Joe Murphy

Breaking the B-B-Binaries

Open Access

Gender expression and fluency aren’t usually two things people pair together, however stammering is forced to exist on a binary in a similar way to gender. Children are always taught fluency is the inherent good while stammering is the undesirable bad, that it’s supposedly impossible to feel any other way about it. As any person with a stammer likely knows, it’s more complicated than that.

Stammering isn’t something that can be turned on and off, it never manifests the same way twice. Those who stammer even have our fluent moments. In fact, I’ve heard multiple stories of people who stammer being criticised due to apparently not stammering “enough”. This is pretty ironic considering fluent people are quick to say “oh I stammer too sometimes”, never being as fast to accept that our voices are equally as malleable.