I am a deeply sensory person who cares about love and ethics. Hufflepuff to the core. The redwoods were my first home and my heart will live there forever. I live in the sensory world, I am only a visitor to ideas and words. Oh, and my alignment? Chaotic-good.
I thought it was good that they encouraged us to be physically active in school but I feel like PE teachers were way too hard on everyone. Once a week we had a whole PE period just for running and my teacher told me that it didn’t matter if I had chronic bronchitis (I was sick like, every few months, I even had walking pneumonia once), I still would be graded on how many laps I could run in one hour, which wasn’t many. If we walked, we got yelled at and would get points taken off our grade. I even failed a semester of aerobics in highschool because I had a nasty ovarian cyst, even though I had doctor’s notes and everything. :T What was up with PE class, man.
I don’t know about anyone else’s, but I’m pretty sure what was up with mine was “pointless ableist nonsense.”
Yours too it sounds like.
i got in trouble for ~not trying~ when I was asked to do demonstrably physically impossible things
I hated Phys.Ed. class. Only class in school I got a D in regularly. You weren’t just marked for trying, you were marked on how well you did. Which absolutely favours people who are coordinated and good at sports and penalizes anyone who’s bad at these things.
Also, I am afraid of things flying through the air at my head thanks to two incidents with basket balls in grade eight. I don’t think the boys responsible even got in trouble, and I needed new glasses after the first one.
My gym teachers were so out of touch with reality that they actually claimed I wasn’t flexible enough. I’m hypermobile. However, my arms are not proportional to the rest of my body at all. So their one flexibility test, I routinely failed. Not because I was bending less than anyone else, but because my arms were too short to reach as far as anyone else. Even measuring my arms against my height, which is very simple to do, could have shown them what the problem was, instantly. But instead they recommended that I do all these stretching exercises to become even more flexible than I already was.
I could put my feet behind my head, flexibility was hardly a problem area for me, or rather it was a problem area but because I was too flexible. I actually told them that my mother was too flexible, because I knew she’d been diagnosed with hypermobility at one point, or something related to it. And they told me, “There’s no such thing as too flexible.” They actually said that. Hypermobility comes with a huge list of medical problems including potentially a reduced range of motion later in life from joint damage. But apparently to most gym teachers, there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing.
Oh also, I had a few teachers over the years who clearly wanted to be gym coaches, or who actually were gym coaches in addition to the subjects they teached. Invariably these were the same classes where I was subject to all kinds of ableist bullying beyond the usual, often instigated by the teacher. In two of those classes, the teachers even listed me as “having a great sense of humor” on my report card – which was a twisted way of saying “Mel is the butt of all my jokes and I like making the class laugh at hir, so I’ll say sie has a great sense of humor even though actually sie breaks down crying sometimes”.
And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the same teachers who did that were always the ones who made it very clear that they wanted to be (or, in fact, were, in addition to teaching their regular subject) teaching gym class. Because there’s a very particular way that the worst of gym teachers look upon disabled students (whether diagnosed with a disability officially, or just everyone knows unofficially that this person is “different”, and treats them accordingly). And these teachers do that even when they’re not actually teaching gym class at that moment.
When I see a picture of someone who looks like me, it’s usually illustrating a tragic or demeaning story.
Sometimes it’s a picture of a child, illustrating a story about how difficult life is for parents of autistic children. Or a story about how the child’s favorite thing got turned into therapy. With depressing bullying statistics.
Sometimes it’s a picture of an adult, illustrating a story about how difficult life is for parents of autistic children once their kids reach adulthood. Or a bleak story about unemployment statistics. Sometimes it’s a story about a special business or sheltered workshop for autistics that the parent is proud to say their child is involved with. With depressing unemployment statistics.
Sometimes it’s a story about how an autistic person has a special talent. Maybe they’re an artist. The story is always about how mysterious and beautifully tragic it is that autism sometimes gives people special abilities along with significant impairments. The story will not take them seriously as an artist. It will be a human interest story about autism, and no art experts will be quoted — but the headline will probably say “autism does not define him.”
This gets corrosive. It can make the world seem bleak and hopeless. It can be hard to remember that this isn’t an accurate way to describe us. That we are, in fact, more than that.
In real life, we’re people, and we do things. We do things besides be miserable or be inspiring. We have thoughts and attributes that are not convenient to the tragic plots of newspaper articles. We’re people. We do real things. And we matter.
I am not a tragic story; I am not an illustration. I am a real person. And so are you.
As someone autistic who’s been in the news multiple times I can say this is 100% true. Even with the best media people I dealt with, they generally had their own ideas about who I was and what mattered about me and what didn’t, and what story to tell about me.
Can we talk about how autism discourse often revolves around throwing people with intellectual disabilities (and other cognitive stuff) under the bus? Like I’m reading something and it involves literally saying “well at least autistic people can actually be really smart and not have cognitive/intellectual disabilities!”
First, autism and intellectual disability are not mutually exclusive.
Second, intellectual disability does not preclude meaningful lives. Intellectual disability does not mean people cannot have input on their own lives and choices.
Stop talking about it like autism is higher up on a hierarchical scale and that’s why autistic people are worth something.
People are worth something because they are people.
This gets especially intense around autistic people who use FC.
I got my head practically bitten off by a facilitator who told me that “motor planning problems aren’t cognitive impairments” and I was like “actually yes they are, they’re where thinking meets movement, that’s cognitive“. But he didn’t get it, didn’t want o get it, he just wanted to keep pretending (and passing along to his clients) this idea that autistic people’s cognitive impairments are just a myth, that autism is just almost like a form of cerebral palsy where your body doesn’t move how you want it to but you think just like everyone else.
Physical disability rights people are no better. I know someone who did a research project on disability pride in the mainstream disability rights movement, and she was shocked to find that most of it boiled down to “at least we’re not retarded”, sometimes in exactly those words.
And there are segments of the DD movement where autistic people are put at the bottom of the barrel.
From what I can tell, generally at the bottom are DD people of all kinds (including autistic people but not limited to us), and people with psychiatric disabilities, and different ones come out on top in different situations, often with people shifting around depending on the situation.
But yeah been speaking out against cognitive ableism in autistic communities since forever because it’s been a thing since forever, and a much worse thing than just about anyone is willing to acknowledge.
[animated GIF deleted because it was giving me a headache, even though it was half the point of the post, sorry I just couldn’t reblog it… it was basically a guy looking satisfied with himself, but his head jerking over and over was messing iwth my brain functioning]
This happens to me ALWAYS.
ALWAYS.
I have so many test results proving myself right, and yet some doctors refuse to learn to trust me despite my rather extreme track record in this regard.
Just recently I said I was bleeding out of my stoma to a ridiculous degree. Showed the guy replacing my tube that the toilet was full of blood, told him there was at least ten times as much blood as was in the picture. He told me the blood was actually bile and that I was not bleeding. A week later I got an endoscopy that showed an ulcer with a giant blood vessel right in the middle of it, spewing blood and blood clots. But I know that even if I go back to this doctor and tell him this happened, he’ll laugh at me at best. Because he does that. He laughed at me when I said I knew the difference betwee bile and blood, and then he literally refused to respond to anything I said the entire rest of the time we were in a room together. Literally just ignored eery word I said as if I wasn’t talking. It was incredible rudeness. But it seems like everyone around him goes “well that’s just what he’s like” so it’s supposed to be okay, there’s like this culture of excusing it because he’s a doctor or something. IDK. I’m always afraid of running into him because I just get sick of his bullshit attitude towards me, which has always varied between condescending, contemptuous, and hostile.
