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Yep. President Biden Stutters. So What. [1]

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Date: 2024-06-08  

Earlier today a community member named Alonso del Arte posted a story on KOS www.dailykos.com/...on how Tom Fitton, a founder of the right-wing Judicial Watch, got all bent out of shape, accusing the White House of releasing an inaccurate transcript of President Biden’s interview with Robert Hur. Hur, you will recall, accused Biden of seeming detached and out-of-it and called him a slow old man. He also could not defend the accusation in a congressional hearing.

The inaccuracies Fitton cited consisted of using a lot of filler words (uh, um) and some repeated words and syllables, which were left out of the transcript of the interview. It seems that Fitton homed in on what may be part of President Biden’s stutter to try to make him look incompetent.

It’s no longer news to point out that Biden stutters. Big deal. Those of us who consider ourselves to be members of the “stuttering community” sometimes wish that he would just up and say so in some sort of official statement. Truth is, though, that would not defuse the issue for those who WILL pick at each and every repeated sound or filler word or pause. He has certainly been very up-front in his public interactions with both kids stutter, such as his very public interviews with young Brayden Harrington and an even younger boy named Harry just last March, and with adults who want to write about it.

Some of the infelicities of speech that Fitton accuses Biden of covering up are actually probably examples of what we in the speech therapy field often refer to as “normal” or “non-stuttered” disfluency. And yes, even people who stutter noticeably can also engage in “normal” disfluency. Experiment: ask someone nearby what they were doing on April 17, 2016. Ninety-nine chances out of 100 they will wrinkle their brow and say, “Um...uh...2016? Aah, I, I don’t really remember.” Then they might try to guess, for example, “Was that Fred’s birthday party?” or some such. That’s not a sign of dementia. In fact it’s a sign of a very healthy pruning of irrelevant information from one’s memory bank. It is very, very normal to forget nonsalient and inconsequential information.

It’s more than a little distressing, though, that people who want to tear President Biden down choose to pick on his speaking style rather than his policies, most of which are hard to argue with. They are playing off stereotypes that some of us find maddening, and plain wrong.

There are many studies in the professional speech pathology literature that underscore the prejudices that are abroad in the general population against stuttering and stutterers. Stuttering is supposed to lead to diminished opportunity, diminished quality of life, social anxiety, increased general anxiety, social isolation, and a host of other ill effects. And it does: there are a bunch more studies that do in fact show these consequences. But then one wonders whether that catalog of prejudices doesn’t in some way exacerbate those effects and turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Those prejudices are countered by studies on the effect of resilience on the life journeys of people who stutter. President Biden is a supreme example of a resilient individual. A trait that could have derailed many of his ambitions didn’t stop him. That speaks to great internal strength.

In the last ten to fifteen years, a new way to look at stuttering has developed in the speech pathology world, and among stutterers themselves. Taking a card from the “neurological differences” deck, stuttering is now sometimes presented as one of many natural differences in the way people are wired. This started in the world of autism, and I am sure that many on KOS who live along that spectrum can attest to the impact of such a positive change.

There is even a movement among speech pathology experts to drop a tendency to define stuttering by what it is not. Rather than calling the subfield “fluency,” this movement simply calls it “stuttering.” There is even some rejection of the “people who--” wording, with a preference to call stutterers just that — stutterers. Moreover, this movement takes a lot of its cues from people who live with stuttering on a daily basis. The specialists who follow this line of reasoning honor stutterers as the real experts.

That is a sea change from as recently as twenty years ago. Of course there are those who disagree, but the followers of this new way of approaching the issue are not put off by the disagreements. Not in the least.

One result of this is a movement away from trying to rewire stutterers to become superficially fluent speakers. There is a growing emphasis on teaching them (us) to become good communicators, stutter or not. Superficial fluency is fragile. I know too well how sudden and surprising a “relapse” can be, and it’s a whole lot easier to just own the stutter and keep on trucking than to try to “fix” what isn’t broken. This is explained very well in an opinion piece in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, the research organ of ASHA, the professional association for speech and hearing specialists. It’s called A Point of View About Fluency Seth E. Tichenor, Christopher Constantino, and J. Scott Yaruss. A synopsis is available free on pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/… (Unfortunately, like most “scholarly” articles, getting the whole thing is an arcane and rather expensive process, but that’s another subject for another article.)

There has also been a burgeoning of “stuttering pride” movements and organizations. The flag above is just one example of an attempt to own the stutter and to make the prejudices irrelevant. The picture on top of this article shows a person waving the recently designed Stuttering Pride flag atop Hadrian’s Wall on the border between Scotland and Ireland. A quick websearch using the search terms “stuttering pride” or “stuttering self-help” will return a whole lot of organizations and ads for a lot of stuttering swag.

It’s a long, long way from “The King’s Speech.”

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