If that photo doesn’t terrify you then you don’t understand what’s going on
This photo is more threatening than the ones where they were being pulled out of their chairs and zip tied
[Tweet from ADAPT reads, “he had them sent to jail without their wheelchairs clearly senator portman doesn’t care!”
Image is a police officer pulling an empty motorized wheelchair (mobility scooter?) down the street. Another officer and empty chair are in the background.]
Imagine if they’d kept an able-bodied prisoner in a jail cell but kept their legs (and possibly their hands) bound, so they couldn’t stand up, move around in the jail cell, get out of bed or off the floor.
That would be considered inhumane, and torture, right? If that news got out, humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International would be up in arms. You know they would.
That’s what it means when you take away a person’s wheelchair. That’s why it’s terrifying. But because it’s happening to disabled people, no one except the victims is noticing.
Also note: Power mobility aids like those in the photo can cost as much as a brand-new automobile. And if they get damaged because the authorities don’t know what the hell they’re doing (or they do know, and are motivated by spite or malice), then the person will be just as helpless after they get out of jail.
And Medicare will not replace a damaged or broken wheelchair unless it’s at least five years old.
Now imagine being helpless in a jail cell, unable to move, and having that worry in the back of your mind.
Honestly, I was cracking up when this photo was taken, because it’s just so ridiculous.
There was a ramp, but it was VERY well camouflaged. And when I did finally get in, there were these awful thick carpets that were next to impossible to wheel over.
Basically, no one thought this through.
[ID: photo of a wheelchair user at the bottom of a flight of steps with their back turned, looking up. the building behind them reads in large capital lettering, “wheelchair foundation”.]
“wandering” eg not making as many complicated mouth noises as others and still having the audacity to have basic human needs like “exercise” “alone time” and “sometimes being in a place where the people who hurt you can’t get to you”
Walking While Disabled
there’s a book i read (it was written in the 40s so it has some excuse) where one of the main characters is being horribly emotionally and physically abused by her mum
she leaves whenever she can
they keep saying she “wanders” because she has a “mother complex”
let me put it this way
the book is just good enough that i managed to finish it without throwing it at the wall too many times
This is an area where I see even disabled people getting confused. Like, even when we know deep down somewhere in our gut that it’s vastly wrong and dangerous, we don’t always have answers when people say these things to us, and that can cause us to doubt whether we actually have a good reason for our viewpoints or not.
I can’t count – can’t even begin to count – the number of times I’ve heard “there’s too few resources to go around” used to justify ableism. Used to justify tons of other things, too, but at least people fighting those other things tend to have come up with answers to it. Disabled people haven’t, always, even when we know instinctively that something isn’t right with what we’re being told to believe.
So it runs something like this:
“You say it’s wrong to deny someone a lung transplant because they’re autistic. But there aren’t enough lungs to go around. Surely we have to choose somehow!”
“Isn’t it a waste of resources to keep Americans alive on respirators and with feeding tubes when some people in some countries can’t even afford the basics?”
Well. No. And I can finally articulate why.
Take the organ transplant thing.
Yes, there is a horrible, horrible shortage of organs, for all kinds of reasons, some of which are solvable and some which may never be, depending on a lot of complicated stuff. But regardless of why there’s too few organs to meet the need, there really are too few, they’re a limited resource and not everyone who needs an organ is going to be able to get it even if we believe every last one of them should get a chance at transplant.
(This isn’t theoretical to me. I have bronchiectasis. It’s mild enough I’ll likely never need a transplant, but bronchiectasis that gets severe enough can result in people being on the transplant list. If that happens to me, I hold very little hope for getting a transplant.)
So.
The question these people aren’t asking.
Basically… certain kinds of disabled people are denied organ transplants for purely ableist reasons that have to do with the idea that our lives fundamentally have less value or less quality of life – automatically – than other kinds of disabled people. (I can’t really call anyone sick enough to need a transplant nondisabled.).
But even after you remove all the disabled people where the issue is 100% ableism preventing transplant from being seen as okay or viable. And even if you grant that there may sometimes be medical issues that render a transplant a bad idea compared to someone else (although that’s a slippery slope and there has to be a huge amount of caution even in seemingly clear-cut situations, because often what seems clear-cut can have deadly levels of hidden bias riddled all through it). You eliminate all those people? There’s still not enough organs to go around.