Does your hospital have Code/Condition H/HELP? (It varies in terminology?) Basically, if you can’t get your doctor to listen to your concerns, you (or your family) dial the in-hospital hotline and report the code, and you’re seen by designated responders who address your concerns immediately and investigate why your doctor was ignoring/dismissing you. I’ve never had to use it, but I was made aware of it last time I was an inpatient.
It has Patient Relations, which I’ve had to use multiple times, usually when I was far too out of it to actually call them myself, so my DPA ended up doing it. It was sometimes an extreme struggle even then. Luckily my main doctors all believe me about stuff – they’d be stupid not to at this point, as I said I have so many tests backing up so much stuff I’ve said that they no longer doubt anything I say. But when I end up in different departments of the hospital, I often run into trouble of various kinds. And sometimes it’s trouble that would not be worth calling Patient Relations over. But sometimes it’s life and death stuff. And I never know which it’s going to be. But I have never been able to successfully contact them myself, it’s always been done for me.
One example was the time they said that because I had a developmental disability, I would need an outside staff person with me 24/7 before they’d agree to admit me, even though I’d been hospitalized there many times before and had never caused any trouble or needed anything that different from any other patient because of being DD. My DPA called Patient Relations and I was admitted immediately. But then they immediately started trying to throw me out, and it took the combined efforts of several of my regular doctors to keep me there. And then it was a fight to get life-saving medical treatment, where even Patient Relations couldn’t help us and we had to turn to the Internet and the threat of bad publicity. (They conceded, when pressed, that I needed the treatment in order to survive. They just kept coming into my room every day, several times a day, trying to persuade me not to accept the treatment. Once people started calling the hospital, they suddenly said “You’re getting your feeding tube tomorrow.” And I only got one more bizarre visit trying to dissuade me, and even that was half-hearted on the part of the doctor.)
Then when I got the feeding tube and there were complications, they ignored my pain levels (because a part of the tube was lodged in the wrong part of my body, causing excruciating pain any time I moved at all) and ignored the fact that something could be wrong, and treated me like I was just complaining too much and that if heart patients could stand up then I could surely stand up even though I couldn’t roll over in bed without sobbing my eyes out. Meanwhile my roommate got tons of pain meds thrown at every twinge she had no matter how minor, and told stories of a procedure similar to the one I’d had, and talked about how wonderful it was that any time she squeezed their hand they’d give her more anesthesia so she wouldn’t feel the pain. (I had my procedure screaming in pain due to non-working anesthesia and was simply told “hold on” for the entire hour or so the procedure took. I was also told “You won’t remember this later so it doesn’t matter that it hurts.” I still remember that, all of it. Nobody gently held my hand and told me to squeeze if I felt pain so they could adjust the anesthetic. They just treated me like my yelling and squirming was bad behavior.)
And that was all in one hospital stay, a couple years ago. So Patient Relations was helpful for parts of it but couldn’t do anything about other parts. And this is far from the only time I’ve had to involve Patient Relations. There was the time they decided that I could eat just fine, gave me a giant fish dinner, and I puked it all up of course, but they said I was good to go home even though I couldn’t keep down any of my meds and needed IV replacements so I wouldn’t die. And then when I refused a med that was on my chart as something I was allergic to, threatened to stick it up my butt if I “refused” it. My DPA called Patient Relations and suddenly I was given a week to recover and start eating on my own, given new nausea meds, etc. (That was my first gastroparesis hospitalization, but we didn’t know back then that I had gastroparesis. They just thought I was randomly extremely nauseated.)
And there was the time I belonged in the ICU – one of many times probably – but my doctor said he would only treat pneumonia, not any of the other conditions I had, because pneumonia was what I was brought in for, therefore… none of my other conditions mattered. (Those conditions were eventually found to be gastroparesis, myasthenia gravis, and adrenal insufficiency, all of which were messed up either by the pneumonia or by the treatments for pneumonia or both.) Nobody put me in the ICU, although they did transfer me to a better ward after someone kicked up a fuss about them ignoring my needs when I was on the cardiac ward (as overflow, not as a cardiac patient – they didn’t like the fact that I was violently ill and making their quiet, sedate ward too noisy – so they simply closed my door and pretended I didn’t exist and that my call bell didn’t exist either). I was severely delirious and in no state to explain everything that was happening to anyone, and I’m lucky I didn’t die. (I know what death looks like, and it was sitting patiently next to my bed for weeks.)
And on, and on, and on. I could tell so many stories, and Patient Relations only helps sometimes, in some situations, to some degree.
Anonymous asked: surprise: people with disabilities deserve to be discriminated against because in reality they weren't meant to be born. natural selection ought to have weeded them out to better the human race, but instead they drag the rest of us down.
I’m sorry you feel that way, I don’t know how you could ever think something like this, I’m not sure how long you studied biology, but natural selection doesn’t work that way. Natural selection means that people with traits that won’t help them survive die out, and people that have mutations that help them survive better in their environment. The whole point of natural selection is for passing on genes and survival, and last time I checked people with disabilities survive and pass on genes. People with disabilities get married and have kids, they live fairly normal lives.
People with disabilities don’t deserve to be discriminated against, asking for small changes for accessibility doesn’t mean we’re asking for a million pounds, we’re asking for something that isn’t difficult, just something small to help us out.
Without disabled people we wouldn’t have:
the telephone
light bulbs
cars
the bicycle
anything by disney
Ikea
Virgin airways and Jet Blue airways
any music, films, books by any disabled people
If disabled people had been ‘weeded out’ the world would be a completely different place
This was an amazing response. However, I want to clarify something about evolution. We hear the oft quoted “survival of the fittest” because that’s what we learned in high school biology - and even then, if we were lucky to get even that much. But stand back,lovelies, because I’m about to Science:
Evolution isn’t just about YOU as an individual surviving and passing on your genes. If that was true, no SPECIES or even single POPULATION would survive past a lifetime or two.
There’s this thing called “diversity” which is necessary for evolution and natural selection to even take pace. It is literally in Darwin’s three main rules for evolution. 1. There is diversity. 2. That diversity is heritable. 3. Individuals and species with struggle to survive.
So, if nothing else, we need genetic diversity and mutations in order to change as a species. Not less.
That’s all great, you say, but what about the “weak links”????
Well, have I got news for you, friend! Even Darwin wrote about this shit! And biologists and anthropologists continue to this day to make major breakthrough studies on this concept that is integral to evolution itself.
Are you ready? It’s called “altruism”!!!!
And guess what? It is a key factor in the success of evolution! I know, right???? Being nice helps us evolve???? But its true!
You see, if you as an individual are the strongest and the best and you survive - or even have a few babies - what happens if no one else makes it? What happens if you beat out everyone else for resources and you told them “only the strong survive”? What happens when only the “strong” survive?
