Stuttering Pride and Embracing Verbal Diversity
Reflections on the 32nd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
By Maya Chupkov
July is Disability Pride Month. Our culture has come a long way when it comes to disability rights, but one community that often goes unrecognized are those who communicate with verbal diversity, what most people understand as a stutter.
Around 70 million people around the world live with stutter. Stutterers often have difficulty producing sounds and words, resulting in moments when they know what they want to say but may take longer to say it.
Thirty two years ago this month, Congress signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a landmark civil rights law that prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities. The ADA defines a disability as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” In 2008, Congress broadened the scope of disability on the basis of past stuttering workplace discrimination cases. Still, protection under the ADA is guaranteed only if stuttering is determined to be ‘substantially impairing’.
Several studies show people who stutter experience higher rates of unemployment or underemployment. A 2018 study from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research found that stuttering discrimination “may have contributed to the earnings gap associated with stuttering, particularly for females.”
I won’t argue that effective communication is not necessary in the workplace. Instead, in our workplaces and in our culture at large, we need to change our view of effective communication. The issue should not be the speech differences, but the perception of what “normal” speech is in the first place.
One simple step employers can take in creating safe spaces for people who stutter is to practice patience. Verbal diversity is part of our society, and employers must embrace these diversities.
To their credit, workplaces across the United States have been working to accommodate stuttering and other impediments. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, created a stuttering resource group for all employees who identify as verbally diverse. The group meets once a month and is a safe space for people to talk about their challenges, milestones, and lessons learned around their stutter. Because workers at Meta organized, the company also included speech therapy in their healthcare benefits package, a not-so-common but important move that all U.S. employers should take.
Stuttering Pride and the Power in “Coming Out”
It took me 29 years to “come out” as a woman who stutters. For my entire life, I felt misunderstood and misjudged because of the way I communicate. I was bullied constantly as a kid. The difficulty of having a stutter goes beyond producing speech - it is the anxiety and shame. Often the most difficult aspects of the stuttering experience happen under the surface.
The worst discrimination came in the workplace. Early in my career in public relations, I was given several bad performance reviews due to perceived lack of preparation and confidence associated with my stutter. This in turn caused me to stutter more while I led client meetings and my team would cut me off and take over.
I turned a corner the day I decided to take pride in my disability rather than hide from it. “Coming out” as a stutterer and embracing verbal diversity can help destigmatize speech differences and may even lead to people finding others who share their identities or allies to support them. I’ve learned this first hand in starting my podcast, “Proud Stutter.” Listeners have reached out to me saying they have never felt more seen and understood since discovering the show, helping in their own coming out journey.
What can you do to foster stuttering pride and create a stronger system for verbal diversity? Here are some tips:
Advocate for stutterers in your own community. Support your local stuttering community by helping them pass city and county level resolutions recognizing stuttering holidays. San Francisco was one of the first cities in the country to formally recognize National Stuttering Awareness Week.
Support artists who stutter. Through music, comedy, and film, artist stutterers are using their creative talents to spread awareness. To name a few: JJJJJerome Ellis, Nina G, and Gina Chin-Davis.
Do not finish our sentences. Never finish sentences or say phrases like, “slow down, “breath” or “start over.” This can be triggering because it sends a message of disapproval
Being a woman who stutters in the world comes with many challenges, but I am hopeful that as stuttering pride continues to increase, the world will be a safe place for all of us stutters to stutter freely.
Maya Chupkov is Executive Director & Host of Proud Stutter, a stuttering advocacy organization and podcast about shifting the narrative around stuttering, one conversation at a time.
