I can’t fuck wit ppl that got the flash on when they get phone calls or texts
Why do you hate HOH and deaf people??
here’s an alternate theory: i wasn’t thinking about them when i made this post, and you know that as well, but decided u would make an issue out of this anyway
“tumblr: a short story”, 2016
Not remembering that disabled people even exist when you say shit like this is exactly the problem
One thing I hate when articles praise disabled people for doing stuff that is expected of able-bodied/neurotypical people is when they use language like, “They were different but their parents loved them as much as they loved their other kids!”
Like, that stuff is dehumanising! It’s not something that should be mentioned and praised in an article, it’s something that should be expected of a parent!
Some people can lift 200 pounds. But if they carried it everywhere they went for an entire day without ever putting it down, they’d severely tear their muscles and cause permanent damage to their body.
Some people can enter a 140° car in the summer to get something out of the car. But if they stayed in the car, they’d die from the heat.
Some people can hold their breath underwater for 30 seconds. But if they tried to go scuba diving without the necessary gear, they’d drown.
Clearly, someone doing something for a short period of time does not automatically mean that they can do it indefinitely with no problem.
So why do people assume that if someone can walk for a few seconds, they don’t need a wheelchair?
HOOOOOOO SHIT THERE’S THE TRUTH
THIS THIS THIS
it goes further than wheelchair users too.
It’s a very important issue with people who can’t work “normal” jobs due to chronic pain and chronic fatigue.
Sure I can go to a friend’s house and talk and maybe play a board game for a few hours. But a) Im not doing that without incurring pain and fatigue and b) that is not the same level of exertion as working even a part time job.
Sure I can write blog posts some weeks but I still incurs pain and fatigue and I can’t do it everyday. It’s not the same as working even a part time office job.
Sure I can walk to the shop and back using me cane but I can’t do it at any given time without notice and I end up with increased pain and fatigue. That is not the same as being able to walk anywhere I want whenever I want.
You, dear judgemental and biased assessor, could walk the length of Hadrian’s wall in 5 days*, but lemme tell you, even if you have trained for it and even if you are fit and healthy, you will be exhausted and in pain by the end of it. But you can do it. So from that I can of course extrapolate that you can walk 84miles up and down literal mountains all the time whenever you want, one after another with no rest and of course you’ll be fine and the pain and fatigue will be trivial and eventually prohibitive?
No? Then you can’t decide that because I can walk to the shops and back using my stick and incurring pain and fatigue that that means I am fit to work a regular job or have zero mobility issues.
*I have actually done this before I got sick. It was way tougher than I thought.
“if somebody becomes panicked when you accuse them of lying theyre obviously not telling the truth” shut up ugly im a survivor who got punished for shit i never did all the time of fucking course im gonna panic when im blamed for something i didnt do
since this post is actually getting attention rn i really want to emphasize this-
many of the “tells” of lying are traits commonly found in abuse survivors and mentally ill/disabled people.
stuttering, averting eye contact, panicking, raising your volume, fidgeting, and other similar traits are actions performed commonly by these groups, especially in situations of heavy stress- such as being accused of doing something we didnt do, especially if we are afraid of being punished for doing nothing.
im honestly begging people to think critically when accusing somebody of lying for small traits like these.
why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating “y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born”
note: for people just tuning in, this is in reference to my recent post about selective abortion of disabled fetuses where i goddamn literally say that i don’t support restricting abortion or shaming people who selectively terminate?? because it’s not about individuals??
“why on this earth would you come to the askbox of a multiply disabled person and expect them to respond kindly to your insinuating ‘y’know since disability makes life harder, wouldn’t it be better if no disabled fetuses were ever born’?”
because that’s what being in medical school does to you. i both cringed and laughed at the asker’s use of “indoctrinated” because yeah, the medical-industrial complex, including medical school, does indoctrinate people with ableist ideas of “quality of life” that lead them to conclude that it would be better if disabled people were never born.
i was in a graduate program with med and dental students. i had to take an ethics class with them. it seemed like they didn’t think of disabled people as human; i mean, i had one classmate compare the names for inanimate objects to disabled people’s diagnoses when i said that id/dd/ld people reject the r-slur. dude literally thought that disabled people have the same right to self-identify as an inanimate object. one of the issues we talked about in that class was selective abortion. long story short, i almost flipped a table, and probably would have had the prof not interceded.
i love how this doctor jokes about it as if their medical education was entirely bare facts outside of any paradigm. I’m 100% certain that opinions like “disabled fetuses are better off not being born” are presented (or understood) in medical education as indisputable medical facts.
no doctor likes to think they could be wrong about a belief so central to the paradigm in which they were educated 🙃
I’ve had too many doctors tell me or my loved ones that we’re just faking our medical problems for me to think that medical education isn’t full of intense ableism.
I did a research paper on Deaf culture in high school and one of the stories I found was that a Deaf woman who had to change doctors after the first visit with an unplanned but wanted pregnancy – after years of going to him for pelvic exams, apparently – because he would only agree to schedule an abortion, refused to offer any prenatal care, and kept going on about how she wouldn’t want to bring someone else like her into the world, now would she.
He was so caught up in his own ideas about disability and what lives are worth living and what lives are worth permitting to exist that he wouldn’t shut up and let her communicate for the one minute it should have taken to get it into his over-credentialed head that her hearing loss had been completely accidental with no even faintly plausible genetic component. Her baby had no risk factors.
Because he was the doctor and he had a medical degree and she needed to calmly accept his words about the good of the future of mankind (while not permitted to flip out about the discovery she’d been getting pelvic exams from a doctor who saw her fertility as a negative trait) and get an abortion appointment set up without pausing to consult with or notify her own husband and co-parent-to-be.
Her baby was born with the expected lack of hearing problems.
even if her baby had had risk factors wtf would be wrong with Deaf people wanting Deaf kids?! (if you were studying Deaf culture, this question is probably not even directed at you, it is more rhetorical)
psychiatric survivors deserve to talk about our negative experiences with mental health care without being told we’re “perpetuating stigma”
Struck again by that last commentary on the eatin’ sock, that I really am pretty glad I grew up around some more matter-of-fact attitudes about actually a lot of things. But disability definitely included there.
Not that this set of approaches can’t carry its own failure modes. (Ask my brainweasels, or rather please don’t rile them up more.) But, it would honestly never occur to me to get all creepy about the need for an eatin’ sock. Whether it’s for a cat or anybody else.
I still get shocked sometimes, when I think I understand just how different a set of assumptions some other people are working from. That can also make for extra fun when you’re encountering them aimed at you, of course 😵
And I know this is one of those things that people with sufficiently different experiences would have a hard time believing.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.