Dyslexia is a disability, no matter how intelligent you are.
I’m an educated woman and a voracious reader. I’m doing a PhD whilst running my own company, in which I write academic essays for a living and read them on YouTube. But there’s a kicker: I’m a dyslexic, but because I’m educated, my disability shouldn’t exist (according to the vast majority.)
I wasn’t officially diagnosed with dyslexia until I was thirty, though my dissertation supervisor during my master's program identified me as one eight years prior. Until that point in my life, no one had noticed how badly I struggled with my disability. I was just “stupid”, “careless”, “clumsy”, and “lazy” regarding my attention to detail and reading skills. If a student always gets A grades, the teachers aren’t concerned with why they’re not getting A*s.
The biggest criticism I received at parents' night was that I “didn’t study hard enough” for my spelling tests and made “careless errors” when reading exam questions. My mother was always concerned about why it took me so long to do my homework every night and how little I read (especially compared to my bookworm cousin.)
Dyslexia exists on a spectrum; for some, their disability is very obvious from an early age. They confuse their bs with their ds and may struggle with deciphering there/their/they’re. Because they struggle with what others deem as “easy” linguistic rules, dyslexics are often labelled as unintelligent and uneducated. If your dyslexia is caught early in your school years, you may get sympathetic and supportive treatment from adults around you. However, although everyone has heard of dyslexia, the only people who seem to know what dyslexia entails are those who have it or support those with it. Thus, when in school, though teachers may be more forgiving of a student’s dyslexia, students very rarely receive any empathy and understanding from their peers, who still think they’re ‘intellectually stunted’ in some way.
This general lack of understanding of dyslexia creates ignorance in adulthood, haunting dyslexic adults who no longer have the support system of teachers, disability advisors or parents. Dyslexic adults are treated and seen as uneducated and unintelligent by their employers and coworkers. It’s then no wonder that, after a lifetime of being socially outcast by one’s peers, dyslexic adults start to believe they aren’t intelligent and can’t accomplish anything.
But what happens to dyslexics in conventionally “intelligent” environments, such as academia or highly skilled jobs? Well, for them, dyslexia stops getting seen as a disability by those around them and, instead, a failure in the person’s intellectual standing. Because according to most people, dyslexia is a disability one can outsmart: if one researches hard enough, studies hard enough, reads enough, attends enough conferences and seminars and listen to enough documentaries, one can cure themselves of their dyslexia. If you’re educated, there’s no excuse for mispronouncing Ptolemy or accidentally switching your ms with your ns.
I’ve been making videos on YouTube since 2011, and it wasn’t until I started discussing academic topics (Classics and ancient history) that I began being bombarded with irate pseudointellectuals furious at me for my mispronunciation and refusing to accept my errors could be due to dyslexia. After all, I’m an academic woman doing a PhD! Surely I should know better. Commenters repeatedly tell me that my pronunciation errors are not due to my dyslexia but my lack of research. Because, evidently, I don’t put the time and effort into researching anything…despite my work involving me writing 30+ minute long video essays about academic subject matters.
I never realised my dyslexia would become such an issue until I made the unfortunate error of writing a video essay regarding the family tree (or, rather, incestuous bush) of Cleopatra VII. I get all my information from peer-reviewed sources, and naturally, all of that information comes in the form of written material. I was never taught anything about the Ptolemaic dynasty; I only read about it independently. Thus, you can imagine my joy that my two weeks' worth of researching and writing was rewarded with several hundred frustrated comments informing me I mispronounced Ptolemy.
Initially, I graciously accepted that it should be ‘Toll-emay’ rather than ‘Tol-emmy’ as I’d mistakenly aid. Still, after being bombarded with several hundred comments over the following months, with 99% not being empathetically informative but aggressively patronising, I lost my faith in humanity.
Dyslexia is more than struggling to read.
The comments I receive on YouTube are no different from my mother's and teachers' disappointed sighs: you should know better. You’re a smart girl. Before being diagnosed with dyslexia, I spent over twenty years trying to educate away my disability.
Why was I so stupid that I read numbers back to front, misread basic words (like the time I read ‘many’ as ‘merry’ and wrote a whole paragraph about the inappropriate use of language in an essay), or mispronounced words I knew how to pronounce (such as the time I read the word depot as ‘de-pot’)?
One of the reasons I was diagnosed so late in life was because I performed well academically and thus didn’t meet the stereotypical diagnostic criteria for dyslexia to be flagged up as a concern to teachers. The second and more serious reason I was diagnosed late in life is that the vast majority of the public doesn’t understand what dyslexia is.
They think we struggle to read and spell words, but if we’re educated enough, we can become not disabled.
The fact I’ve received a comment which explicitly told me my mispronunciation was not due to my dyslexia but my failure to research thoroughly enough demonstrates how ableist and ignorant the public is concerning learning disabilities. That person would likely never dream of taking my glasses off my face, asking me to get behind the wheel of a car and then criticise me after I crash because I “wasn’t looking hard enough.”
