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2:53pm July 12, 2013

allies-person:

In essence what I don’t like about a lot of “anit-ableist" discourse on Tumblr is that it buys into the uber-medicalization of everything, when I think that disability rights ought to challenge medicalization and firm boundary-drawing between normal and abnormal.  I mean, it’s complicated.  I’m not one of those “let’s not have any labels" people.  But the reification which so many people on Tumblr give to essentially constructed categories is a bit worrisome. 

I think it started before tumblr. FWD did a lot of it with regards to mental illness categories in general. Where suddenly, in particular, it became ableist to question mainstream psychiatric viewpoints of mental illness at all ever. And then that spilled over into tumblr. I remember a lot of us who had been hurt by exactly the psychiatric viewpoints being promoted, being very fed up with the main attitudes being promoted as The Truth on FWD. (And some people without my name recognition, being treated much worse than I was for pointing it out.)