To Think that Disability Shouldn't be a Trump Card

[MissAustenMadeAQuilt]

Don't know how to link but the case is easy to find.

Martin Madden worked for the Met Police as a civilian worker.

He made many crude, lewd and sexual remarks to women co-workers and eventually he was sacked for this.

He has gone to a tribunal. As he was diagnosed with ADHD in 2022, the judge found that he was disabled and was not aware that his actions were inappropriate.

He will now be compensated.

This, and the recent Tourettes case where a racial slur was excused because of disability, makes me wonder if ADHD and Tourettes will now be a "Get Out of Jail Free" card and it is PoC and Women who will suffer the consequences.

I do have a skin in the game. I am woman and have a mixed race child.

AIBU?

I agree with you I'm over it being used as a excuse for shit behaviour if you know it's a issue don't get a job that includes having to talk to people I don't care if it sounds mean

You're really flattering yourself there by using the very mild term 'mean'.

The fact that the N word is a racial slur has nothing at all whatsoever to do with having a chip on one's shoulder. Google it. It's a racial slur. That's a fact. Maybe you could also watch two movies; Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi, which will explain to you the origins of the term.

Be sexually harassed like the woman in the OP, or your children racially abused like OP's children, and see if you still have the same heartless attitude then.

Surely you can see the difference between a bunch of teenagers claiming to have tourettes, vs an adult person legitimately diagnosed with it? Yabvu.

OP - what do you suggest people with genuine Tourette’s do? Should we lock them up in institutions so they can’t offend anyone?

people may pretend to have various disabilities to get away with shit but that doesn’t change the fact that some people genuinely do have Tourette’s and they can’t NOT display their symptoms.

Its like asking a wheelchair user to just walk as the chair is causing an inconvenience.

What do you suggest people with real Tourette’s do OP?

As for the ADHD case, no that is not an excuse.

It's all making sense now. We've all hashed this out with the same poster already!

The Tourettes case. He couldn't help saying it.

Yep this, exactly this.

If some grown man with ADHD uses racial slurs, his poor impulse control isn’t an excuse: poor impulse control doesn’t mean he has no impulse control at all, and it’s totally reasonable to react as you would with anyone else. My DH and I are both diagnosed with ADHD and we’re both described as “severely impacted” by it. We’re adults, so we know what’s socially acceptable/unacceptable, and we can control impulses to an extent - the stuff that slips through is more at the level of interrupting when someone’s speaking, or oversharing without realising we’re doing it. But neither of us would impulsively say racist, sexist, or ableist things, because neither of us hold beliefs like that.

Tourette’s is very different. Tics are involuntary and uncontrollable, and verbal tics are likely to be the worst possible thing you could say/shout in any given situation. They don’t reflect beliefs, they reflect an acute awareness of what you absolutely would NOT want to say. If someone with Tourette’s uses a racial slur it’s incredibly likely they are 1. Not racist, 2. Fucking mortified, and 3. Scared of it happening again, or saying something even worse, if they try to apologise.

I’m sorry your child experienced abuse like this, it’s disgusting that kids are behaving so horribly, and it must have been very upsetting for her. But those children did not have Tourette’s; they were being both racist and ableist.

Highlighting the guy with tourettes is wrong as it's involuntary but racism and sexual harassment in any other scenario out with a genuine affliction is never acceptable.

What a ridiculous comment. You clearly aren't bright enough to differentiate between 2 completely different scenarios.

The two cases are not remotely similar.

Claiming someone is incapable of being aware of substantial social norms like not directly sexually harassing coworkers means that they are incompetent in other ways. It means they can’t be taught. It means they aren’t capable of learning and doing most jobs.

We aren’t talking about subtle social cues. This case is an egregious misinterpretation of embracing neurodiversity.

The BAFTAs incident is an example of how sometimes rights really are pie. Normally it is a very big pie and there is plenty for everyone, but sometimes, there are issues. It is true that people should not be subjected to slurs. It is also true that a variety of Tourette’s exists where the person will tic with the very words they know to be the most inappropriate. Their brain chooses those words not because they are racist or sexist, but because they believe those words to be horrific. Someone with Tourette’s deserves to be part of the world, just as much as people deserve to not have to hear what they are saying.

It was one of the issue yes - he’d discussed accommodations before deciding to go. The BAFTAs should have had enough info from the film made about him to make accommodations and the BBC definitely do because they’ve made several documentaries about him.

He was told everyone in the room would be appropriately informed about his Tourette’s (because it presents differently in different people - just someone in the room has Tourette’s isn’t enough)

He was told he’d be far enough back to not be heard from the stage and that his tics would be cut before the broadcast - but they could hear him and there was a microphone near him, then they didn’t cut that one out.

What they offered was IMO the bare minimum anyway, they should have had more - but then they didn’t even do what they had offered to.

Yes then it wouldn’t have made the gutter press

But you can see the backlash coming, as with any group of people who try to bring awareness and some understanding of issues there is the gutter press spinning it to discredit them.

Women have it most of their working lives after they are young and beautiful. If you might go off and have children, it’s maternity leave, when you have dependents it’s days off for sick children or approaching menopause.