Eventually your species dies out, that’s that. Evolution is not about individuals or even just the Top Echelon getting by and leaving everyone else in the dust. You’re species would not make it. You would lack too much diversity, have too little individuals in your population, and nature would try to create more variation in the form of more new mutations anyway. So.
Altruism has been shown through numerous studies to be both desired by animals and encouraged.It is a key part of evolution. We essentially evolved to be altruistic!
When you are altruistic, that individual will remember and we hopefully return the favor in the future. Even if they don’t, spreading your altruism about with many individuals means you will probably get a returned favor or someone being altruistic to you in the future when you need it. We evolved with this process, to be frank, it is why we are here and it is one of the reasons our species in particular is one of the most successful. Look at species who kill each other for resources constantly - they aren’t thriving like we are. In fact, they can weaken their ranks and their overall population if they are constantly aggressive (Beta fish are a prime example of how, when taken out of the wild and put in unnatural environments they begin reacting in violent and UNNATURAL ways that lead to their lowered numbers overall).
Basically, what I’m saying is: Don’t Be An Asshole. Your evolution depends on it.
-Angry Cripple Who Studies Biology and History
In which Amy is Bill Nye, but cuter
in “survival of the fittest”, fit doesn’t mean strong. it means “fits best into the environment that houses it”
mankind has proven its ability to dominate and overcome almost every environment on this planet. we’re still working on deepest sea and insides of volcanoes, but that’s about it. mankind has the ability to adapt and modify nearly every environment - or the human body itself - to be the best possible fit.
when the environment is inhospitable due to disability, we modify our own damn selves. crutches, prosthetics, wheelchairs, walkers, canes, etc. we modify the environment with accessibility options.
we have the ability to BE THE FITTEST, no matter the environment or situation, and the fact that environments are regularly changed on a large scale to suit able-bodied people’s aesthetics, but simple modifications to suit disabled bodies and our needs are fought against is fucked up. period. there is no justification for it. mankind as a whole fits any environment because we have dominated the entire fucking planet (not infrequently to our detriment) to do so. we have the ability to terraform and people argue about ramps.
tell me that’s right.
“we have the ability to terraform and people argue about ramps”
the environment we live in is pretty artificial and made for specific humans
Like, imagine if instead of stairs, we had holes with a rope down them and you had to climb up like in gym class.
what percent of the population is now disabled? From what I remember from gym class (and these are kids, who are going to be the best off energy wise) only maybe ¼th of the class made it to the top. Probably less because we had so many kids I think there were usually maybe like 5. Everyone else got maybe halfway, just enough to be ok, or not very far at all. I bet it’s even worse then it was when I was a kid because we’ve cut recess and increased homeworks since so kids are less active. In the past when we had to be more active then we were in the 90′s there was probably a larger number of kids who could do it. Being able to climb up a rope isn’t a required skill anymore so it’s not considered a big deal if you can’t do it.
A lot of disabilities were not previously disabilities, and are only so in modern time. Ex, stuff like dyslexia wasn’t important when barely anyone could read. We are developing our world faster then evolution can keep up. It’s going so fast WE can’t even keep up, hence all the middle aged people needing to go back to college because the job market changed and phased out their old obsolete ones due to changing needs.
Tomorrow someone might invent something that flips things again and switch around who is disabled and who isn’t because it just happens to work better with people with x disability and if you don’t have x disability now you will be disabled in the future.
You have no idea who the -next stage in human evolution- is so don’t assume it’s going to be you.
Also (sorry for not reading everything above, so if I’m repeating some people’s points it’s not intentional):
Anything that destroys the genetic diversity of the human race is asking for far more trouble than you get by leaving things well enough alone. So weeding out disabled people genetically is actually destructive to the survival of the species. Not constructive. We’re such a non-diverse species genetically already. We need all the genetic diversity we can get, even when it looks negative in the eyes of some people. (Even when it is very negative by any standard. It’s still better to have that diversity than to smash it out.)
And it’s not because we make cool things that people can use, although that is a good thing.
It’s because genetic diversity is super important to the survival of the species as a whole.
And also because you never know everything a supposedly “defective” gene is actually doing for the person (the example everyone gives is sickle cell anemia and malaria resistance, but lots and lots of things work like that – more things than we’re even aware of yet).
It’s extremely foolhardy to fuck around with things you understand in only the most limited way. And even top geneticists have only a limited understanding of genetics (human or otherwise), as any honest one will tell you outright. Even after mapping the genome. We know much less than we don’t know. And we lose a lot when we pretend it’s good to weed out the “weak”.
Also, in a more sociological than genetic sense, “weak” people have always been around and caring for us has always been a part of what makes us a social species. If we did not care for each other in this way – if there was not evidence of cave people who lived to what was then old age, despite never having been able to walk or even chew food in their entire lives – then we would not be the species we are. The moment we start doing away with disabled people, treating us like mistakes who shouldn’t have ever survived, treating us as if we’re a product of “modern medicine gone too far”, etc. – we’re destroying the ethics that bring out the best in our species. Social species have to take care of each other. If we don’t, then being a social species is meaningless. Even ants will often try and help up injured ants, as my friend who used to feed ants so she could watch their behavior noted many times. Because they’re a social species too. Humans have been helping disabled people survive since probably before we were even evolved into homo sapiens. The way we treat people with the least power and the least ability to fight back if mistreated (which is true of a lot of disabled people), says everything about us as a species. Treating sick and disabled people well is a key part of being human. And also of being several other social species – nothing about humans is exceptional that way – but it’s definitely a part of being human. And we lose core parts of our humanity if we forget that.
Sebastian Haffner once said that nobody should ever be put into the position of having to defend their own existence, or construct arguments for their own existence. This is absolutely true. He was talking about Jews in the Nazi Germany he fled (with his Jewish wife), but it applies to any other target of eugenicist ideas, and disabled people (as well as poor people, people of color, and Jewish people) have always been a fundamental part of who eugenics was and continues to be targeted at. I’d even say the fundamental part, because both racist eugenics and classist eugenics were entirely founded on and informed by the ideas of ableist eugenics, and then they were all twisted together into one thing so that it was hard to see that pattern. But regardless, nobody should have to argue for their own existence, ever, ever, ever, including now, here.
I am growing increasingly uncomfortable with “ableism” as a term.
Most people don’t read neurodivergent people as ND. They read us as “weird”, or “crazy”, or “eccentric geniuses”, or “lazy”, or “cute”, or “stupid”, or “r*tards”.
And the thing is… some neurotypical people are read as every single one of those terms. And I don’t think it’s “misdirected ableism”, in the same way that a straight man being read as gay is misdirected homophobia. A neurotypical who is consistently read as weird, in the same way I’m consistently read as weird, has essentially the same experience as mine IMO.
But on the other hand putting, oh, anti-pagan or anti-otherkin sentiment in the same category that you put anti-ADHD sentiment– much less the same category you put discrimination against wheelchair users– is stretching the term ‘ableism’ to the breaking point. And I worry that framing it as “ableism” gets you to the place of “well, it’s bad to be mean to people who are weird, because they might be autistic or psychotic.” And, no. It’s bad to be mean to people who are weird. Full stop. End of sentence.
