Emily Ladau:
Hi, I’m Emily Ladau.

Kyle Khachadurian:
And I’m Kyle Khachadurian.

Emily Ladau:
And you’re listening to another episode of the Accessible Stall.

Kyle Khachadurian:
What are we going to talk about today, Emily?

Emily Ladau:
Can we please talk about what it means to be too radical or not radical enough in social justice movements?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Let’s do that.

Emily Ladau:
Okay. So, I have this thing in my head of you know Goldilocks and the Three Bears with everything-

Kyle Khachadurian:
No, I’ve never heard that story.

Emily Ladau:
Wait, are you serious?

Kyle Khachadurian:
No.

Emily Ladau:
You just said it with such conviction, I was like, “Wait, maybe he had a really sheltered childhood. I don’t know.” So, it’s like this person’s too radical, this person’s not radical enough, this person’s radicalism is just right based on my individual opinion.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes, they align mostly with what I like and if it’s too much, it’s too much, if it’s too little, they’re just garbage, in either direction.

Emily Ladau:
Right, exactly. So, that’s how I’ve been thinking about social justice lately. I think that a lot of this is prompted by how people engage on the social medias, but just in general, I’ve been getting a lot of people coming at me, quite honestly, in both directions. Some people saying that I am too militant in my thinking about disability and that I should really ease up on people and then people telling me that my work and my methodology and my ways of thinking about disability are really just pandering to non-disabled people. So, therefore I am doing more harm than good. So, I’ve decided in social justice, you just can’t win.

Kyle Khachadurian:
In your experience so far, I’m curious which side the disability community at large tends to land on.

Emily Ladau:
To be honest, it’s relatively split. There’s-

Kyle Khachadurian:
Really? Interesting.

Emily Ladau:
… disabled people who have been saying that my work is just not radical enough and is basically ableist in and of itself. Then there are people who are saying that I’m too much, I’m just a lot. Look, I am a lot-

Kyle Khachadurian:
But Emily, that’s your thing, right? But are you a lot or are you that person’s first exposure to a type of systemic issue that they’ve never heard of or maybe only heard of in passing, you know? For a lot of people, especially with your book, I’m wondering maybe, are you a certain contingency of people’s first disabled person and you’ve ripped open their eyes and they don’t like what they’re seeing now?

Emily Ladau:
Well yeah, I think that’s what’s happening. A lot of people feel like my book is just too much a list of things to worry about getting wrong or things that they have to remember or rules that they have to follow. They’re like, “Why can’t you just let everyone live? Like let me live!” Then there are people who are like, “Are you kidding me? You spelled this out to the point that you’re basically just speaking to non-disabled people and they should already know better. How dare you spell it out for them.”

Kyle Khachadurian:
I mean, they should already know better but they don’t. Right? I don’t know.

Emily Ladau:
Well, I think that’s the thing about social justice in a nutshell is that, and I know I’m going to get flack for this, but at this point, I’ve made up my mind that I’m sticking to how I feel. If we expect that people have knowledge of social justice and they understand the jargon and they understand the principles and they understand what it means to be a good ally, et cetera, et cetera… I think we did an episode on this, like the in-speak episode-

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes, yes.

Emily Ladau:
It’s almost a form of privilege in and of itself if you come from a place of assuming that everybody is on the same page and at the same level as you are when it comes to understanding of systemic social justice issues. I don’t think that’s going to be a popular thing for me to say, but what I mean by that is that people in social justice work often share a certain vocabulary and a certain understanding of the world and concepts. Even though we are often marginalized, there is still a level of privilege in that we’ve had access to education ourselves about these issues.

Emily Ladau:
I’m not saying that it’s fair that we’ve had to because in a world where things like ableism didn’t exist, it wouldn’t be a problem in the first place, but the fact that people act like everyone should just understand social justice issues completely discounts the fact that people come from all different upbringings and backgrounds and parts of the world. Basic disability history is not even in public school curricula. So, come on. I don’t know. Do you see what I mean? I have so many layers here.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you know where I learned the most disability history?

Emily Ladau:
Where?

Kyle Khachadurian:
You know what I’m going to say. Your book.

