#Disability Rights

[disabilityaidpositivity]

Certified disability aids positivity post!

Disagree? Respectfully, you can argue with a wall🫶

[reclusive-exorcist]

intersex liberation, disability liberation, fat liberation and youth liberation all go hand in hand and you cannot have one without the others, these communities all have a not insignificant overlap of those who are two or more of these.

[ghoul-butch]

i feel like a lot of people aren't ready to have a disabled partner. not even if you really really really like us, or if you think we're hot, or even if you're disabled yourself.

some of us are never going to improve, and a lot of us will get worse. you have to accept that before getting into a relationship with us because if you don't it's so easy to put us in the position of performing normalcy to not make you sad to be around us.

some of us may need you to help with the things we either have difficulty doing without injury, or cannot do at all. some of us won't remember things, or get confused easily, or have trouble hearing you. unfortunately we can't just get over our disabilities when you're having a hard day, or you're mad at us. and it would be nice if we lived in a world where all disabled people who need carers could have them to make dating (and more importantly, life) easier but very few of us have the ability to get that care.

we're also our own people, and we deserve to have boundaries, desires, and needs. a lot of able bodied people do not see us as fully realized humans with our own internal and external worlds, and you carry that into your relationships with us. this results in either you ignoring our wants out of life because we should be overjoyed we have a life with you at all, or ignoring our boundaries because we really don't know ourselves as well as someone with an outside perspective does.

and to follow the obvious segway; sex. sex can be incredibly complicated when you're disabled. either it being difficult to physically manuever without help. it can be incredibly painful if done incorrectly, or for some incredibly painful no matter what. and for a lot of us, we've faced sexual assault because our assaulters know it's hard for us to fight back, or hard for us to be believed after it happens. some of us can't have sex at all, or don't want to.

also a lot of us cost more money to survive than you do. from specific diets, to medical appointments over and over and over again, to expensive medication and replacable disability devices. hell, a good chunk of us cannot have jobs! or in a lot of places jobs will hire us and pay us a lower minimum wage because society sees us as worth less than you. and we're often under enough stress keeping out heads above water without you also expecting us to be as financially able to do things as you are. and plenty of us are kept trapped in relationships we can't leave because of our limited funds.

please, before you date us actually do even the smallest amount of studying about disability rights, disabled people's lives, and bodily autonomy in general. think of the intersections we exist at as well, disabled people can be black, gay, trans, poor, and any other marginalized group you can think of.

i can recall so many stories of disabled people abused mentally, physically, sexually and financially by people who don't think they're even doing that to us. people who really really really love us, or think we're hot, or are also disabled themselves.

for so many of us our relationships feel like ticking time bombs. we deserve better.

please be better to us.

[the-angry-acrobat]

I literally just saw someone saying “I like this trope” when talking about a few characters with canes/mobility aids in media and I’m bewildered to say the least. there a too many problems with this sentiment to phrase them all but disabled people are not a fucking trope, we’re people. I didn’t realise this was astounding!!! disabled people don’t exist purely in media and literature!!! like, not only are we ostracised and stigmatised and treated like a condition or a rarity or someone something to pity, or dehumanised, but now we’re also being reduced to a recurring fictional archetype. there is literally so little disability representation in media and literature that when people find out about more then one book/movie/show/whatever that includes a character with a disability, they don’t go “oh yeah, a person with a disability is written into this story” they go “oh, the disability trope is popular at the moment” or “I’m really into the mobility aid/disability trope as of late” and I don’t think I could roll my eyes harder I’ve literally seen my brain at this point. I’m losing my fucking mind out here. there is no way people actually see us as a TROPE omfg

[ryjkowiec]

As you know, what they did to Ben this season was the first thing that broke me in this series and after 2 weeks I can say, what they did to him society does to disabled people. Treat them as a thing, even, ha, as a prophecy, symbol, muppet. People would do the most intense mind games what disabled people need to just not ask what they need. People with disabilities face things that Ben faced, the most cruel thing - dehumanization. Deprivation of basic human needs. Assumption of his needs that became an extortion. Sorry, this is the real life everyday of many disabled people, not having control over one thing in their life, the most fuckin basic. They have to live a certain way no matter how much violence and abuse they experience, no matter the pain. Yeah.

