So this happened:

My son came to me last night with something that’s been bothering him for a long time. It seems that for almost every single day at school for six years he was called some variation of the word “retard”. I knew it had happened to him a couple of times, but I had no idea it was happening in almost every classroom, in the halls, on the bus. Fucktard, Retard, Asstard, Fagtard.

I’m just as guilty of the next person, especially with the word fucktard (I don’t use retard, being the parent of a child with a developmental disability kind of cured me of that). After seeing the hurt on my son’s face and the pain in his eyes when telling me this, I can’t say anything close to that anymore. My son told me that when he told one person he was autistic they retorted with “I knew you were a retard”. This was someone who he thought was a friend, that person spread it all over the school and it became another tool for bullying and exclusion.

I’m not the PC police, but language does hurt and is often used as part of a set of tools to exclude and cause pain to others. If we’re going to be inclusive and caring humans, we need to know these things so we can help people figure out how to cope and how to move past the damage that bullies cause with their words and actions. I’m passing this along because there are many autistic people all around us every day who carry the scars of bullies and may lack the tools to cope. It leads to depression, in some cases suicide. It erodes confidence and robs people of self worth. Not just the words, but the connotation of those words.

YMMV of course, this is only one family’s experience. Now I have to figure out how to help my young adult son heal those wounds so he can rebuild the confidence and love of self he once had.