If you dare come at me about banning straws, I will throw you into the sun cannon. I’m disabled, I’m crippled, I need disposable plastic straws, and all those pricey ridiculous alternatives aren’t working as well. Plastic straws were invented for the disabled.
Way to shit all over a vital access need because you think straws are worse than corporate greed.
We all care about the turtles, the seals, the oceans, obviously. Notice how the easiest thing to yell about was something that would barely affect anything but appealed heavily to emotional discourse.
The disabled community is huge, and it can be joined by anyone. Most of those As Seen On TV products were invented for us. Society still mocks us and ignores us, and often outright harms us in multiple ways.
Communicate better. Listen better. But stop putting us out in the cold because you are inconvenienced by our simplest needs.
Straws aren’t killing the planet, its animals, or people. They’re a microscopic fraction of an iota of a percentage of the problem. You want to do something? Ban plastic fishing nets. Anything else is just a hollow feel-good gesture at the expense of real living disabled people.
Society either criminalizes & dehumanizes disabled people, or accuses them of cheating the system. We are either second class citizens, or liars and thieves.
The accusations vary based on what is most likely to allow privileged parties to shirk the social responsibility of allowing disabled people to live and participate in society as equals human beings. The easiest way to turn the public against its minority citizens is to insist they are undeserving.
We are inconvenient. In their eyes this is an inexcusable crime.
“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Reblog for disability commentary.
That last paragraph is absolutely important.
“How come nobody ever heard of ‘dyslexia’ until widespread literacy became a thing?”
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
hey if you do shit like this i want you to fucking unfollow me right now, invisible disabilities exist and the people with them need accommodations like disabled parking
If you want to help disabled people, but refuse to acknowledge invisible illnesses exist/ demand proof of an illness, you’re not really for disabled people
Do not even speak to me if you do this. You have no idea who is and isn’t disabled. Placard up? Then theyre legal to be there. I just went through two years of trying to get the damn thing and I am gonna USE IT.
I know I don’t “””look””” multiply disabled. That’s not your call to make. I will definitely lose my attempt at charitable and zenlike calm if I EVER catch you doing this sh*t. I am still fully capable of ‘taking you to the cleaners’ as it were. I will collapse afterward, because Severe ME/CFS, but I WILL STILL DO IT.
Is anybody else bitter that their disability went undiagnosed their entire youth and was treated like a behavioral/personality flaw because they got good grades?
I don’t get seasonal depression, I just get slightly sleepier and more irritable and mopey when I don’t get any sunlight, but when I said this to my doctor she was like “you should still get a lightbox” and I did and now I have way more energy.
The moral of the story is, if you spend time thinking to yourself “well I don’t actually have [diagnosable problem], I have [milder version that I can just ignore]”, you could instead of just ignoring it get the accommodation for the problem and see if it improves your life. I do not expect to remember this next time I “don’t actually have the real problem”, but maybe eventually I will learn.
We treat accommodations like something that you can only have if you’re really really desperately suffering and cannot function at all without them, but that’s… really really not the case. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Not to uuuhhh highjack this post, but I have some experience with this. Not only does it corroborate the above but I have found that even you don’t have any need for whatever accommodation that also shouldn’t bar you from getting one if you just…
want it
see years ago my grandmother was diagnosed with cancer, and as happens with progressing cancer her mobility was drastically reduced. To help combat this and allow her to retain independence at home Papa (my grandfather) got a shower chair. This is about as self-descriptive as it can get, it is a chair made of metal and plastic that sits in your shower or bathtub. I’m sure those with physical disabilities are already quite familiar with them, for those of you that aren’t just google it.
Eventually my grandmother passed. A couple years after my dad had to stay at Papa’s house for a couple weeks, for his own medical reasons. While there he discovered that Papa had kept the chair. And while Papa was old he was hardly infirm, he didn’t use a cane or have any severe mobility issues. Certainly none that would have affected his ability to stand in the shower. The conversation went more or less as such:
Dad: Why they hell did you keep the shower chair, dad? You don’t need it
Papa: Kevin, you wait until you use it. Then you’ll know why I kept it.
My dad was disbelieving tbh, to him chairs in showers when you don’t need them was a thing that like. Lazy rich people had. wtf could be so great about being able to sit in the shower? Why would an able-bodied person even need to? it’s a fucking shower? wash urself and then get out. Then he used the chair, and according to him it was like he’d had a proper religious revelation. Shortly after his return home (tbh the amount of time it took for him to take a shower sans chair) my dad went out and bought a shower chair.