[charmandabear]

Me when my disability disables me: By Talos this can't be happening

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Sara Nović for The Guardian:

Twelve days before Donald Trump took office, Charlie Kirk, media personality and rightwing activist, complained on his eponymous show about the presence of American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters at emergency press briefings for the Los Angeles fires. Another rightwing activist, Christopher Rufo, took his cue on X, calling interpreters “wild human gesticulators” who turned briefings into a “farce”. The rightwing theorist and Origins of Woke author Richard Hanania, quote-tweeting Rufo, declared ASL interpretation an “absurdity”. Around this time, Elon Musk was skulking around the platform, campaigning to bring back the R-word. Use of the slur tripled on X after his post. To those with less knowledge of disability history, these attacks might read as gross, but ultimately toothless. Activists, though, quickly sounded the alarm: the incoming administration would be coming for disabled people. “To the deaf community, the fight for accessibility is nothing new,” said Sara Miller, deaf educator and community advocate. However, Miller said she had seen a burgeoning movement against accessibility from conservatives with large platforms, including during the first Trump administration, when the National Association of the Deaf had to sue to have ASL interpreters during 2020 Covid briefings. “But when looking at the history of the first term of [the Trump] administration, and currently how diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) is being targeted, it’s not hard to see the correlation.”

Manufacturing cultural outrage to justify policy that would have previously been considered too cruel or damaging is a staple of the far-right playbook: most recently, the US has seen the move used to bolster book bans and outlaw Black history and gender-affirming care. The play-by-play is always the same: social media followers take their marching orders, hurling discontent at the specified targets and regurgitating talking points. Eventually, the ideas become so ubiquitous they are adopted by politicians who use them to engage their base. Finally, the talking point becomes the policy itself, and politicians claim they have a mandate from the people to justify stripping away the rights of the marginalized. Fast forward to 21 January 2025, when the accessibility page and all ASL content were removed from the White House website. Then, real-life interpreters were removed from the White House and across multiple federal agencies whose accommodations divisions were dismantled under Trump’s anti-DEIA orders.

Alongside “diversity” and “women”, words like “accessibility” and “disability” have also been listed as grounds to flag or reject grant applications at the National Science Foundation, sparking concerns at other federal agencies and research institutions. And last week, the Department of Justice, which is charged with enforcing the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), began to rescind key guidance, justifying the move by suggesting that accessibility is the reason for cost-of-living increases. Simultaneously, disabled children’s right to education is under fire. On 20 March, Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Earlier in March, secretary of education, Linda McMahon, laid off over 1,300 people – nearly half the department – eliminating seven regional offices, large swaths of the department’s office of civil rights, as well as parts of the office of special education and rehabilitative services, though she had previously said those programs wouldn’t be affected. Twenty-one attorneys general filed a suit over the layoffs, arguing they were “illegal and unconstitutional”.

The education department funds early intervention and post-high school transition programs, and organizations like the American Printing House for the Blind and the Special Olympics. It also enforces the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the law that gives disabled kids the right to a “free and appropriate public education”. A child’s needs and services are documented in a legally binding agreement known as an Individualized Education Program, providing services like speech, physical and occupational therapy, and the use of specialized curriculum. Accommodations like closed captions, ASL interpreters, ramps and elevator keys, braille materials, preferential seating, audio books, use of a laptop or notetaker, and movement breaks can also be included.

Without these plans, disabled students may be inside the classroom, but they will not be meaningfully educated. Now the director of the office of special education position is vacant.

[...] Leaving disabled people behind is not new to the American political landscape; the US has a history of eradicating the disabled. Eugenics – the pseudoscientific belief that humans should breed for “desirable traits” and suppress the undesirable ones – rose to popularity in the US and globally during the late 19th century.

The first eugenics-based law in the world was passed in the US: Indiana’s 1907 Act to Prevent the Procreation of Confirmed Criminals, Idiots, Imbeciles and Rapists targeted disabled people in state schools and institutions and incarcerated people by mandating sterilization for “criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles in state custody”. The Nazis would go on to praise the US’s codified eugenics and racism in their 1934 handbook. In Germany, the convergence of two mass-disabling events – the Spanish flu pandemic and the first world war – wreaked economic strife, the rationing of food and medicine, and overcrowding in institutions and long-term hospitals. Calls from the German eugenicists to stamp out what they called “life unworthy of life” began in the 1920s, even before Hitler came to power.

