In Go Carolina by David Sedaris, he gets sent to speech therapy because of a lisp, and in this process, he realizes that the only ones who were sent to speech therapy were boys who had a lisp, and not girls, or any other kind of speech impediment. It was interesting for me to read it because I was put in speech therapy for not being able to say the letter ‘r’ (I was pronouncing it as an ‘l’ or a ‘w’). My cousin (a boy) also had the same speech impediment and is only a year older than me, but wasn’t sent to speech therapy and was never even recomended for it by his teachers as I was. Thinking back to it now, I wonder if it was because he didn’t have a lisp to make him ‘sound gay’ as that was the reason that boys were put in speech therapy in the Go Carolina story.
I don’t know for certain if I was placed in speech therapy for that issue because it was thought that the ‘r’ mispronunciation was characteristic of being a lesbian or not, but it is interesting how I was forced into it even though my cousin (with the exact same problem) was not. I think it could also have something to do with how he was more inclined to ‘masculine’ activities (in that he played sports and didn’t engage in traditionally feminine activities) and David was not when he was sent to speech therapy.
At this point in my life I have no memories of being in speech therapy, so I cannot attest to any trend in who was there and who wasn’t (I was in preschool when I was put in it), but I’ve always found it interesting how my cousin managed to avoid it and I didn’t, even though based on Go Carolina, I wouldn’t have been placed in speech therapy if I had been attending the same school at the same time. To this day, my cousin still speaks with that impediment, and even though the men in our family started to comment on it when he got into highschool, I can see how that only affected him a little bit, as he still has the speech impediment, it’s just much less pronounced than it was when we were younger.
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