And yet, once you’ve got the people who actually make the transplant list, there at some point has to be stuff that’s just left entirely to chance and other factors, rather than the doctors picking and choosing who is more deserving, more viable, etc.
So like, why is it automatically assumed to be okay to use certain kinds of disability to narrow down your transplant list, when other kinds of disability can’t be used, and other factors can’t be used? (At least not officially.)
And the only real answer to that question that makes any sense is, “Because this isn’t about what’s better for people medically, it’s about some people being automatically considered more worthy of life than others, some people’s lives being automatically considered more worthy of throwing loads of resources into than others, and it’s completely unethical to use such assumptions to make choices about who lives and dies in a situation like this.”
Like, let’s say there’s 100 people who need a particular organ, 20 of them have disabilities that are automatically or frequently used to exclude people from transplant lists, and you’ve got 10 organs to go between all of them even in the best-case scenario… you’ve still got 80 people left over. So how is choosing between 80 people in a semi-random way different than choosing between 100 people in a semi-random way? If you really valued the lives of those 20 other people, if you really saw them as deserving a chance, you wouldn’t throw them out on their ass and tell them to go die. You’d treat them just like the other 80 people. You’d handle the problems of scarcity in a way that was fair to everyone involved, the way you try to be with the people who do make the transplant list.
And seriously? Please don’t try to “educate” me about transplants. If it’s not organs, it’s something else people need to survive, and it’s always roughly the same groups of people singled out for not even getting the chance to survive, regardless of what the resource is. And disabled people are always included within the first group of people targeted in times of scarcity. Always. (Yeah, there’s lots of others, but I can’t write about it all at once, my brain won’t do words that way. So anything I say here applies to anyone this kind of deadly high-level BS is applied to.)
Like… pretty much any time I’ve brought up ableism, I get told “There’s not enough _______ to go around,” even in contexts where it makes no sense at all unless your reasoning is very, very ableist. Like disabled people have brought up questions about disability-selective abortion, only to be told that “There’s too many people in the world already” (something also used to justify things like food not being a human right on the basis of race and class). Reflexively, before people even bother to listen to why we have concerns about this. (We’re also assumed to be pro-life or questioning the universal right to abortion in such contexts, whereas feminists bringing up questions about sex-selective abortion are not generally treated like that.) Or why we should live outside institutions. Or why people in the UK who need respirators aren’t stealing resources from poor people in developing countries. This zero-sum bullshit only works at all if you accept that disability is a valid reason for people’s lives to not be worth as much.
So next time someone tells you that your membership in a group means you automatically don’t get some kind of resource that is (really or in their mind) scarce, ask why you automatically get counted out, while other people don’t even if there’s still not enough to go around? And be sure to check and see whether the thing is actually scarce or just built up in people’s minds as scarce to justify denying it to people. If we’re equal to you in value, then you can’t use our disability as a reason to choose these things any more than you can use some totally “innocuous” difference that would never be used and be considered the same as total randomness. People can’t just assume that disability is a quality that justifies instant disqualification from those with even a chance at survival. And even people who think they’ve thought it through all the way…. often haven’t.
So…yeah. I’m really sick of this entire thing, and I’m sick of it being a way to shut us up because we don’t have an answer that we can articulate clearly. (Don’t get me started on having to be able to articulate something clearly in order to believe it, either. Especially because I have no chance of articulating that beyond these two inadequate sentences.)
I’m busy right now, but want to come back to this later. Some very important points
I made a thing. I drew it in response to this essay that Son of Baldwin posted on Twitter. Especially this line: “
In many ways, I believe ableism is the root bigotry of humanity.” So I took that metaphor and made it visual.
Image description: A black and white tabloid sized poster in the style of an educational diagram, showing a tree and its root system, combined with text.
At the bedrock level: “BIGOTRY: Beliefs and policies which work to exclude people from full membership in human society.”
In the root system: “ABLEISM: Judging the value of a person’s humanity on the basis of ability.”
The trunk has two forks; the left-hand fork is labeled “RACISM:” and leads to an example racist belief in its cluster of leaves: “Blacks are Less Intelligent than Whites, but they are More Athletic.”
The right-hand fork is labeled “SEXISM:” and leads to two clusters of leaves. The main cluster reads: “Women are Weaker, & Less Rational than Men;” the secondary cluster reads: “Gays are effeminate. Lesbians are emasculating.”
The top cluster of leaves, centered between these two branches, with a freely curving arrow pointing down to each half, reads: “Claims about Ability used to Pass Judgment on People’s Humanity (This is ABLEISM)”
Description ends.]