By 1933, the magazine Volk und Rasse was publishing a variety of eugenics propaganda, including a political cartoon featuring images of large moneybags labeled “a slow learner”, “the educable mentally ill”, and “blind or deaf-born schoolchildren” bore the caption: “This illustration depicts the burden of maintaining the socially unfit.” That same year, a law called for compulsory sterilization of those with “hereditary diseases” including deafness, blindness, schizophrenia, epilepsy, bipolar disorder, chronic alcoholism and a host of other conditions. A 1935 expansion of the law required mandatory abortions on the fetus of a parent with one of the listed conditions. Approximately 400,000 disabled people were sterilized in Germany and annexed territories during this period.

More extensive propaganda campaigns declaring disabled people as “useless eaters” were launched through various media in Germany. The arts, including in literature, documentaries and narrative film, posed a solution: mercy killings. As Mark P Mostert outlines in his 2002 article “Useless Eaters,” one particularly popular 1941 movie, I Accuse, caused a spike in the belief that euthanasia was an act of kindness toward disabled people. In the film, a a man euthanizes his beautiful, disabled wife as an act of love, asking the court: “Would you, if you were a cripple, want to vegetate forever?” The court acquits; the movie’s final scenes declare “love is medicine”. Support for euthanasia among Germans exploded, writes Mostert, and the first disabled people were euthanized at the behest of their families, who had bought the party line that killing their loved ones would be an act of grace. In 1939, Hitler created an advisory committee to oversee the state’s first official program for the killing of disabled children, whose murders began en masse that year.

The program quickly expanded to encompass multiple killing sites, as well as disabled adults across German territories, through the program Aktion T4. The Nazi gas chambers were perfected using disabled people. There, officials first created the cover story that “patients” were being sent to take a shower, where they were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas and sent to crematoriums. When carbon monoxide proved too slow, the methodology for gassing via cyanide-based Zyklon B was tested and fine-tuned on disabled people.

The Guardian has a well-done article on the Trump Administration (and right-wing media)'s war on disability rights.

[northgazaupdates]

UPDATE: NEW LINK! Yahya and his family were displaced by the IOF, and are currently residing in Deir al-Balah, south-central Gaza.

Life as displaced Gazans was already extremely difficult for them. Food is very scarce, and their living conditions leave them exposed to the elements. Here is the frequent condition of their tent now that the winter rains have come:

Then, Yahya’s father was injured. Some cartilage was damaged in his neck, and doctors say he requires IMMEDIATE surgery to avoid permanent paralysis.

Yahya and his family previously had another campaign, but it was suddenly shut down by GFM with no explanation. They have created a new one, but it has EXTREMELY LOW FUNDS.

The surgery is a stifling €15,000 euros (about $15,729 USD). Yahya and his family have no hope of paying for it without your help.

I am currently watching an elderly loved one lose their mobility, and it is an extremely heartbreaking and isolating situation. I cannot imagine what Yahya and his family are going through, having no social or financial support and only minimal medical care.

Please give what you can to this family. You are their only hope to save their beloved father’s mobility!

[icarusinfreefall]

reminder that adhd medication isn't a luxury or preference, but a lifesaving medication. a 10 year long study in the usa showed that, when properly medicated, the rate of car crashes people with adhd get into goes down significantly--men's rate drops by 38%, and women's by 42%. the med shortage, denial of meds by doctors, rising prices, and the "war on drugs" has killed--with such a car dependent society, not driving frequently isn't an option, which means we need better healthcare and need it now.

https://shorturl.at/8VD8B

edit because i forgot to explain: short link is to an article by the washington post, it should be free to read

[sayruq]

10 children a day lose their limbs in Gaza. All hospitals in Gaza are basically barely functioning and the amputations are done in unsanitary conditions and without anesthesia

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[forsapphics]

Happy Disability Pride Month! 🩶💚❤️🤍💛💙🩶🌈 (x)

[sparklefartstheunicorn]

Source video

Please reblog and share.

[majaurukalo]

Disability benefits shouldn’t be tied to the income of a disabled person’s partner/spouse/parent.

Do you hear me?

DISABILITY BENEFITS SHOULDN’T BE TIED TO THE INCOME OF A DISABLED PERSON’S PARTNER/SPOUSE/PARENT.

This is the straight forward way to deprive a disabled person of their financial freedom and independence and trap them into possible abusive relationships.

[alvie-pines]

disability rights involves the right to do fuck all. the right to be a useless member of society and STILL be loved and cared for and have a fair standard of living. human beings are not defined by the capital we produce.