Emily Ladau:
And my book, it’s such an incomplete overview, though. There’s so much that I missed and didn’t include.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Well yeah, I know that now because I went and I read Wikipedia, which by the way, has a very great amazing timeline of the disability rights movement. It does. But you are what got me started. I’m someone who does know better, a lot better, and yet I didn’t know anything about disability history. I think you’re absolutely right. I think that people are want to forget when they didn’t know anything about social justice and when they saw an injustice and were just like, “This is wrong and someone should do something about this,” without knowing how to express themselves at all. Along the way, probably had terrible problematic opinions that, in retrospect, they can look back on and go, “Wow, that was awful,” even though they had their beliefs in the right place. I know, certainly, I was like that.

Kyle Khachadurian:
On the one hand, I want to give those people the benefit of the doubt. On the one hand, it’s like, “Okay, you’re probably marginalized, too, and your anger’s probably coming from a justified place somewhere,” but on the other hand, it’s like, “At what point are you just being a bully to someone who’s just trying to educate the masses who they know don’t know better?”

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, and also at what point are you being a bully to the masses? I know that’s going to make people mad, too, but come at me, at this point. Because I am not justifying any form of discrimination, I’m really not, but at the same time, I always ask myself whether somebody seems to come from a point of view of knowing better.

Emily Ladau:
While I believe that we live in a world where everybody should know better, I have a lot of questions like, “Does that person have internet access? Do they use the internet? What corners of the internet do they find themselves on? Who do they surround themselves with? Where did they grow up? Where did they go to school? What do they do for work? What income class level are they at?” I mean, there is so many things that factor into a person’s understanding of the world and understanding of systemic injustices. That, in and of itself, is a systemic injustice.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Can I bring up a sort of related thing?

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, sure.

Kyle Khachadurian:
So, I really hate when people say, “It’s not my job to educate you,” and I’ll tell you why. I understand the sentiment behind it, but I feel like a lot of these social justice slang terms, all these phrases that we have in our vocabulary, are shorthand for a much larger thing. “It’s not my job to educate you,” typically means it shouldn’t be my job as the marginalized person to educate you, the non-marginalized person. But unfortunately, when you’re telling that to someone who doesn’t know anything, they might Google it.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Typically, when you Google a lot of these issues, the first results are almost always things like Breitbart and PragerU and horrible, horrible websites that never have pay walls. So, they’re going to see that first. They might not read any further and if they did click a legitimate link, they might not be able to read it because it’s stuck behind a pay wall or subscription. So, I think that that phrase is, to be honest, not good. I really think that it always does more harm than good.

Emily Ladau:
I am totally with you, and I know that’s a hugely unpopular opinion. I think we should honestly just call this episode unpopular opinions, but really, I get very frustrated when people are just like, “Google it. I’m not Google.” No, I’m not Google, but at the same time, I don’t want to alienate you either. If you’re really trying, I’m not going to try to push you further away by saying that it’s not my job to educate you. At the same time, I do want to clarify, I don’t think that any marginalized person should just exist to be another person’s teachable moment.

Emily Ladau:
There is a time and a place for asking questions. There is a time and a place for wanting to be educated. Some things that people do are just inexcusable and you don’t owe those people your time. I’m not saying that if somebody screamed a bunch of ableist epithets at you, that you owe them your time, but what I am saying is if somebody uses outdated language and then you say, “That’s bad, don’t use that language,” and then they’re like, “Oh, why,” and then you’re like, “Google it,” how is that helpful?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, it’s not. I don’t know. I don’t like when folks shut you down before you start.

Emily Ladau:
Right, exactly. Because as annoying as it is for me to feel like I always have to educate people when sometimes I just want to live my life, at the same time, if somebody is asking me a genuine question, I’m happy to point you in the right direction. I’m not going to teach you an entire college class on the subject, but if somebody really doesn’t understand why a word that they’re using is harmful, for example, like saying special needs instead of disabled, I’m not going to just yell at them more. I’m going to send them some links to read about why disabled is, for so many people, the preferred terminology and about why, at the end of the day, you should still respect whatever a person’s preferred terminology is. I’m not just going to yell at them. If they keep doing it, then I’m going to be annoyed.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Back to your original question about being too radical or not radical enough, it’s like I don’t understand why there are people who aren’t okay with you or anyone else being the kind of activist that you or anyone else just wants to be. Okay, if you feel like Emily Ladau is not a radical enough activist and you know enough to know that, then why don’t you do it? You know?

