as small as a world and as large as alone, igetje: femforthought: queerlilly: “without...

4:41am August 17, 2014

femforthought:

queerlilly:

“without us you wouldn’t have any rights!" without you we wouldn’t have to fight for them

Always this. Always.

"Remember that men gave women the right to vote!”

And remember that men should never have been at such a social and political advantage as to be able to literally give and take away rights from groups of people.

OMG THIS

I’ve heard this from parents of DD kids before.

“Parents are the heart of this movement,” said one. I will never forget him. He was one of the worst piece-of-work assholes I’ve ever encountered connected to the DD movement. (The DD movement is confusing. There’s a self-advocacy movement, and there’s a parent movement. And there’s overlap where both work together. And you can’t always tell what you’re dealing with.)

Anyway this guy told me:

“You self-advocates didn’t have a voice until Gunnar Dybwad came along and gave you one. You should let parents be the ones who make the decisions, and then we’ll tell you what we need you to do, if anything.”

If I had not been learning self-control I would have chucked my keyboard at his head. Loss of a good keyboard, though. As it was, I used every bit of body language I learned from how to intimidate dogs, and proceeded to get his attention by spreading my legs apart really wide, planting them into the ground, making eye contact (aggression and love are the two circumstances I can do it, and believe you me this was not love) and repeating “What about us!?!?!” over and over until he couldn’t ignore me.

And that’s when he launched into the speech about Gunnar Dybwad and how self-advocates never got anything done on our own and how parents were the heart of the movement and self-advocates just had to do what we were told.

I later found out that he had institutionalized his developmentally disabled son and only intervened to get him out after he’d been more than once beaten within an inch of his life.

I later found out that he’d illegally gotten his wife to sign over her rights to him when she was not of sound mind (he gave an account of this on a mailing list, talking about how he hoped the notary didn’t notice his wife couldn’t speak a coherent sentence and kept referring to her dementia as a “thyroid condition”). He then starved her to death on his living room couch for a week, claiming that the person she was with dementia wasn’t her anymore so this wasn’t murder. He now brings this up and said “Nobody would call me a murderer for this.” Except lots of disabled people call him a murderer for exactly that.

He has announced plans that if he ever is going to become severely cognitively disabled like his wife or son, he would go out and fake a climbing accident so that he could commit suicide but his family could still get the insurance money. Because he would never want to put his family through having the kind of relatives that he had.

He has forced his daughter into psychiatric commitment before, and thinks she still adores him totally and trusts him completely. From all anyone can tell, she doesn’t. (Many of her psychiatric problems were due to having to watch the above stuff going on around her, mind you.)

And he believes himself a champion of the rights of developmentally disabled people.

He makes me sick. Physically sick. Just to think of what he’s done to his family, and his belief that he could be the heart of anything. He barely seems to have a heart.

He terrifies me.

And apparently his line about “You self-advocates didn’t have a voice until Gunnar Dybwad came along and gave you one” is so recognizable to other self-advocates that someone was able to tell me his name based on my repeating that line alone. Ditto “Parents are the heart of this movement.”

I feel so, so horrible for his son. There are no words.

But his take on the whole thing was that parents and professionals gave self-advocates our voices, rather than that self-advocates have been doing our advocacy work for hundreds of years unnoticed, and if Gunnar Dybwad helped us get noticed, it hardly means he created us. We have been resisting and organizing ever since we have ever been put together in one spot. To believe anything else is to believe we’re stupid. We’re not stupid.

He’s one ‘ally’ I never want, ever. And he’s patronizing as all fuck, He’s the worst of the worst of the worst parent allies I’ve ever encountered. and all the worse because he doesn’t see himself as an ally. He sees self-advocates as allies to his movement, which is for parents. He sees us as people to trot out when you need a song-and-dance routine to show the “human face” of your movement, but that everything we do must be choreographed by someone like him.

It’s like when I tell people of the self-advocacy group who single-handedly closed a large institution. Everyone tells me, “It must have been the parent advocates, with some help from self-advocates.” No. Parents weren’t even involved. DD people went into the institution and talked to people there so the would be involved in their own liberation. DD people got help when they needed help, but they were always in control and they always asked for just the help they needed, nothing more. And they won. That institution was closed and its inmates made it into community living. All because of DD people, no assistance needed beyond what they asked for, from lawyers and stuff.

Want to read about it? People First Win Freedom in Tennessee. No fucking Gunnar Dybwad in sight. I mean I’m sure Dybwad was a good man and that he’s being unjustly portrayed by some people. But we did not need him in order to close this institution. And we did not need our parents tagging along either. We (I wasn’t there, I’m using we as in DD people in general) did it entirely by ourselves, with only the sort of help that nondisabled people would enlist if they needed help. We didn’t get “special” help, I’ll put it that way.

Anyway the Gunnar Dybwad line sent chills down my spine because this asshat was making it sound like like “He gave you your voice and we can take it away from you again, so do as I say.”

Meanwhile the other nondisabled people in the room were little help. They were too busy whispering about how amazing it was I could type. They’d seen me all day, pegged me as too low-functioning to type without assistance (or possibly understand anything or type at all). So while I was trying to tell this guy off, I heard whispers of “amazing” and “incredible”… and that’s when I first got it through my thick skull how people really saw my outward appearance back then. They saw me as a potted plant, and were amazed that the potted plant understood what was going around it and could even respond in words. That’s how people saw me, I realized, and suddenly my entire life since adolescence.

Also, if you want to read about 'allies’ like him, read Identifying, Educating, and Empowering Allies by Phil Schwarz. It’s got its problems, but please don’t expect me to answer for them just because I’m linking to it. You’ll be particularly interested in the section on “pseudo-allies”. (Which is what some people use the word “ally” for these days. Which pisses me off. There are real allies and without them we have no chance of succeeding as a movement. Pseudo-allies are pseudo-allies, allies are allies.)