When I was in high school, I dated a guy who had been born without legs. He used a wheelchair to get around (actually he used a skateboard inside the school building, it was easier). He was awesome. He had a great, humorous manner of dealing with people who were uncomfortable with him. And sometimes just to be snarky.
He’s now a motivational speaker, and he once appeared on Penn Jillette’s podcast. I’m not really in active contact with him (we’re FB friends in that way you are with people from the past you’re not really in touch with) but I listened to the episode after seeing him post about it on FB, just to hear what he had to say.
The thing that struck me the most was to hear him talk about how perception of his disability has changed. In the past decade or so, he gets a lot more people who assume he’s a veteran. He travels a lot so he’s constantly in highly visible situations like airports. So a lot of people will approach him, wanting to address him with the assumption that he lost his legs in combat.
This has forced him to develop ways to deal with this. The first time it happened, he had to decide – if someone thanks him for his service, does he just let it go? Let the person go on their merry way, feeling good that they’d thanked an injured veteran? That would certainly be more expedient. But ultimately he decided that he wasn’t willing to accept credit for service he never rendered. So now, when someone thanks him for his service, he politely corrects them and informs them that he was born without legs. What happens next is what surprised him.
Often? The person gets angry with him.
He said he can sometimes see it coming. He sees the person glancing at him, fidgeting, working up their courage, wondering if they should Do The Thing. But they’re very much enamored of this opportunity to thank a veteran, to be a good patriot, so they muster their guts and approach him.
But when he informs them that he’s not a veteran? He’s just robbed them of their feel-good moment. All that nerve-building was for naught. He isn’t a veteran who lost his legs to an IED, he’s just a normal person who’s lived with the difficulty and stigma of his disability his entire life. It’s an awkward position to be in, both for him and the person who approached him.
I don’t know what made me think about that this morning.
A take people could have but choose not to: The prevalence of what is classified as “sociopathic behavior” actually seems to function as a description of a large part of the population with the only real difference between the average person and a “crazy” person is discursive and usually the product of material conditions.
The take people instead choose to have: It’s so scary that we’ve allowed actual crazy people into positions of power and authority. We must extend the reach of the medical industrial complex so that no one, not even our elected officials and business leaders, can escape its disciplinary power!
“An investigation into the death of an isolated inmate at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women has found the prison ran afoul of the U.S. Constitution as well as the state’s constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
And most of the respondents there probably did not stand out in as many other ways. Can’t even figure out what exactly is setting these assholes off most of the time, but it really can be a problem.
(Popping into mind from another context: “cannot distinguish the racism from the homophobia from the sexism”. Throw in ableism to complicate things further.)
Anyway, probably not just imagining there is something not right there, or severely overreacting to minor stuff–along with almost half of people asked.
For me, it’s more likely to be that I am sick/in pain and low enough on spoons going out to begin with, and just do not have any to spare for dealing with totally unsolicited obnoxious behavior from randos. That has been a major deciding factor for just saying fuck it and staying home on so many occasions.
I still don’t feel like I can talk about that much, in case it gets interpreted as all “just” a mental health issue. Including being sick/in pain at all. (Not to dismiss what really are primarily anxiety-driven reasons. I’ve just had too many bad experiences in that direction when anxiety was really not the main problem.)
My partner does not seem big on that kind of approach, or I wouldn’t want to live with that. But, again, enough bad experiences–including with straight up victim blaming–that I would rather have most people think it’s just the physical disability stuff keeping me at home. It all gets frustrating.
could also be “I’ll die but so will 90% of humanity, and future generations won’t have these problems due to selection” I guess. if almost everybody else is dying too it seems only fair
i guess? i feel like whenever i read primivitists they have a individually-centered ideology (there’s some ive seen that are egoists?), but i guess you could have a solely altruist primitivism…hmm
man I feel like that if you have a plan that’s going to ruin the lives of even a third of the population and you’re like “ya it’s rough but it’s tough love” then you need to volunteer to be one of the ones who has their life ruined for credibility’s sake
TIL consigning 30% to 90% of the population to death and/or terrible suffering is pure altruism. like, I get the point op’s going for here, but also consider that maybe primitivism is just extremely bad.
My boyfriend, who takes a cocktail of prescription medications, often gets into these arguments with “burn down the system [and, by extension, any kind of medical infrastructure]” types. My favorite was one in which he got accused of “thinking only of himself”. Yeah, okay, the disabled person with the bare-minimum request to not die is the one thinking only of themself.
If you’re a solely egoistic primitivist then you’re at least consistent, but I’ve seen quite a few who call themselves socialists and even communists.
the thing about being someone who’s never catcalled is that you start to wonder why like is it because im ugly???
and then you realize that youre judging your worth by whether or not you are objectifiable to a man and thats so fucked up like honestly its so fucked up
but the worst part about the patriarchy is that it still sits at the back of your mind regardless like “nobody thinks youre pretty because they dont see you as a sex object” like somehow thats a desirable thing and it fucks me up
You’re either public property or completely invisible.