The ensuing conversation with my mother went as such:
Mom: Kevin why did you buy that? We don’t need it!
Dad: Just use it once, this will change your life.
And it did. After using the chair for the first time my mom straight up wanted to know why they had never thought to get a chair for the shower before. Ever since we have had a chair in the shower.
It has proven itself invaluable.
Exhausted but covered in grime from yardwork so you HAVE to wash before doing anything else? shower chair
Don’t have the spoons to stand in the shower? shower chair
Leg/hip/back injury slowly getting worse over time making standing for long periods a difficult matter? shower chair
Home from work and just want to shower but your feet are killing you? shower chair
can’t keep your balance when masturbating in the shower? shower chair
want to write fic in ur head without your feet starting to hurt because you maybe spent a little too long standing there in spray? shower chair
disassociating? shower chair
gotta shave your legs? shower chair
crying because you’ve now realized how much easier being able to sit down and prop up a leg makes shaving while in the shower? shower chair
I have no current mobility issues, and yet if I had to move house tomorrow a shower chair of my own would be one of the first things I purchase for my own home.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this could make my life easier but do I really need it?” And y’know what maybe you don’t need it. Maybe you don’t need that accommodation, but maybe it would make your life easier anyway. When it comes to things that you keep in your home for personal use does it really matter? Besides there is always the very real chance that buying it now, when you don’t’ need it but can afford it, will save your ass down the line when you suddenly do desperately need it.
Normalize the accommodation so that the stigma behind not using it is eroded.
the idea that “technological advancement” should strive for the elimination of mentally ill, autistic or physically disabled people, instead of easier and better accommodations that allow us to live healthy and fulfilling lives, is ableist
I don’t understand what this post is saying…medicine should stop striving for cures because it’s discriminatory towards sufferers of mental and physical illness or disability?…um
Hi, sorry to butt in again but I’ve been working in disability for two and a half years as well as being disabled myself, so perhaps I can clear something up. There are two models of looking at disability. There’s the old model, the medical model, which sees disability as something inherent in the person – a person who uses a wheelchair is disabled because their limbs don’t function in the same way as other people’s, for example. Then there’s the new model, the social model, which sees disability as a symptom of society, so a person who uses a wheelchair is disabled because society does not fully cater for people in that position (think, for example, about how many buildings, transport systems etc. don’t have step free access).
You’re thinking about disability in terms of the medical model. The issue with this is that many disabled people don’t. For example, for many autistic people, their autism is an inherent part of who they are – it shapes their behaviour, mentality and personality to an extent that without it, they would lose all sense of their identity. Suggesting that they should be cured suggests that there is something inherently faulty about them – that who they are is bad and wrong and they need to be turned into a new person, instead of wider society being educated about autism and there being less pressure to behave and process information in a certain way.
Now, some disabled people do want a cure. I suffer from joint hypermobility syndrome, a chronic pain condition which makes everyday living very unpleasant a lot of the time, and I would love for that to be cured, but that is because only the medical model can apply to me. There is nothing that could be changed about society that could make my condition easier to live with, the only way my life could be improved is if my joints stopped hurting. Also, my condition doesn’t affect who I am other than hindering me due to the constant pain – without it, I would still be me, just more comfortable.
Please listen to disabled people. We all have different perspectives on and understandings of disability. When someone says that they don’t want to be cured (or that they do), please listen to them and try to understand why. It’s only a cure if it’s genuinely going to help the people it’s intended for, and the people it’s intended for know whether or not it will better than anybody else.
This is one of the very best breakdowns of the different models I’ve ever seen. Thank you! 🙂
This week, the Office for National Statistics has added ready-made mashed potato to the UK’s official shopping basket, which it uses to measure inflation, and people are up in arms. Who buys a pre-chopped onion that costs three times as much as a whole one? How lazy do you have to be to choose a frozen omelette over a couple of eggs?
These kinds of convenience foods are an easy target. But for the 13.3 million people in Britain with disabilities – and those living with arthritis, chronic illness, recovering from injury or surgery, or undergoing cancer treatment – convenience foods aren’t just convenient: they are a lifeline.
This is an issue close to my heart. I’m a professional cook, but I also have a chronic pain condition, and there are occasions when I can’t even hold a knife. In times like those, I’m never going to opt for the impenetrable whole butternut squash over one that has already been diced for me.