Emily Ladau:
Because I think the assumption is that I am somehow undoing people’s hard work, but the reality is-

Kyle Khachadurian:
I don’t agree with that.

Emily Ladau:
… I think that a lot of that hard work goes right over a lot of people’s heads because they don’t have basic primers and understandings. I’m not saying I am the authority on disability, like the exact opposite. I’m one person. I’m not an expert, but if I can do anything to make it a little more accessible and understandable for you, why not let me try? Oh my God, I feel like I just want to yell like, “Let me live!”

Kyle Khachadurian:
Something that we try to do every single episode of the show is to not alienate anyone able-bodied. I think we’ve done a decent job at that. I mean, I don’t know, but I really do. I think that people who are abled who listen to us don’t feel like they’re our enemy or don’t feel like they’re scared. I just wish that that was afforded to everybody in that way. I think that disability’s hard to understand. I think that disabled people tend to understand it more just by virtue of being born the way we are or having acquired it when we did.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I think that there are people in our community, and in every social justice community, that like being part of, they don’t like being marginalized, obviously, but they like having that camaraderie. They like having that lingo. They like having that jargon. They like having that community. I think that when you and I come along and try to include other people who might not know, I can’t help but wonder if they feel like we’re letting them into the club or something like that or we’re telling them a secret, even though all I think we’re doing is trying to educate people as best we can in the simplest ways we know how.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, I think there’s this assumption that if you’re not doing activism in a certain way, that you’re undercutting the people who are doing it in what is supposedly the right way. I have been called out for even acknowledging that disability can be intimidating to other people. I’ve been told that that, in and of itself, is ableist. Yes, it is ableist, but it’s not that I’m being ableist. It’s that I live in an ableist society where I need to acknowledge that reality and meet people where they’re at to try to move them past that way of thinking. But if I don’t acknowledge that that way of thinking exists in the first place, how are we going to move past it?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, exactly. You can’t because the alternative is you go up to someone and say what, “You’re garbage for not thinking that people with disabilities can live a normal life”? That’s not going to get you anywhere.

Emily Ladau:
Right, and there’s a very good chance that people are only thinking that because that’s how they’ve been socialized to think. I mean, look at what the media shows about disability. We are surrounded by messages that disabled people are pitiful individuals.

Kyle Khachadurian:
My own parents fall for that crap sometimes.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, it’s-

Kyle Khachadurian:
You know, and-

Emily Ladau:
It’s so ubiquitous. If we can’t get away from being surrounded by that messaging, then how can we expect people to ever move forward in their thinking without first acknowledging that there’s a reason they think that way?

Kyle Khachadurian:
I don’t think that acknowledging that there’s a reason someone thinks the way they do makes the person acknowledging that acknowledgment the ableist one or the racist one or the misogynistic one or anything like that. I really don’t. You’re pointing out someone’s ableist thinking or whatever, you know? If you say to me, “Hey, Kyle, that thing you said was slightly sexist,” I’m not going to be like, “Well, you’re the real sexist for recognizing that it’s sexist. There you go.” That’s not how it works.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah. I feel super frustrated by all of this because this constant back and forth of how to do things the right way is, I think, the reason that we’re not getting as far as we would like to get. I, for one, would really love to put myself out of business and not be having these conversations anymore, but it’s not going to happen because we can’t even agree internally. I should clarify that if I do something really wrong and really ableist, absolutely call me out on that. Also, there are plenty of times where I don’t recognize my own ableism. That’s not necessarily something I’m proud of. No, I’m not proud of it, but it’s a reality. I’m not always aware of my own ableism. I’m not always aware of my own biases and prejudices. I am constantly learning. But if I am constantly learning, then shouldn’t I also recognize that other people are also learning?

