I feel that the popular understanding of “weaponized incompetence” is going to become a powerful force of ableism in the lives of disabled men. As a way to accuse the disabled man of being “lazy” while framing it as a purposeful attack (or even abuse) against the accuser.
That does not mean weaponized incompetence does not exist - only that the concept is going to inevitably be used to harm disabled men.
Oh my god YES THANK YOU, I’VE BEEN THINKING ABOUT THIS.
Every time I see someone post about “weaponised incompetence” I want to point out that the same symptoms they’re identifying would also cover ADHD and Autistic men, disabled men, men with memory problems, like…???
But I get the feeling the people who rail about this on here wouldn’t actually listen to those arguments because the way these post are always framed always strikes me as radfem-lite. “All me are evil, deceptive, cunning bastards who pretend not to be able to do things that all men obviously can/should be able to do, and there are no exceptions or outliers anywhere ever. something something men are all inherently evil and plot deliberately as a group to make womens’ lives hell. No man has ever been oppressed and no woman could ever possibly take advantage of any of this same bullshit in any way.”
Yes exactly. Like weaponized incompetence is a Thing that Technically Exists, but I don’t trust anyone who posts about it on tumblr dot gov to correctly identify it for basically that exact reason. Tumblr analyses of many things are Bad but Tumblr analyses of gender are often particularly odious because of all the radfem bullshit on this site.
Also, it seems like it never gets applied through the lens of ableism – weaponized incompetence used against disabled people of all genders in order to deny access – even though it’s like… really, really relevant? People saying food is allergen-free when it’s not because they “can’t” (don’t bother to) read a recipe or an ingredients label; people who consistently “forget” sensory triggers of people they’ve known for years, or “forget” that a supposedly accessible place has a flight of stairs, or “forget” a disabled person’s limits despite being told over and over again; people who can operate an iPhone but can’t figure out how to use an EpiPen… Like, my wheelchair folds to get it into a car. You could not make this thing easier to fold. The wheels pop off when you push the button in the center of each wheel, and the seat folds down by lifting two very visible levers on the frame. That’s it. 30 seconds. Yet after literal years my parents still can’t fold my chair when I go out with them because “oh, it’s too complicated, you can’t expect us to remember how to do this!” And that’s ableist weaponized incompetence at work – two very intelligent people who can’t figure out how to press two buttons and lift two levers, not because it’s too complicated to remember, but because they don’t want the added complications of going out with a wheelchair user and so refuse to learn. It really isn’t that hard to learn how to look at the world through an access lens, yet people will constantly refuse to do so under the pretext that it’s “too difficult”, limiting disabled people’s access to the world simply because it’s not a priority to learn and they know that disabled people have to do the work of access anyway, so why should they lift a finger?