On the third hand, it definitely seems to me that physically disabled and neurodivergent people share a lot of common experiences on a structural level: the health care system; institutionalization; lack of accessibility. And I like that “ableism” highlights the similarity between those things. But I don’t think it’s a useful tool to analyze a lot of the interpersonal problems neurodivergent people face.
Ableism isn’t primarily about how people externally relate to me, though? It’s about how they react to me being disabled and needing accommodations.
I don’t get why you’d object to thinking of cognitive ableism as a thing?
I think there’s a difference between mobility impairment and cognitive impairment. I think there’s a difference between different kinds of cognitive impairment. And I think there’s a difference between being autistic and being blind.
But like, I have a blind classmate. And there are materials that neither of us can read, for physical reasons. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the reaction we both often get to that access need is meaningfully similar and that the right word for it is ableism.
Yeah.
I can’t speak to whether another word would be more useful for certain types of neurodivergent people, but…
When people told me things like “I can’t help you, you’re a cripple,” they were being ableist.
When they forced me to move my body in certain ways, and shamed me when I couldn’t, they were being ableist.
When they told me I’d never be as good as people who were born without disabilities, they were being ableist.
When they said maybe if it had been possible to know the fetus that became me would be born with a disability it should’ve been aborted, they were being ableist.
When they demanded I push my body until I got hurt and then told me publicly it still wasn’t good enough, they were being ableist.
The thing they were doing needs to have a word.
Yes. That thing.
I’ve been in a lot of situations in which people expected me to do physically impossible things, and insisted that I try over and over again.
There are ways in which my physical and social experience is different from people who have CP or whatever, but there are also a lot of ways in which it’s the same.
I’m in just about every major disability category (psych, DD, cognitive, physical, chronic illness, chronic pain, born, acquired, stable, unstable, etc.) and ableism is a thing and acting like it’s super super different for every category of disabled people is just hair-splitting at best. Like ableism is generally worse for some kinds of disabled people than others, but not always in an overall sense, more in terms of specific things (but there really is a disability hierarchy, too, although it’s complex and shifts around a lot by situation). I don’t feel like it’s meaningful to say that ableism only applies to physically disabled people. In fact I think that idea itself is incredibly ableist.
Also, I’m not sure if anyone involved in this conversation thinks ableism is a recently invented word. But just in case anyone does think so, it’s not. It’s been around since at least the eighties. And it’s been used on every kind of disabled person for a very long time.
Also some disability law acknowledges that ableism happens to nondisabled people sometimes. That’s why at least in theory the ADA applies not just to disabled people but to anyone presumed to be disabled. Just like homophobia can happen to people presumed to be gay. There are lots of people who refuse to acknowledge this happens, but it does happen all the time and it’s still ableism (or homophobia or whatever else).
Also ableism is a component part of every other kind of oppression, so it’s not just another form of oppression but a very key form of oppression. This isn’t me trying to say it’s the worst form of oppression or set up a hierarchy of oppressions, nor am I claiming that it’s the only thing at the root of other oppressions. But it is tangled in the roots of every single one, deeply, in a way that other ones or not. It’s that you can’t get rid of any single kind of oppression for real, without getting rid of ableism, and that’s not true of most other kinds of oppression. So it strikes me as particularly weird that people attack the very idea that this kind of oppression exists, when it’s one of the more key oppressions to understand if you want to be able to fight any kind of oppression at all.
(What do I mean? Sexism says women are biologically inferior in ways that have to do with abilities and that this inferiority means that they should be treated in certain ways. Racism says people of color are biologically inferior in ways that have to do with abilities and that this inferiority means that they should be treated in certain ways. Homosexuality was until recently actually officially considered a disability (and still is in some places), being trans still is – and LGB people got away from being considered disabled not by fighting ableism but by distancing themselves from disabled people – something that most anti-oppression movements end up doing rather than addressing the ableism itself, or understanding how ableism shapes even who gets considered disabled within a culture. The eugenics movement wove together racism, classism, and ableism, with ableism being the tie that bound the three together. And this is the short version. You could literally write an entire book analyzing the ways that ableism plays into every major form of oppression out there, in ways that are bound up in the cores of those kind of oppression, such that you can’t get rid of the oppression without getting rid of the ableism. And I’m not talking about ‘intersectionality’, which is also a thing but a very different thing that I’m not addressing here at all because it’s not my point. My point is that every oppression involves ranking people by ability and finding the oppressed group inferior, and that requires an ableist value system in order to do that. So there’s like… at least one core idea to each oppression that is pure unadulterated ableism. You can’t say the same of, say, sexism, which is also bound up with other kinds of oppression but on a side-to-side level not a down-in-the-core level if that makes any sense.)
I always get a lot of crap for saying the above, mostly because people think I mean just about everything except what I meant. They think I’m saying something they’ve seen before, something where a member of an oppressed group will decide their oppression is the most important kind, and that’s just not the case. I’m a member of most of the commonly-named oppressed groups, and ableism really is different in that respect. If I were doing this on the basis of being disabled then surely I’d do it on the basis of every other oppression I experience too, which I don’t, because when I dig to the bottom of oppressive ideas I don’t see every other kind of oppression located down there as consistently as I see ableism located down there. And not because I don’t know how to spot things or something.
I remember talking to someone who told me she had a disability, and I
asked what it was, and she said it was that she was black. She understood more
about ableism with that statement than most people I’ve met. Although
I’m sure she’s gotten a lot of shit for saying it, it’s true that
there is ableism against black people, because ableism is one of the
component parts of racism. I wouldn’t go around calling people of color
disabled (that’s not even close to my place as a white person), but I
totally understand individual people of color who understand ableism on
that level calling themselves disabled. I also know disabled people who
would be furious at that, but there’s people who would be furious at a
lot of things..
It’s even more complicated than this but I’m tired and can’t explain more than I already have. I do find it highly disturbing that ableism is simultaneously all-pervasive in the core of different oppressions, and routinely dismissed by members of just about every oppressed group as an idea that has gone too far or doesn’t make sense or shouldn’t exist. That basically ensures they’ll never reach their stated goal of ending those oppressions, they’ll just at best pass them on to people who can’t get away from the ableism as well as these people can.
madeofpatterns asked: Even if you were somehow faking everything (and I know you're not), you still wouldn't deserve what they're doing to you. No one deserves that.
Exactly. And I’m not. But the targeted cyberbullying is obnoxious.
And yes I’m still getting anon hate, discussing cyberbullying seems to bring the cyberbullies out of the woodwork sometimes… this time it’s a so-called autistic person claiming to be embarrassed to associated with me and asking rhetorical questions about “what’s your diagnosis NOW?” (listing two diagnoses that I have now, one that I had in the past, and one that bullies convinced me to act as if I had, claiming I had it and didn’t know it, and who got written up in my psych records for doing so, as people who should never be allowed to talk to me again)). I’ve blocked the person’s IP address but who knows if that will stop them.