It sucks I related to this and it was finally put into words
Also I feel like it should be pointed out, it’s often not *just* the lack of sexual harassment. It often is combined with women gossiping about how they think you are ugly too. This is important because it’s not just about men, it’s about not being acceptable to women or being the designated “ugly friend”.
If you are a woman or dumped in that label as “close enough” your human worth is directly tied to your appearance. It’s not just men enforcing that. It’s not something you can avoid by sticking to women’s spaces and only being around girls.
Idk I have just had too many woman act like it’s disgusting I have self esteem problems from this but like, it’s not just guys lack of attention, it’s the fact women find me a fun target to beat up on to raise their own self esteem. But people will brush this stuff off as internalized sexism.
We have a major problem in general I think with this expectation this shit shouldn’t bother you because it is stupid. Like you shouldn’t worry about aging, you shouldn’t worry about fitting molds, you shouldn’t worry about how conventionally attractive you are… but rejecting that shit doesn’t make it go away. Society will still enforce it on you and if your self esteem isn’t good enough it will rip you apart. People shouldn’t have to feel guilty for caring about this shit when it has a DIRECT RELATION to how much of a person most people see you as.
One other thing I want to point out: how commonly sexual harassment is treated as only consisting of the “what, you can’t take a compliment?” catcalling variety.
And not so much the “you are such a disgusting freak, and we must loudly go into great detail about this at every opportunity” variations which tend to get thrown at marginalized people more. (Disability, sexuality, gender, you name it.) Which often seems to be far more gender neutral in terms of both targets and who is doing the harassing/assaulting.
Some pretty good discussion of a couple of people’s experiences with this, specifically influenced by disability:
Instead, I got a series of messages that I was in fact a sexual being, but anything to do with my sexuality was gross and an object of mockery, or, to be used only for really fucked up fetishes for which I could become a fantasy object (but that was much later).
That type of sustained harassment can be brutal, and mess up your head longer term in some slightly different ways. Especially when it is coming from such a variety of your “peers”.
[image description: 3 tweets by katie @katiehianna_. Altogether the text reads, “I find it hard to believe that people who go on about stopping benefit cheats on disability are doing it because they “care” about disabled people if thats the only issue they care about and don’t advocate for disabled people in any other way.
If you don’t care about disabled ppl being forced to live in poverty because they can’t get benefits they are entitled to, who can’t access the care they need and who are discriminated against daily then don’t claim that you call out potential benefit fraud for us.
Also this harms us more than it helps us because we get accused of faking our illnesses and we get denied benefits because the government are cutting 80% of benefits and don’t care if the people they deny are genuine or not (they ARE genuine because only 0.7% claim fraudulently)]
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From personal experience, the difficulty and hoops involved in trying to get and keep my disability benefits are incredibly draining. Able-bodied cheaters are not the ones hurt by further difficulty in getting these benefits. Changes targeted to make benefits harder to get- disproportionately hurt those of us who are actually disabled- because we are less likely to be able to put in the time, energy and effort into jumping through increasingly difficult hoops in order to get benefits that we desperately need.
An autistic friend of mine just said this to me “The harder I work at communication the more people expect from me and the less they are willing to compromise.” and it is the most fucking heartbreaking thing I’ve heard.
This is very much a thing, though – and I’m sure people across the board with other disabilities can verify that it happens to them, too.
People will turn any progress you make toward being “normal” – no matter how straining or difficult it is for you, no matter how little it actually helps you – as either inspiration porn, or proof that you don’t really need accommodations, you just need to “apply yourself! :)))))”
I had no idea what you were talking about so I looked it up and my first reaction was a creepily realistic vision of child-me screaming, “WHOA!”
Look at this thing!
I wish my wheelchair looked like that when I was a kid. Hell, I wish my wheelchair looks like that as a 24 year old grad student!
I think you’re coming at this all wrong, not because you’re thinking too much about a children’s toy, but because you’re thinking too much about what would offend wheelchair-users when you’re a Walker. I mean, the last I checked, you Walkers all seem to like standing for some reason, but you don’t see me getting a bad taste in my mouth whenever I see one of those nifty hoverboard scooters that takes standing to a whole new level So why would you (or specifically, why would we as wheelchair-users) be upset that this toy takes sitting to a whole new level? A really cool level at that? It’s no different.
Besides these things are actually way cheaper than pediatric wheelchairs! Why aren’t we having kids use these instead of the hospitals chairs? Wait, I just read this article, people are beginning to use them as wheelchairs:
Yeah, this gets absolutely no criticism from me! On the contrary, this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen, both from a toy standpoint and a disability standpoint. 10/10 PowerWheels! My fourth-grade-self-who-was-too-poor-to-afford-you-but-buttered-up-to-the-rich-kid-in-elementary-school-because-he-had-a-Chevy-Silverado respected you and my 24-year-old-grad-student-self continues to respect you! You get a Gatsby gif!
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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