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s what I really kind of don’t like. It’s because if you look at disability Twitter, you can see for days and days, you could scroll through Twitter and all of them, even us, acknowledge that there is always something to be learned and that every day is a learning process and that we’re not perfect. We all do that and we all should do that. So, if you can afford yourself that level of grace, why can’t you afford that to the people that you claim to not need to educate? They are doing it, too. You just have more information than they do because you were born this way and you know some lingo and you know some history and you know some things. Why wouldn’t you want people to know that? Isn’t that what you want? Aren’t you tired? Don’t you wish you could go home? Don’t you wish you didn’t have to tweet every day? Don’t you wish you didn’t have to write that book?

Emily Ladau:
See, but I think you were getting at this before in the same way that there might be some frustrations and it feels like you’re letting people into a secret club. I also think that some people really thrive on the activism. As frustrating as it is and as much as we wish we didn’t have to do it, I am calling myself out here. This is my job, you know?

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m not saying I want to take your livelihood away, but I’m just saying don’t you wish you didn’t have to? Don’t you wish we didn’t live in an ableist world?

Emily Ladau:
Of course, I do, and I’m not saying that I think I’m some superhero who’s here to fix it, but what I am saying is like-

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m asking everybody.

Emily Ladau:
Oh, right. Like just the more-

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m including myself in this, too.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, I would love to pack up and go home and not think about this all the time, but I do think about it all the time. So, my hope is that maybe I’ll change one person’s mind.

Kyle Khachadurian:
You’ve changed my mom’s mind.

Emily Ladau:
Yes!

Kyle Khachadurian:
She listens to you more than me.

Emily Ladau:
You know what? That’s it. I’m done. I’m packing up.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s it?

Emily Ladau:
I’m going home. I’ve peaked.

Kyle Khachadurian:
No, but really, and if you’re someone who thrives in that world, I’m not saying at all that I wish that you would stop either. I get it. For a lot of us, this is a job, a hobby, a community, a lifestyle. There are layers to this, right? But what I’m saying is just because Emily or I or anyone else might explain something in a way you don’t like or when you don’t flat out disagree but you just wish we had done it differently, there are so many activists out there with all the colors of the political spectrum in every intersectional identity that are also disabled. You’ll find your person. If you’re someone who’s new to this world, obviously we hope it’s us, but there is someone in the disability community for everybody. This is a very diverse group of people.

Emily Ladau:
And it’s so funny how in one breath, people can be like, “There’s 1.3 billion disabled people in the world and every single one of them has their own experience and you’re only the expert on your own experience,” but also, “If your experience is different than mine and your activism is different than mine, then you’re doing it wrong.”

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Emily Ladau:
What?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Well, obviously. Disabled people aren’t a monolith, except for when we think we should be, in which case we’re still not, but we’ll call you out for not being one.

Emily Ladau:
Again, I absolutely want to be called on my BS. If I’m really being ableist, tell me. Believe me, I have to do better in so many areas. I mean, I have to acknowledge my privilege here. I am a white woman. I am physically disabled. I do communicate verbally, right? I do come from a middle-class home. I have privilege in so many ways, but at the same time, what I’m trying to do is balance that paradox of having privilege and being marginalized and find ways to bridge the gaps that I so often see are making it harder for the disability community. Maybe I’m doing that wrong. I don’t know. Sometimes I find myself completely doubting everything I do, but at the same time, there are so many people who are like, “Thank you for making me think about this issue in a way that I never thought about before.” I’m like, “Okay, I changed a mind today. That’s kind of cool.”

Kyle Khachadurian:
What’s the point of having privilege if you’re not going to use it for good? Like honestly, yes, yes, you’re an educated white woman from a middle-class background, okay. Look what you’re doing. Isn’t that what you want? To lift the voices of other marginalized groups and to educate other people from your own position of marginalization, isn’t that the best use of privilege?

Emily Ladau:
I don’t want to pat myself on the back here, though. I really don’t want anybody thinking that I’m looking for a cookie.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m just saying, there are certainly worse ways you could be using it.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, sure. I guess that’s true, but at the same time, what I was trying to say before, I think, is I don’t want anybody to think that I believe I’m here to save the day and that I’m the expert on all things disability. I’m just doing my best and my best is not always good enough. I get that, but at the same time, I think when we fight each other, it makes it so challenging to figure out how to cut through the noise for the people who are just trying to find their way, either as a new part of the disability community or to better understand the disability community as an ally. If we’re giving people so much to figure out and then getting mad at them when they don’t figure it out, how are we helping ourselves?