I don’t know why people like that even show up in someone’s inbox. Like if someone were truly faking autism, I would want to know why. There are a lot of reasons someone might do it, many of which are pretty innocent. The only time I would get mad, is if they were doing it to infiltrate the autistic community as a reporter or something – something that actually happened once, and that person got less shit, for a shorter period of time, than I have gotten even though I’m not actually faking autism. I was initially diagnosed when I was 14 and barely had heard of autism, and I’ve had the diagnosis confirmed by people whose job is to deny as many people as possible. (They interviewed me and my parents as well as reading through the records of previous diagnoses.) Which again puts me with more proof I’m autistic than many prominent members of the autistic community who are not singled out for such harsh bullying.
Another thing that gets me about this, is that the behavior people think they’re seeing when they look back on me in adolescence, even if it really was what they think they are seeing… is normal behavior for an adolescent, autistic or not. Adolescents try on new identities that are not actually real, as part of coming to terms with who they are. That’s not all that I was doing, of course.
In my case, I was trying to survive a psychiatric system where if you didn’t act out the diagnoses they gave you, in detail, then they said you were in denial. At one point this would have delayed me being allowed to live at home again. And they could hold things like that over your head, saying you’ll be allowed to go outside if you just admit to this, you’ll be able to go with us on car rides if you just admit to that, etc.
So I learned to live down to whatever expectations I was given, and because I was thorough, I attempted to live down to those expectations even when I was alone in my room and nobody was looking. It made me feel utterly awful, like the worst person in the world, but I’ve since talked to other survivors of the psychiatric system and they report having to do similar things to get out and go home.
There was another thing I acted out that wasn’t just the psychiatric system. It was a pair of bullies who were interested in psychology and used me as their guinea pig. One of them gave me the FAQ for an online support group for a certain condition. I thought it was an instruction manual for how to behave in the support group, and again being thorough I behaved that way outside the support group too. Meanwhile they were both trying to convince me that I really had this condition and didn’t know it, so when I acted as if I had it, they praised me for “doing so well” and stuff. I thought this was how you made friends (it also followed on from some other things I’d learned that I thought were just part of everyone’s social facade because they were part of the social facade of one of my few friends, who was a cousin if not on the spectrum themselves). Eventually I realized it wasn’t real and left and apologized taking all responsibility onto myself, even though most responsibility there was not my own. Those same bullies who got me into the situation now gleefully point out that I apologized and therefore I must have just liked faking things that weren’t me. They also point out that I went right on at that point to the next thing I was “faking”, which I already described above as a product of extreme psychiatric coercion.
Bullying people for having been successfully bullied in the past. Bullying grown adults for what they did as teenagers, many of which were normal things for teenagers to do even if the weren’t doing them for the normal teenage reasons. Bullying people for doing what they had to do to survive a hostile, abusive, and sometimes life-threatening psych system. These are all much worse things to do than faking something for attention.
Not that I’ve ever faked anything for attention, it’s just not my style. I’ve said I have, usually when lacking other words to describe why I did something, but that’s pure echolalia at its finest and nobody even believed me at the time because they knew I wasn’t.
But one day I thought, “What if I was? What if I just liked to act like this for attention? Would I deserve how I’m being treated?” And the answer I’ve always come back to is “No.”
That was when I started looking into the DPW community. It’s a community of people who fetishize disabled people (D), people who pretend to be disabled (P), and people who truly want to be disabled (W). I found myself squicked out by the D, because they almost always fetishized helplessness and saw disability as part of that. Some of the P’s and W’s wanted to (or wanted to pretend to) be disabled because they fetishized helplessness, too, and that bothered me as well, but that was not the majority of what I was reading. The majority of what I was reading was a community of fakers and wannabe disabled people who had found each other and honestly reading the sort of things they did, I found them far less bothersome than I find identity policing within the disabled community. I’d far rather deal with them than deal with bullies who like to look at everyone as a potential faker, or who single out a specific person and call them a faker whether they’re really a faker or not.
There is one context where faking for attention really offends me. And that is when people pretend to be dying of cancer or something like that, and then amass all these online friends, all this support, including from other people with cancer who have limited emotional energy to expend on someone who doesn’t actually really have cancer. Some of them get a lot of money that way too. I saw someone doing that (and spotted them as fake right away, actually, which is rare as I don’t go looking for that, so it must’ve been obvious) and she caused a huge amount of devastation and loss of trust. But what got her caught was not just not meeting stereotypes of her condition (which is what people use against me – “you’re not an LFA stereotype, or an HFA stereotype, so you’re not real at all” and they usually try to claim that I’m claiming to be LFA, which I’m not), it was things that were seriously at odds with reality, like things that were not just improbable but impossible, and tons of those stacking up over time.
So I understand some instances where people fake things and it has devastating consequences for everyone around them. And people like her also make me mad because they make people like me suffer. Meaning, they make people warier and warier of everyone they meet online, and other people start getting so that if you don’t meet stereotypes of a condition you must be a faker at worst or mistaken about yourself at best. So every time a genuinely harmful faker does their thing, they’re hurting people who are not faking at all but are the most vulnerable to accusations of faking. And they’re also hurting people who are faking but not hurting anyone.
I’m sure there are fake autistic people in the autistic community. I’m even sure I know who a couple of them are. I would never say their names, and they’re obscure enough most people wouldn’t know their names if I did say them. But it gives them a community and that’s something they badly need right now. So I say more power to them, they are not doing any harm, they mostly lay low and interact the exact same way real autistic people do, so it’s not like they’re doing the kind of damage someone does when they fake dying of cancer. The autistic community is large enough to absorb them without taking damage, and they get the companionship they are looking for. And I would not expose them even under torture.
I’ve also seen at least one person where I was very suspicious of their claims of being autistic, who was (in order to cover for their own discrepancies between their story and reality) always the first to jump to accuse anyone and everyone else of being fake autistic people. That is damaging, and hypocritical as well. Anyone who promotes an atmosphere of rooting out the “fake autistic people” is someone who promotes an atmosphere where those of us who don’t fit stereotypes are the first up against the wall, as the saying goes.
That’s why I continue to speak out against this, even if it gets me bullied more. You notice how the anon haters came out of the woodwork the moment I mentioned cyberbullying? They are trying to shut me up. They honestly think that after all I’ve been through, their actions are going to stop me. Nothing can stop me now.
It will help me and others targeted in this manner, the more people who speak out, and the more people who leave supportive comments to people who have been targeted by cyberbullies, whether in accusations of faking or in other respects. Accusations of faking are a favorite to use against disabled people because they play into a suspicion most nondisabled (and many disabled) people have, of this idea that disability gets you all these perks and that therefore people like to fake it all the time for attention. Fakers are actually rare, and most people accused of faking are, like me, people who don’t fit certain stereotypes, or people who are politically inconvenient because we’re outspoken against certain injustices both inside and outside our communities, or both. I’m both.
I’m also, like many people singled out for serious targeted cyberbullying rather than the occasional drive-by, someone who has inconvenient stuff in my past on the Internet that can make me look bad if you take it the wrong way. The thing is, if you took everyone’s lives, and put it all somewhere public where it would exist forever, then everyone would be vulnerable in the exact same way. Because we all do things that look bad to people who don’t understand why we did them. And we all do things that look like one thing and are actually another. And we all do things that really were bad but that we’ve changed since then. And we all do things that look worse than they actually were, when taken out of context by bullies.
