as small as a world and as large as alone

9:06pm May 17, 2015

madeofpatterns:

funereal-disease:

See also: why I, as a neuroatypical woman, feel patently unwelcome in the social justice community.

It’s true: there’s no disability that “makes” you oppressive. There’s no disability that automatically “makes” you anything except disabled. Disabled people are people, with the full breadth of human diversity.

BUT having a disability can certainly make you any of the following:

• unable to sense when you’re creeping someone out
• unable to parse gender-neutral pronouns
• unable to realize when you’re talking over someone or taking up too much (literal or metaphorical) space
• triggered by discussions of privilege (scrupulosity, anyone?)
• triggered by angry rhetoric
• unable to keep up with the ever-changing Correct Terminology
• unable to figure out when it’s okay to joke about something and when it isn’t
• unable to pull your weight in home maintenance
  
• temporarily violent/physically aggressive
  
• other things I’m probably missing

Statements like this have a distinct undertone of “I have no problem with disabled people, as long as they don’t act disabled or anything, or force me to care about intersectionality, or god forbid inconvenience me.”

Sometimes disabled people are difficult to deal with. But you know what? That’s the nature of the beast. You can’t champion disabled people in the abstract only to turn on them the moment they display any actual signs of their conditions. That’s what I find disrespectful to folks who are disabled.

(Sidenote: of course it has to be “white men”. Of fucking course. It’s not like disabled women or people or color exist or anything. And if they do, they never, ever inconvenience anyone with their disabilities.)

people who communicate through delayed echolalia and can’t keep track of who is allowed to use which words

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