OKAY.

So I have sat down and taken a look at this whole "Helen Keller is a fraud" business on tiktok and I maybe have some Thoughts that I would like to share now that I am fueled by spite and very strong coffee.

At the top of this thread: Yep I'm Deafblind and on twitter!

I've actually done a pretty deep dive on HK's life recently for my book, and there's... so much mythology around her and her life. We can thank William Gibson (the playwright not the sci-fi author) for that.

Gibson made her a myth.

Helen Keller, in addition to publishing multiple books, several essays (some of which were eugenicist as fuck) was a world traveler. A socialist. She helped found the ACLU. She was a complicated woman of her time. Her legacy is responsible for a lot of ableism.

Helen Keller was also the first deafblind woman to graduate from college. She did a lot.

But Helen Keller, because of her legacy is a monolith.

The tiktok nonsense honestly is coming from that monolith.

So, if y'all only ever read or saw Gibson's version of Helen Keller (which is based in ableist fearmongering and conformity requirements for disabled people) you're gonna assume she didn't speak, or hear, or even really have empathy.

All of which is a lie.

She DID speak orally, though it was limited. She COULD appreciate music (it comes up in her book The World I Live In).

But because y'all think Deafblind people are just one thing you can't conceive of intelligence or adaptation. That's on you.

This is also why this tiktok meme is a problem.

Saying Helen Keller was a FRAUD? That's straight out of the Disabled Law Enforcement Handbook. It's fucked up. You don't get to say disabled people can't do things just because you can't conceive of how.

I have MANY complicated feelings about Helen Keller, her legacy, her philosophies.

But her ability to craft metaphor and prose is stunning. I won't let that get lost.

"Perhaps my sun shines not as yours. The colours that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less colour for me." - Helen Keller.

But y'all think she's a fraud.

I'm a Deafblind woman.

I'm (almost) done with my book. It comes out next year.

I'll bet someone is going to say I didn't write it, that I couldn't have because I'm Deafblind.

That too, will be bullshit.

Anyway. I'm not a Helen Keller stan by any stretch of the imagination.

But I will defend her right to have written, and her existence as real.

If you liked this thread, or want to learn more about what it's like to live a Deafblind life, please do check out my Patreon: Dispatches from a Deafblind world. http://www.patreon.com/snarkbat