Everyone who takes the bullies’ word for it, and then sends me anon hate, has turned into a bully themselves, by the way. So, anon, whoever you are, you’re a bully. You’re a cowardly bully, too. Rethink the choices you’re making. I’ve legit come close to death many times the past year and am dealing with my dad’s death right now. One thing we both learned is that the closer you get to death, the more love matters as the only thing in the world that matters, and the more everything else falls away. You can’t love and act from hate at the same time. When it’s your turn to die, you’ll have to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself whether you acted from love enough. I hope my face, and the face of anyone else you have bullied, stares at you back until you realize what a hateful person you have been. And then I hope you turn to love in the end, because what will happen to you otherwise is not going to be good for you or for anyone you care about. Think I’m exaggerating? I’m not. I’ve come close enough to death these past few years to have a choice whether to live or whether to let go and die, and so far I’ve always had a chance to live.
Another bit of food for thought for anon: If I’m faking, why do I have a feeding tube? And I’m talking a GJ tube, not one of those nasal ones you can fake by buying one and sticking part of it up your nose. They don’t give out GJ tubes to people who don’t have tons of objective medical proof that we need one. I had to fight to get mine, not because I didn’t need it, but because they thought my quality of life would be too low once I got it. If they’d thought I didn’t need it, they could have sent me home from the hospital and refused to give me a tube.
Medicare would never have covered the tube without proof of gastroparesis (gastric emptying study), proof of severe and sudden weight loss, proof of how little I was eating even on Ensure (monitored around the clock in the hospital), proof of my lung disease bronchiectasis (high-resolution CT scan), proof of aspiration pneumonia (CT scan, x-rays, rattling lung sounds, coughing up green stuff, etc.), and all that put together got me the GJ tube. Without hard proof, they’d never have given it to me. Nobody can get a GJ tube without either needing one, or at least having all the medical conditions to need one (but that’s a mistake, not a case of faking). You can’t fake your way into a feeding tube.
So if I’m such a faker, anon, and I’m faking all these medical conditions, why do I have equipment that is hard to get even when you need it, and that can’t just be bought and installed at home? I also have an InterStim implant that I could not get without a urodynamics study and a lot of physical therapy (with objective measurements of how I did and did not progress) first. And I have a port (central line), which I could not get without multiple hospitalizations, multiple PICC lines, etc., due to bad veins, and without enough legitimately diagnosed medical conditions that they’re pretty sure I’ll land in the hospital often enough to need to use the port. (Which is used in place of an IV for people who either need things you can’t give through an IV, or, like me, whose IVs infiltrate every few hours or so when you can get a good vein to begin with which is rare.)
They don’t give you implants without proof. And you can’t give yourself implants. So if I’m fake, where did all my implanted medical devices come from? And if your answer is “I don’t know,” rethink whether you really think I’m faking things or not.
Predictably, I got anon hate from my posts about cyberbullying, why should this be surprising?
Telling me I am not autistic, have no medical problems, and should “get help”.
Funny, I got help a long time ago. I was put into the system and assigned a doctor at random who took one look at me and saw autism. He told my mother after taking a developmental history that I was autistic and an idiot savant. I was later examined by the regional center system in California, the SSI system, and the Vermont Developmental disability system, alkyl found me to be autistic/DD. And those are systems that deny as many autistic people as they can get away with. I have watched it happen to both children and adults but especially adults with no childhood diagnosis. My childhood diagnosis saved me.
The team of psychiatrists and psychologists and neurologists who diagnosed autism knew me throughout my entire teenage years, and one psychiatrist into adulthood.
I sought help for medical problems as well. I had more trouble with this as some of my diseases were rare and autistic people present differently than nonautistic people in Medical settings. We also face more medical discrimination (which anon hater perpetuated by saying I fake things for attention) than either nondisabled people or nondisabled autistic people. I know because I co-wrote a study on that topic which has made it into peer reviewed journals.
So it took awhile. But I now have more concrete documentation of the reality of my physical illnesses and disabilities than most online chronically ill people are able to say they have.
I have bronchiectasis. Diagnosed by high resolution CT scan.
I have severe secondary adrenal insufficiency. Diagnosed by repeated blood levels of cortisol and ACTH (finding not enough to measure of either, at a time when I was near death) and an ACTH stimulation test.
I have either myasthenia gravis, hereditary myasthenia, or hereditary myasthenia gravis. Diagnosed by a single fiber EMG. My mom has it too diagnosed the same way after I was diagnosed. We were both also tentatively diagnosed by response to Mestinon before our battery of testing was complete.
Early onset gallbladder disease and post cholecystectomy syndrome, diagnosed by ultrasound and surgery. It had gotten so bad because of years of doctors blowing me off that the gallbladder was looking dead by the time the surgeon took it out. He was angry.
I have autistic catatonia (which accounts for loss of most speech among other things). The symptoms matched exactly what my doctor had seen my whole adolescence. All he had to do was read the Wing and Shah (2000) paper and I was diagnosed in a heartbeat it was so obvious. I couldn’t possibly have been faking it because the one paper out when I first showed signs was unavailable to me and would not have resembled me as it was a single case study of a very different sort of presentation. The 2000 study was about lots of people and provided general criteria that I more than fit.
I have gastroparesis diagnosed by gastric emptying study. You swallow radioactive eggs and they track how fast they travel through your stomach.
I have TMJ dysfunction tied to a jaw deformity found in a panoramic scan and a hypermobility syndrome diagnosed by joints bending in ways that are impossible to fake. People who are not hypermobile can’t put a thumb parallel to their forearm or a foot behind their head.
i have a straight neck as found in xrays and cat scans, it lacks normal curvature.
I have exotropia. They look at the position of your eyes.
That’s just a sampling.
Not only that but my father was and brother is autistic so why would I be likely not to be?
Anyway I have ample proof of all of these things. They don’t give out power chairs, communicating devices, hospital beds, Hoyer lifts, feeding tubes, oxygen machines, or much of my other adaptive equipment (some of which I don’t need anymore due to treatment of my belt diagnosed conditions) to people who don’t need them. Hell, some people who do need them have a hard time getting them. So I had to have a lot of proof to get these things.
I have more proof of my autism diagnosis than many autistic people in the autistic community whose diagnosis is never equated by people like this anon.
I have far more proof through objective medical tests of my medical conditions, than most chronically ill people I meet online. They may occasionally get questioned but few of them are singled out for cyberbullying campaigns with the main target takeaway message being that they have a mental illness that makes them fake their condition.
There are people running around exactly like me who do not get cyberbullied and shunned and treated like shit. Even when they directly point out to the bullies that they are just like me yet the bullies are not targeting them.
The reason the bullies do not target most people just like me? They are not, as they claim, about exposing the truth. If they were, Anne for instance would be as heavily targeted as I am and Shi would many of my online friends. Because all of us have the traits that are signaled out on me for picking on relentlessly.
