#exwaldi

He said of L.K. and kids like her "The girl L.K. in class 1...is one of those cases that are occurring more and more frequently where children are born and human forms exist which actually, with regard to the highest member the ego, are not human at all but are inhabited by beings who do not belong to the human race." He goes on to say that kids like L.K. are "not human beings at all but demons in human form."

Given some of the examples Steiner lists, it's an open secret in Waldorf/anthroposophy circles that he is talking about developmentally disabled children.

I am developmentally disabled. Autistic, specifically. A frequent trope invoked by parents of kids like me is that their real child was "stolen" and "replaced." The implication being that we aren't their real children, we're Something Else. Something not quite human, just like L.K.

Waldorf supporters will often claim that survivors take this quote out of context, that it's a metaphor and no one really thinks this is true.

But as a DD kid at a Waldorf school, it couldn't have been clearer that my teachers did believe it. (as an aside, even if it was a metaphor, it would still be disgusting and ableist and dehumanizing and demonstrate a deep hatred of disabled children)

For one thing, I was literally told this several times, that I was not human. That I was a monster. A demon. Not a person. That I had no soul. Because Steiner said so and he was "clairvoyant" so he must have been right. Because in a cult, you don't question shit like that.

The twisted, appropriative Waldorf take on "karma" was also at play. Other kids (the normal, human kids) were encouraged to either bully me or not interact with me at all, because being nice to me or even basically polite would hurt their "karma."