This story was originally published on Passionfruit.
Before 2020, Ryleigh Spets used TikTok mainly to make fun lip sync videos or try out the newest internet trends. She didn’t talk much about her stutter, and she certainly wasn’t planning to become an advocate for people who stutter. But when she noticed people disparaging presidential candidate Joe Biden for the way he spoke, she could no longer stay silent.
“They were saying he has a degenerative brain disease,” Ryleigh, who prefers to go by her first name, said. “I was like, are you kidding me?”
Critics speculated that Biden’s occasionally stalled speech was indicative of memory loss or dementia, and mocked his seeming inability to answer “basic” questions. Stutterers, however, recognized his pauses as “blocks,” a common form of stuttering. Ryleigh, who had first learned that Biden was a stutterer as a 7-year-old in speech therapy, was horrified by the suggestion that his speech impediment should disqualify him from becoming president. To her, it was offensive to the entire stuttering community.
“If you say bad things about someone’s disability, then you’re saying bad things about everybody else’s,” she said.