The reason?. This is not about exposing the “truth” about me out people like me. It is a personal vendetta targeted at me and only me. The reasons each person has for bullying me are different but they are united in hating me. They find me an easy target because certain of my traits make it easy to play on people’s prejudices. They picked those ableist prejudices to play on because they know ableism is utterly unexamined in the minds our most people (most people have never heard of ableism). It’s easy to paint me as fake because everyone likes to look for fake disabled people due to deeply rooted disability, racial, and class prejudices intertwined. So they are targeting me not because I am truly a fake disabled person. Even they know I’m real. Some of them used to admit I was real, back when calling me disabled was a way to call me broken, and therefore another acceptable bullying technique. Some of them even urged me to act out things I didn’t have then blamed me for “faking” them later.
So make no mistake: When you read bullshit about me not being disabled, you are not reading people determined to find the truth about me. You are reading people who wanted to attack me – and only me– as hard as they could. Accusing me of faking my disabilities is the easiest way to do it. That’s how cyberbullying works. The surface level concern trolling bullshit is just bullshit designed to rope bystanders in and make them take the side of the bullies, making their work easier.
I posted many of my medical records online once. They contained both proof of my initial diagnosis of atypical autism (just autism really but PDDNOS in the nineties was used in many people who like me fit full criteria, you can read about it in Unstrange Minds – it was switched to autism by the same doctor after the danger of long term institutionalization had passed). And also evidence that my current cyberbullies, some of them anyway, were known to my psychiatrist to encourage me to act out pathologies I didn’t have for their own amusement and that I should avoid them at all costs. A far cry from their claim of being super close friends who were not at all involved inn making me do those things.)
It helped not at all. In fact it just gave them more personal info about me. I suggest anyone considering doing their records online reconsider. It won’t make bullies Stup bullying you because they don’t want the truth. They want to hurt you. And they can get more info out off those records than you might imagine. Then they can hurt you worse. The only records I’ve posted recently are screenshots of my adrenal lab test results, because they contain no identifying information and are just a bunch of numbers.
Anyway I am sick of this. I am sick of being singled out while people with far less proof than me are accepted instantly. I don’t want them singled out either but it rankles to see these bullies accepting the reality of people who have no proof at all while all my proof means nothing. They even have accepted some of the few people I have secretly doubted. No I won’t say who. That would be gossiping and my doubts are best kept to myself. They serve no purpose except in my personal relations and how I choose to be wary at times.
But this anon hater is not after the truth about me. They just want to bully and hurt me and calling me a fake is, as they see it, the easiest way to do so. They say I’m not autistic and have no medical conditions. I was diagnosed with autism when I barely heard of it. There may be no objective tests for autism but I was given tests in which scored in very typical patterns for an autie. But Medical conditions?. Objective testing galore, most of which can’t be faked, and I “passed” tests for practically all of my diagnoses. Very objective unbiased tests. Shi claiming I don’t have Medical conditions it’s laughable to anyone who’s seen my medical records.
Which, by the way, fact checkers insist upon. If they hadn’t seen my test results they might not have believe me, because of my stalkers. Seeing the test results, as well as objective proof stalkers were lying about really basic information, meant I’ve never been denounced as a fraud by the media. I fact CNN’s Sanjay Gupta addressed this manufactured controversy and strongly endorsed my diagnosis. They required tons of proof including interviews with people who knew me in childhood and childhood records. They could have easily denounced me if they had any sense I wasn’t real. They didn’t. They said I may be atypical (never claimed otherwise) but I’m definitely autistic.
All that and some people still believe cyberbullies over objective testing. If that’s you, leave me alone until you’re willing to become a decent human being. Because all this stuff is hate and you are hateful if you get mired in it and act on it by approaching me about it.
Y’all do realize that in real-life disabled people just…exist, right?
Most of us do not come with a Matt Murdoch origin story. We’re just here, the way we are. Real life doesn’t give us a reason.
When you say this, you’re basically saying that unless you can justify our existence, our stories don’t deserve to be told.
It’s funny, because most fellow writers I know are on a constant quest for some kind of accuracy. But that shit? It ain’t accurate. It’s not truthful to have disabled people only exist when they can serve a purpose, or you can give them a backstory angsty enough to fuel their story arc, or whatever else. That’s not how life works.
Sometimes the guy working at the supermarket just happens to only have one arm. Sometimes a girl in your LGBT group just happens to be in a wheelchair. Sometimes the person next to you in class just happens to be autistic. Shouldn’t fiction reflect that?
Why can’t the reason just be “I want to tell a story about a disabled person”?
Natasha McKenna was fully restrained when 6 officers tased her 4 times back in February. Natasha was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 12 and all 6 officers were fully aware of her mental health history and her deteriorating mental state at the time of her murder.
Despite all of this, Natasha’s murder has been ruled an “accident”.
Click here to let Sheriff Stacey Kincaid know how you feel about the cover-up of the murder of Natasha McKenna. Sheriff Kincaid is in charge of the 6 officers who murdered Natasha.
703-691-2131: Call Fairfax County Sheriff’s office’s non-emergency line and let them know how you feel about the cover-up of the murder of Natasha McKenna.
Click here to file a citizen’s complaint in the murder of Natasha McKenna.
703-246-3251: Demand the public release of the video of police torturing and executing Natasha McKenna. Call in requests to Lt. Steve Elbert.
sheriff@fairfaxcounty.gov: Email the Fairfax County Sheriff’s office and let them know how you feel about the cover-up of the murder of Natasha McKenna.
The last known words of Natasha McKenna were:
“You promised you wouldn’t hurt me!”
Horrified not surprised but horrified. Cos test you bad if you’re black, bad if you’re crazy or really assumed crazy, worse if you’re both, she didn’t stand a chance. This fucking world with fucking white cops who think they own this fucking world.
Note especially for white and/or nondisabled people:
She was not just a crazy black woman. She was a human being. Being crazy and black don’t contradict her humanity, but I bet a lot of people see her more as symbol than person at this point and if like to head that off at the pass.
I don’t know her. But I know she had things she loved, things she hated. Favorite tv shows or maybe had reasons she never watched tv. Same with music, games, even toys (whether adult or child oriented most of us have our toys) She likely had people she loved and who loved her. Maybe pets. She had things that made her unique. And now all of those things have been cut off from ever expressing themselves in the future.
Remember that, if you remember anything. And remember, especially if you’re white and/or nondisabled, that none of these things are contradicted by being black and disabled. They tried to make her an unperson. Don’t let them.
Autistic people and other people with cognitive disabilities are often interpreted as doing things for attention, whether or not that explanation is plausible.
For example:
Alice is autistic. She flaps her hands.
Hand flapping is part of Alice’s body language. She moves her hands to express a large range of thoughts and feelings, just like some people move their facial muscles to express a broad range of thoughts and feelings
Alice also sometimes flaps her hands to calm down when she is overloaded
Bernice is a behaviorist. She is distressed about the fact that Alice flaps her hands.
Whenever Alice flaps her hands, Bernice stares at her, and pays intense attention to the fact that she is flapping her hands
Bernice notices that every time Alice flaps her hands, Bernice pays attention to her
Bernice concludes that her attention is reinforcing Alice’s flapping behavior
Bernice concludes that Alice’s hand flapping is an attention-seeking behavior
Bernice puts Alice on a behavior plan based on ignoring her whenever she flaps her hands
Behaviorists and others make this mistake a lot. They very, very frequently assume that the fact that they are paying attention to something means that it is being done to get their attention. It doesn’t. It just means they’re paying attention.