So it’s starting with ADHD diagnosis, if anyone uses it as a reason for tribunal, however legitimate, it will plant seeds in employers minds that employing someone with ADHD might be more trouble than it’s worth. No one cares about the actual facts anymore.

Disability can be used as a defence IF the individual has that disability.

OP can you see how those awful boys at your DDs school are now going to make life much harder for people with a genuine diagnosis of Tourette’s, but you end up with people, like you in your OP, thinking that is an excuse for bad behaviour and acting like a racist twat, rather than a uncontrollable tic as a result of a genuine neurological disorder.
Your daughter absolutely did not deserve to be and shoukd never be subjected to racist abuse.
That boy is not going to get a diagnosis as he does not have Tourette’s.

But no matter how people try and explain why John Davidson shouted what he did at the BAFTAs, and that it’s precisely BECAUSE his mind knows it’s the worst and most abhorrent thing he could say that it became a tic (so the opposite of it aligning with his beliefs), people will still say “yes but he shouldn’t have done it”.

The kids who taunted your daughter are racist and also disrespectful of people with disabilities. They don't have any disabilities as excuses.

My daughter is mixed race and has been on the receiving end of racist comments at school. She also has tourette's syndrome which makes her life a misery and comments and ignorant opinions like the op's make it so much worse. You will notice op, no tourettes's sufferer of any race think John Davidson is 'playing a card'.

John Davidson was vilified by many online. And he also left the BAFTAs ceremony soon after it started because he was aware of the effect of his tics. So I’m not sure in what way you think that is equivalent to horrendous racists who do not have Tourette’s being abusive to your daughter. You’ve also said this was dealt with by the school, so clearly a claim of Tourette’s (presumably not a claim they ever seriously made in their defence anyway) was not treated as a trump card. If the school started to take claims of Tourette’s from groups of undiagnosed racists as a defence and didn’t deal with their behaviour, I’d agree with you that that’s awful.

Yes @frightright I can see that and I can also clearly see that the boy is never ever going to get a diagnosis of Tourettes.

However, what I can also see is that he won't be the first to use it as an excuse-it didn't wash with school this time-and I can also see - even though he won't get a diagnosis-his mother announcing that he has Suspected Tourettes and that the CAMS list is so long she can't get an official diagnosis.

As to the man who offered up a defence of ADHD for his lewd remarks to women-well that defence was accepted and I can see other men-whether they have it or not- using it as an defence for saying the stuff he did.

No, they may not get an official diagnosis but this is where the old Suspected ADHD will come into play.

It's open for exploitation and you can bet your bottom dollar, there will be men who will make use of that.

I am not going to have my child abused and I am not going to hear lewd comments because I and my child, especially my child, have an absolute right to go about daily life without having their confidence shot, their hearts broken, their sense of self humiliated because some else's right trumps theirs.

In my world, my child is the innocent party, has not asked for this and shouldn't be expected to put up with it for one second. Trouble has come looking for them, just as it came for these women.

They didn't encourage it, ask for it and nor should they have to swallow shit and be made to feel that they are in the wrong for not being more understanding of men, any man.

I look forward to hearing a woman with ADHD standing in her office and shouting , " let me feel your cock" to a group of men. Don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, do you?

That's my personal opinion and everyone else may do as they please.

Right, let’s boil this down to the basics.
On the one hand we have a guy with ADHD (and it seems other disabilities) winning a tribunal case against his former employees on a technicality because they handled his disciplinary and dismissal very poorly, and on the other we have a bunch of racist and ablist little scrotes doing the 21st century version of what happened after Joey Deacon was on Blue Peter (look it up, I’m not google).
Neither if these have that much to do with the majority people who actually have these conditions, apart from them suffering the negative fallout from careless, uninformed and/or prejudiced people.

What all this has shown is that despite years of protestations to the contrary, and the naive notion that we can all just hold hands, sing ‘kum ba ya’, and we’ll achieve some sort of utopian existence, rights very much are pie. Maybe if we stopped pretending we weren’t squabbling over the slices we might actually get somewhere, but that would involve accepting that true equality will not be fluffy and comfortable, it’ll be full of sharp edges, hard borders and unavoidable compromises. It’ll involve having to let certain things slip, while coming down hard on others, and accepting that sometimes we do have to ‘be kind’, but at a certain points we also have to say ‘tough shit’.

With regards your daughter, I am sorry she had that experience. Unfortunately the BAFTA incident just led to a lot of people taking the opportunity to indulge the racism.

But you should report it to your kids school. The disability conversation is fairly irrelevant in that context as the children abusing her are not disabled.

As for the ADHD man - the Daily Mail is not reporting it accurately. It’s far more nuanced when you read the judgement.

However, what I can also see is that he won't be the first to use it as an excuse-it didn't wash with school this time-and I can also see - even though he won't get a diagnosis-his mother announcing that he has Suspected Tourettes and that the CAMS list is so long she can't get an official diagnosis.

To get a diagnosis of tourette's you need to have had motor tics as well as vocal tics for over a year, you can't just yell racist abuse from time to time and claim tourette's, suspected or otherwise, it would wash with nobody. Also the GP can diagnose.