Month: September 2017

eatingcroutons:

black-to-the-bones:

Each one of these women has an amazing story to tell, but we know nothing about them. This history is hidden from us, because they are women of color. 

Their names are Dr Anandibai Joshi, class of 1886; Dr Kei Okami, class of 1889; and Dr Sabat Islambooly, class of 1890. 

Dr Joshi was the first Indian woman to earn an MD; her Wikipedia page has the broad details of her life story. She argued that she should go to medical school due to “a growing need for Hindu lady doctors in India”, and was apparently the only student with the stomach to last through a demonstration autopsy of an infant. She died of tuberculosis in 1887, aged just 21 years old, but was such a remarkable figure that her first biography was published in 1888; since then there have been multiple biographies, a novel, a play, and a Hindi serial about her life. Drexel University has quite a few more documents about her in their archives.

Dr Okami was the first Japanese woman to earn a degree in Western medicine from a Western university; she also has a Wikipedia page which gives an overview of her life. Among other things she was appointed to head the gynaecology unit at Jikei Hospital in Tokyo, but resigned after Emperor Meiji visited the hospital and refused to receive her because she was a woman.

Dr Islambooly is the least well-known; her life was mostly undocumented after she returned home to Syria as the country’s first female physician. She was apparently a Kurdish Jewish woman who later moved to Cairo, where she died in 1941.

Here’s an article about their medical school, mentioning some of the other pioneering women who attended it.

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.

About speech abilities

iamthejohnwatson-a:

realsocialskills:

Some people can speak easily.

Some people always have difficulty speaking.

Some people never speak at all.

Some people can speak, but at a cost that’s not worth it.

Some people are better off communicating in other ways.

Some people speak sometimes, and type other times.

Some people have words all the time; some don’t.

Some people can speak fluidly, but only on certain topics. (Just like how one can be fluent in some topics in a foreign language, but be unable to read the news).

Some people lose speech at certain levels of stress.

Some people rely on hand movements and stimming in order to find words.

Some people have a monotone and convey tone through motion.

Some people make a lot of mistakes with words, and rely heavily on tone to make themselves understood.

Some people rely heavily on scripts, and only sound normal when they stay on-script.

Some people use phrases from television.

Some people communicate by repeating themselves, and tend to be perceived as not communicating.

Some people say a lot of words they don’t understand, and are perceived as having meant them.

Some people substitute one word for another a lot, and don’t always realize it.

Some people can answer questions even when they’re having trouble initiating speech.

Some people who find speech easy sound odd.

Some people who find speech difficult sound normal.

You don’t really know how someone communicates until you’ve communicated with them substantially, and even then, you only know in the context you’ve communicated in. Appearances can be deceiving. 

And it’s important to be aware that all of these things exist.

This made me cry. You have no idea how bad I needed this

wretchedoftheearth:

just in general i don’t understand the haughty mockery aimed at anyone who works a job most people don’t want to work. like you want to receive those services, but you also don’t want to work those jobs, so in turn you mock the people who do work those jobs and provide you with services you want/need?