It may become part of a larger essay on how ableism 1) fuels other
bigotries and 2) impedes solidarity and resistance to oppression
(Consider this Fig. 1, out of X number of illustrative figures).
But I’m not sure how long it will take for me to write that longer essay, and I wanted to start the discussion now.
P.S.: If you repost this without the image description, then you’d be excluding people with vision and text impairments from the discussion. And that would be a schmuck, bigoted, thing to do. Don’t be a bigoted schmuck.
Another source for this compelling graphic – wouldn’t it be a great coloring book? –
But as it’s only one picture, wouldn’t it be a very short book?
–
I was also inspired by this line from Disability Rhetoric (Jay Timothy Dolmage, Syracuse University Press):
“Ableism … positively values and makes compulsory able-bodiedness.”
Because, yeah: “makes compulsory” – ABA, anyone?
Thinking about that is how I came to figure out the definition of “bigotry” as a means to exclude people from human society.
Which is why so-called “reverse racism” ain’t a thing. “All white people love mayonnaise” may be a racial stereotype, but nobody’s been denied housing or the right to vote because of it…
So you were right, the answer is yes. You can absolutely have kids as a blind person. There are so many blind people who have kids and raise them just as normally as anybody else every day, and I even know a few of them myself. In fact, the president of the National Federation of the Blind and his wife are both blind, have been since they were young, and have three young and thriving kids, two of which are blind, themselves.
Of course, becoming a blind parent first requires you to be independent enough to take care of yourself first, which usually requires some training, but once you’ve got yourself down, honestly the possibilities are endless. People freak out at the very thought of a blind person in control of a child, but it’s because they have no idea how a blind person could do anything, and it’s because of that very ignorance that drives that fear. They can’t imagine a way to do something without seeing, so they assume that there must not be a way. But there are so, so many ways…
Did you know that a lot of blind parents put bells on the shoelaces of their children’s shoes to keep track of them when out and about or at the playground?
Did you know that a lot of blind parents help the children with their homework by simply having the child read the problem aloud to them?
Did you know that there is technology that allows a blind parent to scan a child’s homework and have immediate access to the text on the sheet on a computer or a cell phone so that they can hear it for themselves or read it with a braille display?
Have you ever noticed that little kids make a whole lot of noise when they go anywhere? When you’re in your own home, it’s pretty difficult not to know where young kids are. From the sound of their bare feet slapping around tile and hardwood and shuffling across the carpet, to the sounds of their breeding that is not quite as silent as they might think it is if they try to hide, to the sound that every toy they play with will make every time they touch it, to all of the sounds and words that will come out of their mouth on an incredibly regular basis, little kids make a whole lot of noise even when they aren’t upset or laughing, and it’s pretty easy to tell where they are. And if you need to leave the room, you make the same judgment call that any sighted parent does and decide if it’s quick enough to leave them unattended for a moment, or you take the child with you to keep track of them and make sure they aren’t getting into things. Little kids are a lot easier to keep track of and people think when they first imagine taking care of a child without eyesight, and it’s almost difficult to NOT know exactly where they are in the room. Even the common so called trump card of a child touching a hot stove is easy to prevent. If you were standing at the stove, you will absolutely noticed the sound of a child coming into the room, and if you don’t, you will definitely notice the feeling of a tiny body standing next to you with that less than discrete breathing. It’s incredibly easy to prevent as long as you’re paying attention as any decent parent is. And even if all else fails, if all of that still somehow doesn’t work, a bird finger is never the end of the world and most kids will do it at some point or another whether their parents are blind or sighted. A little cool water, children’s Motrin, and some kisses and comfort will make them forget it ever happened to weeks later.
Even babies can be easily taken care of by a blind person. A baby too young to crawl certainly can’t get away from you anywhere, so you will almost definitely always know where a baby is because he will probably be holding it or have it sitting in a swing or a cradle or a bouncer. And feeding a baby? Absolutely a no-brainer. It’s pretty easy to find a babies bottom lip and make sure the bottle and is up in the right spot, same thing when they move onto real food. Now, it might mean you have might have to touch a few more dirty faces and get a little more drivel on your fingers, but it’s a small price to pay.
