fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

I don’t get why people think they can catch you out on something like

“You said you couldn’t do X, but then you did Y!”

Like, one of the main things disabled people are trying to explain to the abled world is that our experiences are nuanced. We can do some things and not other things. We can do some things some of the time but not all of the time. Sometimes our abilities change over time. Sometimes we have the same diagnosis as someone else but not the same abilities and limitations. Sometimes we were misdiagnosed and we get correctly diagnosed later on in life. None of this is contradictory, none of this should be controversial to talk about.

Trying to call someone fake because they don’t fit a stereotype and don’t stay exactly the same their whole lives is antithetical to what disability activism is striving for, and it holds disabled people to a much higher standard than abled people to have our lives “make sense” to people who are biased and willfully uninformed.

Abled people are allowed to grow and change without it calling into question their entire life history.

Basically, being a disabled person speaking about disability in a public space means getting constantly subjected to “last year you said you were thirty, this year you said you were thirty-one, WHICH IS IT OBAMA?” type scrutiny. This is garden variety ableism, it’s not new, it’s not original, and it’s not any different when people think they’re harassing fakers for the good of “REAL” disabled people.

If people weren’t so suspicious of disabled people categorically they might actually learn something about disability.

All this does is make disabled people afraid to speak at all. After all, what if they see themselves in the latest victim of the faker hunt? Doesn’t that mean if they don’t talk about their disability very carefully- try very hard not to upset anyone’s preconceived notions of what their disability “should” look like- that they’ll be next? And when we have fewer voices in our community, less people sharing information about the nuances of disability, then we lose something important. There is nothing about trying to oust someone as a “faker” that isn’t toxic for disabled people as a community.