Kyle Khachadurian:
We’re not. I agree with you. I don’t think that’s a good way to be, you know? The other thing, too, with online discourse, including this to a degree, it’s all a performance. It’s not like we don’t believe what we’re saying, but you’ve got to remember that although we have a core audience of disabled people, we don’t know who’s listening. This whole thing is a way for us, and anyone else who uses Twitter like this, for example, to make a point and get your eyes and ears on it and hope that you listen to what we’re saying.

Kyle Khachadurian:
For the people for whom this is their whole lives, I think it’s easy to forget that they, too, are performing. Every time you make a tweet that goes viral, every time we put out a podcast that gets a 300% increase on Google, it’s like we’re doing this to spotlight an issue and hopefully get more people to care about it. I don’t know about you, but I’m not thinking about people who might misinterpret what I’m saying, but not because they don’t understand it, just because it’s not quite the length to which they’d go.

Emily Ladau:
Right, yeah. I see what you’re saying. I also think that-

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, sorry, that was a bit rambly. I apologize.

Emily Ladau:
No, I think it’s a performance, but in the same way, I think you’re also pointing to a level of authenticity because when we’re talking, we, yes, are technically performing in that we’re talking for other people, but when you say that you’re not always thinking about what every single other person is going to think about what you’re saying, that’s because you’re expressing your authentic thoughts.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes.

Emily Ladau:
There have been times on this podcast where we have gotten it very, very wrong. I think that is valuable to acknowledge, that sometimes that level of not thinking about it can end up leading to thoughtlessness and carelessness, but at the same time, there’s a level of authenticity that I think it’s okay for us to have. You talking about performances also reminded me of the fact that the deeper we go into social justice holes, unfortunately, the further away from the people that we want to reach, I think, we get because we end up in an echo chamber where the people who really need to hear it are not the ones who are listening.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s something that I worry about. That’s something I really do think about because at the end of the day, I think most disabled people listening to this, most of them, understand a lot of the things we talk about it. I mean, you might teach me about disability history and we might teach another disabled person something, but I want to make sure that non-disabled people know about things like ableism and know about how little tiny things can really affect us and how saying wheelchair-bound does a lot more harm than just saying wheelchair user, you know? Things like that. So, for me, I try really hard not to, at least while we do this podcast, go too far down the rabbit hole. Does that mean I don’t hold radical beliefs as it pertains to disability justice? No, but it does mean that I would probably not say something if I thought more people would be shied away from this than come to it. I’m not hiding anything. It’s just like I want people to learn from this, right?

Emily Ladau:
I think, for me, it’s more so not that I won’t say something, but I’m going to think about how I’m saying it. I know that’s a little bit contradictory to what we were saying before, but more so, I’m going to think about how I’m saying it so that I’m making it accessible, not so that I’m pleasing everyone.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Right, yeah. That’s fair.

Emily Ladau:
I really do care if I hurt somebody and I really do care if I make a mistake. I also really do care about letting other people make mistakes and letting them know that a mistake or two is going to happen and it’s okay. It’s kind of a tough world to navigate out there and we’re all figuring it out.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Like you, listener, you’ve made mistakes. We’re not saying that we’re infallible, but you handle mistakes with grace, right? You don’t-

Emily Ladau:
We hope you do.

Kyle Khachadurian:
As long as somebody’s willing to apologize, acknowledge that what they did was wrong or hurtful or whatever, and then don’t do it again, you don’t have to forgive them, you don’t have to like them, but that’s it.

Emily Ladau:
Right. I think that’s another really good point. The responsibility is not on a marginalized person to make you feel better about your mistake and to coddle you. I think some people do think that I kind of coddle people, but I also think that there’s a point to which I will let people mess up until I know that they’ve gotten to the point where they know better. Then, at that point, I’m going to be like, “You keep messing up, you keep making mistakes, and this is no longer just a one-off. Now this is getting hurtful. Now this is getting harmful.” There’s a big difference to me between that and between giving people space to figure it out.