Similarly, people who mock my pronunciation of words online and litter such remarks with laughing emojis likely (or rather, hopefully) wouldn’t feel so comfortable laughing at the speech patterns of someone with Down Syndrome.
Laughing at someone for their disability is bullying. When you mock a dyslexic for their spelling or pronunciation, or you criticise them for them, you are mocking and criticising them for their disability.
None of this is to say people with disabilities can’t take a joke or find the funny in their circumstances. When I’m writing this, I just came home from an evening with a friend, during which I completely un-ironically said, “How the turns have tabled”, resulting in us both laughing at my real-life “Michael Scott moment.” I can find humour in my disability, but that’s because I’m thankfully no longer surrounded by judgemental, cruel people who put me down and demand I be “less disabled” or, rather, “less stupid.”
Ableism, Classics and Elitism
Something of note is that the elitism radiating from these comments almost eclipses the blatant ableism. Classics is already a deeply elitist, exclusive subject. Since the early 18th century, ancient history and ancient languages (both of which are primarily Greco-Roman), otherwise grandiosely known as ‘Classics’, has been one of the fundamental subjects distinguishing elitist school and universities from state schools. As such, the subject has been used to maintain exclusive social hierarchies and reinforce classist educational biases.
According to a 2022 British Council survey, Latin is taught at key stage three in less than 3% of state schools, compared with 49% of independent schools. Regarding A Levels, England experiences what has been dubbed ‘Classics Poverty’: the “perverse failure of Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in sixth form colleges to deliver the grades for access to university classics courses.” Classical subjects are still largely only accessible to those receiving private school education, with the few state-maintained schools offering them being selective and/or in London and the South East. As the Network for Working-Class Classicists explains, working-class students not only struggle to get into the subject but even to remain in the subject due to immense barriers, including social, financial, cultural, class, race, and lack of representation and relatable peers, resulting in many dropping out from imposter syndrome, feeling academically “behind” and alienated from their middle-class peers.
For centuries, thanks to this elitist status, the Classics has been used to bash over people’s heads to express academic, class, gender and even racial superiority.
I, for one, have been very lucky. I came from an unemployed, single-parent household. Thanks to the generous financial support of some childless relatives, multiple grants and scholarships, I went to a private school and grammar school, though neither offered any Classical subjects. My English teacher actively discouraged me from applying for Classics, but I did it anyway. I’d never read a single ancient text or studied any ancient history, but a decade later, here I am, doing my PhD in Classics.
My supervisor is an incredible, supportive, wonderful person who played a huge role in my continuation in the subject, along with many other Classics lecturers in my undergraduate (I’m looking at you, Liz, Diana and Dimitris.) Thanks to lecturers and universities like mine and Twitter, I’ve met wonderful fellow Classicists from all backgrounds. Despite the subject’s reputation, the Classicists actively in the field are far more accepting and kind-hearted than the judgemental, faceless know-it-alls on the internet.
However, this doesn’t mean that being a dyslexic classicist doesn’t have its barriers. For one, I have no future in traditional academia as someone who doesn’t speak or read an ancient language, and secondly, my entire intellectual credibility hinges not on the quality of my writing and research but on my ability to correctly decode those words when reading them aloud.
What you need to know about Dyslexia
If I want anyone to take anything away from this article, I would like it to be some lesser (sometimes completely unknown) facts about dyslexia and the dyslexic people you meet.
Unless they ask you to, or you’re in a teaching environment, never correct someone’s pronunciation. Your pedantic display of perceived superiority inadvertently — or purposefully — points out perceived deficiencies arising from differences in social class, culture, race, gender, and abilities. I highly recommend Professor of Phonetics Jane Setter’s article.
Dyslexics will often mispronounce and misspell words we already know how to spell and pronounce: dyslexia is a disability in decoding, not intelligence. This means, for example, when a dyslexic reads aloud, they may pronounce a word in a “strange way” they otherwise know how to say. Similarly, writing under pressure may lead to strange spelling results: we don’t need you to point this out to us.
Not all dyslexics are the same. Shocker! I never wrote my letters backwards, and many other dyslexics pronounced Ptolemy correctly the first time. Dyslexia is a specific neurological learning disability characterised by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition, and decoding can be more visual or phonetic, or equal degrees of both.
Dyslexics can’t outsmart their disability. No matter how academic or well-read we are, we will always have dyslexia. Don’t tell dyslexics to work harder, read more or do more research.
Unless we’re laughing, don’t laugh at, mock, or comment on our disability.
And finally, if you’re a dyslexic reading this: you are intelligent. You’re not stupid, and you’re capable of reading books, writing and speaking. Don’t let the lifelong and continued mockery, criticism, bullying, and harassment make you: bite your tongue, quit your job, stop socialising, change schools, drop out of university, drop out of school, give up on your dream of becoming a writer, prevent you from stepping into a bookshop or library, reading books at your own pace, study a language, stop writing in your weird way with your very specific notebook requirements, feel ashamed of your “slow” reading or use of coloured reading cards. You’re not an “idiot”, “stupid”, or “lazy.” Most people are too ableist to ever understand, but don’t let their ignorance hold you back in life.
