crowd here) – at any rate, so many of them sound fluent or nearly fluent. And, well, I am never going to sound like that. (With the possible exception of speech therapy but *that’s* a topic I really don’t want to get into.) When people like that are presented as the epitome of successful PWS, I get the message, “some PWS can be successful. Not you, though. You stutter too much.”

So for my sake, I’d rather people kept their James Earl Jones and Marilyn Monroe and Winston Churchill and Joe Biden and whoever to themselves and instead talked about, say, this lecturer with a stutter.

@K — I’m exactly the same way. Most people see me as fluent, but I identify as covert nowadays. I doubt I’ll stay like that for long though.

Particularly fun if one has hearing or speech issues that make the process of calling the company something that practically takes up one’s entire supply of ‘spoons’. And who wants to bet they’ll not know how to deal with a relay call?

I really dislike the “overcoming” language. Some of us do have some control over our fluency, and some people may sound fluent but aren’t. I’m one of them. I’m constantly aware of what I’m saying, what words are “easier” for me to say, and I have a broad enough vocabulary that I sound strange sometimes but I “pass” as fluent. It’s not ideal for me, but it’s habit now.

I’m betting, however, that my health insurance company will continue to have a separate gateway pre-auth company I have to call for mental health — something that is, of course, very difficult to do if you have depression.

“Woodman’s Market, a grocery store chain that employs 2,800 people and is based in Janesville, Wis., is among them.

“We can’t have an open checkbook,” company vice president Clint Woodman told the Capital Times in Madison. “If an employee went to a psychiatrist and ran up a million dollars, it would come out of our pockets,” he said. When asked about an employee who incurred similar expenses after a cancer diagnosis, Woodman said in the Capital Times: “Cancer is different. That’s an identifiable physical situation.”"

From your link…

It also plays into a problem hinted at above when someone says, ‘Kerb cuts and automatic doors help everybody, not just disabled people,’ – that when we’re seen as some kind of problematic Other, the fact that a lot of disability accommodations are just common sense gets lost and such accommodations get seen as unreasonable. After all, on days when I’m walking, I appreciate an automatic door when I have a lot of heavy bags. If I were pushing a pram, as opposed to using my wheelchair, I’d be happy to find a kerb cut… this kind of thing ought to be remembered when accommodations are being ruled out on the grounds of ‘cost’ or ‘hassle’.

Though maybe this is a dangerous argument to make… it could be used to imply that accommodations for disabled people are not valuable in their own right, which is not what I want to say at all. I guess it’s complicated…

I love that captioned theatre performance – it’d be so great if that happened everywhere!