Even taking them places. If you’re a blind person independent enough to have children, clearly you’ve probably already made the move to live somewhere with public transit so that you can support yourself by getting to the grocery store, your job, even the local bar. Plenty of sighted families raise children all the time without cars, and how? Utilizing public transit, of course. Plenty of sighted parents do it all the time and it’s no different for blind parents. The only difference is that some blind parents might be pulling a stroller behind them instead of in front so that they can still easily navigate with their cane in front of them.
And then people ask a whole bunch of questions like “well what if you mix up a child’s medication?” And “how would you even know which jar is the baby food?”
These questions go back to some general blindness skills that have nothing to do with being exclusive to being a parent. Blind people label things all the time and it’s easy to tell a whole bunch of different things apart. Think about it: a can of SpaghettiOs feels a heck of a lot different from a much shorter, wider can of corn that doesn’t have a mechanism on top to open it, right? Blind people also label those things. We have this clear tape with a sticky adhesive on the back that we used to label things in braille. We use braille writers and braille slate and styli to write braille on the line of tape specially designed to fit in the writers and slates, and then we cut the tape at the end of the label and Peele off the backing and stick a label on things. You may be asking, “how did you know what to label the thing in the first place?” Well, there’s an app for that. There are apps for almost everything, and the blindness community is no different. One app in particular is called TapTapSee, and it allows you to take a picture and have that picture sent to a team of sighted people at any hour and receive back a description of what the photo is of, such as a can of corn or a box of Lucky charms. Of course, the subject matter is not restricted to food, but a lot of people use it when they get home from the grocery store to organize the things they can’t recognize by tactile and auditory indicators alone such as a bunch of cans of different things that are all the exact same shape and size and make roughly the same sound when you wiggle them.
Now talking about medicine, since mixing up medication could actually be dangerous. Medicine bottles tend to look fairly similar, but there are always a whole bunch of different kinds. There’s some with those childproof lids, the Motrin bottle that has that very distinct weird lid, that Tylenol bottle that also has a pretty distinct lid, and even the pretty standard prescription medication bottles can come in different heights. But let’s say for the sake of the situation that you have a bunch of those pretty standard prescription medication bottles. How do you know which one is the medicine for your kid? Well, first of all you can label it as soon as you bring it home before it goes into the cabinet with the rest, the rest of which are also probably already labeled. But you can also check out the pill itself. Pills are pretty similar, but are still almost always just a little bit different from every other one you have. Whether it’s much larger, much smaller, has a different texture, is oblong instead of round or vice versa, is circular but thicker or thinner then another circular pill you have, or is oblong but has a seam in the middle that another oblong pill does not or vice versa, or has a smooth glossy texture or something a little more rough, almost every pill is just a little bit different in shape and size and texture. Chances are you will not have two totally different pills that look and feel exactly the same. Sometimes some pills even have little logos or words engraved into them, and while you can’t read it, you can feel that there is an engraving there and that another pill does not have it. So even if labeling doesn’t work, the minute you pull the pill into your hand and pluck it between your fingers, you will notice if something is wrong.
So this is obviously only a vague overview, and I’m not a parent myself so I can’t answer a whole lot more than this, but it really is easily possible and really isn’t any harder than it is for anybody else. There is, in fact, an entire division of the National Federation of the Blind made up of blind parents, specifically for the purpose of advocating for the rights of line parents and educating newer blind parents who need answers, to support those who want to become parents or plan to but still don’t know if they can, and all of those other things. I’m actually going to give you that resource, because it can probably help to comfort you a lot for the future as well as serve as very informational and enlightening on all aspects of blindness, not just to you but to everybody else reading.
That page has a ton of information. The organization has many articles and documents and pieces of writing by whole bunch of line parents to give you as much information as they can, it has links to videos from blind parents on how they parent, and even a link to the blind parents email listserv that you can absolutely join to get answers to questions or just to read emails that come through and learn from a distance.
I really hope this helped and that the link above can give you even more comfort that everything you could ever want for the future is more than possible and within reach. Blind parents live every day in this world and I know some of them personally, and it is not because they are extraordinary blind people who beat the odds, but because they are in fact incredibly ordinary blind people who know that they are just as capable of parenting as anybody else.
Thank you for asking and never be afraid to ask more!
When society is doing the diagnosing, it’s not offering treatment — it is serving up mental health stigma. People engaging in armchair diagnosis often demonize mentally ill people in the process, assigning negative, dangerous, and hateful behavior to a mental health problem. This suggests that people believe mental illness causes people to be violent, cruel, bigoted, or dangerous, and that simply isn’t the case.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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