Kyle Khachadurian:
You can tell, though. I feel like it’s pretty… It’s not easy, like obviously it’s not the easiest thing to do, but I know you and you know me. You can tell when somebody is disingenuous right off the bat or if somebody is like, “Hey, I don’t understand this. Can you please,” you know.

Emily Ladau:
Absolutely. Also, something else that I’ve been thinking about is I really wonder how people who are on the more radical side of things engage and interact when they are not on social media. Because I feel very emboldened by the power of social media and having a platform, but it’s a very different situation when I’m out in public and somebody makes a comment. Then I suddenly realize that I don’t have a tweet thread to educate them, you know?

Emily Ladau:
Like just today, I was out with my mother and someone slowed down their car and rolled down the window and started commenting about how we’re going to get a speeding ticket, blah-blah-blah, the usual jokes. I was frustrated because it was already a difficult day and I just did not want to hear it. My mother was like, “Emily, just let it go. Just let it go. Just breathe through it.” You know what? She was right because what am I going to do, be like, “Pull over, get out of your car, and let me school you on why what you said was obnoxious”? I’m not going to do that.

Emily Ladau:
So yeah, I think these people who are super radical social justice activists, who do incredible work that is really valuable, may be very different people in person. That could be because of safety reasons, it could be because of accessibility reasons, communication reasons. I really do believe that we can and should separate out how we act in person and how we talk about things online. There’s so many people vying for attention and there’s so many arguments. Believe me, I’m not one to stop conversation. I absolutely think that there should be dialogue. I just don’t think that it’s healthy when we talk across purposes and don’t find ways to meet each other where they’re at.

Emily Ladau:
I know that there are going to be people who listen to this who have all kinds of what-ifs. I really need people to understand that I am not justifying actual garbage behavior. I have my limits. I have very firm limits on what I will tolerate.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I feel like if you’re someone listening to this and your gut instinct is to say, “But what if,” I implore you to ask yourself why it is that you think we’re the bad guys and educate us on your what-if instead of acknowledging the fact that we’re trying to be very general here and we know that there’s cases that work like the-

Emily Ladau:
Oh, but Kyle, it’s not their job to educate us.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I know, and we’re not trying to educate you. We’re not. We’re really not. It’s also entirely possible that you have a perspective that we’ve never heard and boy would we love to hear it, genuinely.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah. I know it might sound disingenuous, also because I just made a joke because I’m feeling a little sassy tonight-

Kyle Khachadurian:
No, but I’m not kidding.

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, I know you’re not. I agree with you, but I want to engage in measured conversation and I don’t really want people screaming at me on Twitter. So seriously, if your inclination is to scream at me on Twitter, it’s not going to work. It’s going to be a lost cause. Please don’t do that. I realize that I may be alienating certain people just by saying that right now, but man, I am tired.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I feel like you’ve earned a break. You’ve been through a lot this year. Haven’t we all been through a lot this year? Next year-

Emily Ladau:
2021 is a garbage year, has been a garbage year. To be quite honest, the vast majority of people who I am not friends with don’t know the half of it.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah.

Emily Ladau:
But anyway, I think when I listen back to this episode, I really am going to be like, “Wow, Emily, you were kind of being a spitfire here,” but I have feelings on this. Not because they’re really just personal. This isn’t really just about me and my book. This is a much bigger issue.

Kyle Khachadurian:
We’ve touched on this a little bit for this whole time we’ve been doing the show. I think you and your book are just a reason to really get into the weeds about this.

Emily Ladau:
I guess some people are going to be like, “Okay, well now you’re just letting the haters get into your head,” and then some people are going to be like, “Okay, well, I don’t like what you’re doing and clearly you haven’t learned anything and you still suck.” So again, can’t win.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Should we be trying to win? It’s not a competition, it’s just these are my opinions. People like them most of them time and when they don’t, they tell you, you know? It’s not a competition.

Emily Ladau:
You’re absolutely right. It’s not a competition. I’m not trying to win.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I know it feels like one. I know it feels like one. I mean, I’m not trying to discount your feelings. I’m just saying what are you going to do?