Starting at someone whenever they do something doesn’t mean that they’re doing it because they like being stared at. It just means that you’re staring at them.
tl;dr Stop calling everything attention seeking behavior. The fact that you’re paying attention to something doesn’t mean that someone is doing it because they want your attention. Not everything a person who has a developmental disability does is about you.
Obligatory cringeworthy Girl Scout camp for disabled kids (and nondisabled kids, but you couldn’t tell the difference, at least I couldn’t) patch says “come fly with us” and embroidered picture of a kid in a wheelchair holding balloons making them fly out of the chair. Camper reactions to it ranged from “meh whatever”, to “WTF are they serious?”
Favorite moment: Playing on top of spaghetti with a powerchair user as the meatball since she could roll… And she turned on her fastest speed and started trying to run people over. Which I would do too if anyone hung a sign around my neck saying”MEATBALL” in huge letters as my entire “costume’
…are so often staffed by people who wouldn’t know an emergency if it bit them in the ass, and if it did bite them in the ass they’d probably just pretend it didn’t happen.
(A staff person accidenatlly walked out with my new debit card this Friday. Besides the inherent obvious problems there, bills I auto-pay with my debit card were starting to bounce, and there was the very real possibility that my drainage bag I ordered (I’m out of ones that don’t leak again, and doing very creative things to avoid getting drenched every night, with varying degrees of success) could have not gone through, and drainage bags are literally life and death.
The guy on the phone only decided to contact the guy who accidentally took my debit card after we told him about the drainage bag. Apparently bill payments bouncing isn’t a big deal, and neither is any “online purchae” even if it’s an online purchase of an item that literally can keep me out of the hospital and away from dying.
Another reason I usually stay away from LGBTQ Community Centers
CW: Racism, ableism, child molesters, police, when “your” community isn’t.
So there was this guy who was on the board, and always seemed to be at every activity. The man was an asshole. Everyone knew itbut nobody stood up to him. I remember him talking about how the KKK was just about having picnics and get-togethers for white people.
And there was a woman, she had a psychiatric disability and could not pass for neurotypical if she tried. And she didn’t try. And this guy would engage her in pointless cruel arguments over whether she had a “motorcycle” or just a “moped”. Anyway one night he was bragging about how he was going to look charitable by buying her a TV, bu that his real purpose was to keep her out oof the community center. He talked about how it should be legal for parents to murder their severely disabled children or something along those lines. And whiel we were reeilng from that, he told us that pedophiles were just another misunderstood sexual orientation and our society wasn’t ready to handle that.
My friend who took me to the community center wasn’t sure whether she was straight or bi, and this becomes important in a minute.
So when he says the pedophile thing, I ran across the roojm and crouched behind a shelf so I didn’t h ave to look at him. My heart was pounding and I think i was having a panic attack if not a flashback.
He said “See, society isn’t ready to handle pedophiles.”
And my friend was like, “Mel was molested, you asshole” or something along those lines.
He said, “See, she’s too close to the issue to be objective about it. And this isn’t even your commuity center, you said you didn’t feel like you could label yourself. This place is for gay people.”
At the end, I was showing off a button I had bought there. I bought it not knowing its history. It said, “Riots not Diets, Fat Dykes are Revolting, Expect Something Big.” I loved it and bought it on the spot. At the time I was definitely, as now, in the Death Fats category. But even a thin person could wear that button, it’s not like it declared a size-based identity, it just made a lot of hilarious size acceptance puns.
Anyway, I’d found out that a friend had designed it in the seventies or eighties. I wore it to keep something of her close. Like the dad-shirtss, I related to people through objects. And Mr. Gay Asshole Dude starts criticizing me for wearing it when I’m “not THAT fat”. (I weighed as much as I did when I started getting fat anon hate. I assure I was that fat, this guy was just fatter than most fat people and judged us against his standard.“
I experienced the criticism as an attack on my friendship with the woman who designed it – my second mother, as we call her in my family, because when I grew up she took up a lot of parenting duties my parents didn’t have the knowledge to prepare me for the world as a severely disabled adult who needed services and SSI/DAC to survive.
So I said "But she is that fat, the woman who made the button.”
He also said he’d seen an autistic boy on TV and I didn’t look like him. I had half a mind to tell him he didn’t look like Dame Edna so he couldn’t be gay. (Yes, I know Dame Edna wasn’t gay – know because I know a woman he apparently molested, in a long string of others – but the point is television caricatures are not reality.)
And I left.
And I got so upset I had a meltdown on the bus for home: Two drivers (one in training) asked me two separate contradictory questions, and I started screaming and banging my head and finally froze and couldn’t move . The cops were called, and they spent a long time trying to work out if I wss male or female. That was their top concern. Then they started wondering if I was beeathing or not. After they determined that I was, they found my Medic-Alert bracelet, who connected them to my dad, who said take me home, don’ take me to the station, don’t take me to the ER. So they closed off the whole bus and drove me home in ii, making me feel like a waste of resources. This was after they called my home number a zilliion times expecting it to be a group home, not an apartment.
I kept myself amused by thinking about Cal Montgomery’s “Critic of the Dawn” because it never would occur to them I would be able to think about Bruce and Mary, and how they were treating me like Bruce, and my place in disability history.
The only upside to this was I’d had enough bus incidents, and this was the final straw, that the county just automatically let me use paratransit from then on. Which had its own problems, but it worked.
But seriously between that guy and some others… I reported him to the board, and they said everything he did was out of line except the comments about disabled children, because that was a “matter of personal opinion”. That’s always the way with disability discrimination, even when it’s identical in all but name to other kinds of discriminatio, it’s somehow okay when we’re disabled.
With all that, I stopped going to that place very often, and only when I had kava spray on me. (An herbal anti-anxiety med that came in a form you could spray under your tongue. That stuff helped me survive some brutally traumatic situations.)
Feminist blog that is apparently popular writes post explaining why mainstream feminism perpetuates feminism. Post is written by a disabled woman.
All of this is well and good, but the first and most prominent part of the article is all about language, including metaphorical language. Sigh. Are we still at the point where language is considered the primary issue?
To be fair, there was a part about accessibility—though it wasn’t as specific as it could have been, IMO. So it wasn’t as though the author completely reduced the issue to language.
All the same, the relative weights and placement of these sections are pretty telling.
I get it. It’s much easier to tell people what words and phrases they shouldn’t say than to tell them to make their events accessible, start having sign language interpreters, etc. But if we don’t even make some kind of effort, then these things sure as hell aren’t going to happen.
Reblogging because this commentary post seems right on, although haven’t read the post it’s responding to.
Completely off-topic WTF the update seems to have broken xkit’s ability to automatically add the same tags that were being used in the post you were replying to. Hey tumblr, I was using that!
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1:12am
August 4, 2015
129 notes
Anonymous asked: surprise: people with disabilities deserve to be discriminated against because in reality they weren't meant to be born. natural selection ought to have weeded them out to better the human race, but instead they drag the rest of us down.
madeofpatterns asked: Even if you were somehow faking everything (and I know you're not), you still wouldn't deserve what they're doing to you. No one deserves that.