Emily Ladau:
See, but the thing is, I don’t really want to be in competition with anybody. In fact, I want to make more space for other people. I don’t want this to be the Emily show, which is hilarious because this is the Emily and Kyle Show, but my point stands. My point sits.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, this is the Emily Show, but all the other stuff you do-

Emily Ladau:
No, this is the Emily and Kyle Show.

Kyle Khachadurian:
That’s true.

Emily Ladau:
This is very much a two person effort.

Kyle Khachadurian:
It is, it is, it is.

Emily Ladau:
But I don’t need things to be about me.

Kyle Khachadurian:
I just meant out of all the things that you do, this is probably the most that’s about you. Like out-

Emily Ladau:
Right, like-

Kyle Khachadurian:
… of all the work, that you do the activism.

Emily Ladau:
I do the activism. This is me unfiltered. Nobody else has edited what I am saying, except for you do sound editing.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yeah, but I don’t edit out stuff we say. I don’t. Unless we misspeak or say ice cream when we meant to say sorbet.

Emily Ladau:
Technicalities, my friend.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Hey, they’re different desserts.

Emily Ladau:
I ate ice cream tonight. It was delicious. No, I’m sorry, correction, I ate frozen yogurt tonight. No, I did eat ice cream.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Do you guys know that Courtney eats ice cream with a fork?

Emily Ladau:
Okay, all right. I saw your Facebook post about that and you want to talk about wrong opinions? That’s a wrong opinion. Sorry, Courtney.

Kyle Khachadurian:
She also stirs with a fork, but I’ll give her that one because it’s kind of like a whisk, but I also don’t do that. I stir with a spoon or a whisk, not a fork.

Emily Ladau:
I mean, fine, stirring is fine, but what about when the ice cream melts and the fork can’t hold it?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yep.

Emily Ladau:
So, then what happens?

Kyle Khachadurian:
Good question. I don’t know because I use a spoon.

Emily Ladau:
Do you know that that post was literally a point of conversation in my house?

Kyle Khachadurian:
What?

Emily Ladau:
Yeah, I forgot to tell you this. Well, no, because you’re friends with both my parents on Facebook, so-

Kyle Khachadurian:
That is true and they’re wonderful.

Emily Ladau:
So, my dad was like, “What is this nonsense about eating ice cream with a fork?” My mom was like, “It doesn’t matter what you eat ice cream with as long as you’re putting it in your mouth.”

Kyle Khachadurian:
It very much does. I’m sorry, it very much does.

Emily Ladau:
But it’s a spoon, it’s a spoon. I think she was mostly just joking. It’s definitely a spoon. We all agree in this house it is a spoon.

Kyle Khachadurian:
See, the thing is, I didn’t want to out her because I know that people like her or dislike her, right? I didn’t want anyone to know that that’s what I was doing because I didn’t want people to be biased for or against her. I wanted everyone’s honest opinion.

Emily Ladau:
I’m sorry, do you really not think that when you were settling an argument about that, that people weren’t immediately going to be like, “Oh, Kyle and Courtney are having an argument”?

Kyle Khachadurian:
I’m sure they were. I’m just saying I wasn’t going to add to it. I wasn’t going to set it in stone.

Emily Ladau:
I want to clarify that just because I don’t eat ice cream with a fork doesn’t mean that I don’t think Courtney is fantastic.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Yes, and-

Emily Ladau:
I just don’t agree with this particular thing that she does. Herein lies the bigger lesson of the episode.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Exactly.

Emily Ladau:
People do things differently and that’s okay.

Kyle Khachadurian:
Except this, not okay.

Emily Ladau:
Except this.

Kyle Khachadurian:
This has been, or wait, no, final takeaways. Don’t eat ice cream with a fork.

Emily Ladau:
I was going to say, I feel like I just gave my final takeaway. I think we’re good. So-

Kyle Khachadurian:
This has been another episode of the Accessible Stall. If you are willing and able to donate, you can at patreon.com/theaccessiblestall. Just one dollar a month ensures that all current and future episodes of the Accessible Stall remain, what is it, Emily?

Emily Ladau:
Accessible! That means we transcribe them.

Kyle Khachadurian:
We do?

Emily Ladau:
Anyway, may we say you look beautiful today.