#SOCIAL ableism.

[bonefall]

wait, why can’t a decent amount of the members in proto-thunderclan not hunt?

A lot of them have serious physical disabilities! It's enough that it poses a logistical problem, which they are committed to overcoming together.

Thunder Storm's three legs makes him slower than his companions. He's ferociously powerful, but like a male lion, he has to rely on his "lionesses" to slow a large animal.

Bright Storm has asthma from her heroics trying to save SkyClan cats from a fire. She's taking that from Gray Wing, who is famously the first major death now. Like her son, she has a difficult time with chasing prey.

Bumble is dyspraxic. She's a terrible hunter and fighter and struggles with self-worth because OTHERS used it to dehumanize her, and continues to, even after an entire society forms out of love of her.

Sunlit Frost has permanent nerve damage in his arm from the fire, and ends up working so hard that it makes his disability worse. A bite on the good paw from Snake becomes infected after he refuses to sit out from digging graves after the First Battle; I am planning a chunky B-plot about Sunlit coming to terms with the fact he has to retire early.

That's FOUR major members of a small group with physical disabilities that make hunting hard or impossible. They have a lot of logistical problems that I will actually be exploring solutions to.

[creature-wizard]

Since the r-slur is making a comeback (you know, the word that starts with R, has six letters, and ends in D), I'm gonna make a little PSA:

Yes, it's an ableist slur.

Terms like "asshat," "head-up-ass," "up their own ass," and "high on their own farts" exist. There's also words like crap, dogshit, half-assed, assclown, and chucklefuck. And on the less vulgar side, there are terms like ridiculous, nonsense, train wreck, pointless, insipid, self-absorbed, pretentious, annoying, boring, contemptible, vile, and disgusting.

Substituting words like restarted, poptarted, brain damaged, smoothbrain, etc. is still ableist, because either 1. you obviously still mean the r-word, or 2. you're still using disability as an insult.

[hussyknee]

Vajra Chandrasekera is a Locus and Nebula award-winner and has been short-listed for a Hugo Award this year. You can find his Tumblr here: @adamantine and his twitter here: @_vajra

[liberaljane]

Increased accessibility benefits EVERYONE!

Here are some ways YOU can advocate for increased accessibility:

Online:

Use alt-text to describe any images

Record events

Have closed captioning

Share content warnings

Avoid flashing lights or imagery

At Work:

Invest in meaningful Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Initiatives

Provide more PAID time off

Avoid ableist language (like 'lame' or 'crazy')

Provide remote working options

UNIONIZE!

For In-Person Events:

Communicate ANY walking distance (in distance, not minutes!)

Include information about public transit

Provide gender neutral bathrooms

Avoid heavy perfumes or scents

Hire sign language interpreters

Created by Liberal Jane and Sex Ed with DB

[the-barefoot-hatter]

pediatricians are hard to find.

you aren't broken and other important things a triangle needs to hear

[painfordays]

Being the only disabled person in a friend group is like. Argues against mental age for 30 minutes without achieving anything because they will die if they cant call developmentally disabled adults 6 year olds. Feel guilty for cancelling plans for disability reasons and making up a lie so you dont have to tell the truth. Get called a cripple after explaining your symptoms. Get told nothing is ever the doctors fault because they work soooo hard and you're just not persistent enough. Realize the only way theyd ever do even minor caregiving tasks for you is if they were paid. Spend an hour arguing against eugenics. Listen to someone talk about a group of disabled people and with every sentence it gets more obvious they never interacted with anyone from this group personally. Get compared to peoples elderly relatives. Get -

[crazycatsiren]

Some of us don't have the spoons, the head space, the mental capacity, the physical strength, the energy to be the kinds of activists and advocates that you would wish to see us being.

You might want to make sure to check your ableism in your social justice.

[auschizm]

In most situations, random people are too preoccupied with their own shit to really notice let alone judge you. And IF random strangers are busy judging you for any superficial reason, that reflects badly on THEM and says nothing bad about you

[headfullof-ideas]

I was thinking about HTTYD, as one does, and had an epiphany that I wanted to share. I highly doubt that the Vikings of HTTYD, or at the very least the Archipelago, had any basis of ableism at all. Because half of them have lost limbs to dragon attacks, it’s so common place and the raids were so bad that anyone and everyone pitched in regardless of whether they had all four limbs or not. And so it never became a thing where people who were disabled were considered incapable (just want to clarify that I do NOT think that at all, in any way shape or form) because it was not only common but impractical to think that.

Like, I was thinking about it harder, and I don’t remember even an episode where someone even insinuated that Hiccup or Gobber couldn’t help or do something because they were disabled. Like, dragons basically stopped ableism by biting a bunch of people’s limbs off until it was normal to know or be someone that was missing something.

[cowsabungus]

Non disabled people will take services away from disabled people and then cry about how their gran never gets any help

Wonder who's fault that is

Have fun in the hole u dug for yourselves

[disabled-dragoon]

Seeking help to make a disability more "manageable" does not:

Magically make the disability go away

Negate the fact that the person seeking help is disabled

Negatively "enable" people (???) (what??)

Mean that everyone who cannot/is not currently seeking some form of aid for their disability is a bad person

Give you the right to condemn the rest of the disabled community, even if you personally know someone in it

Disabled people can still be "awesome" whilst disabled.

Describing someone as disabled is not bad, insulting or negative unless you purposely use it in that manner. (which you shouldn't be anyway)

And just because you personally cannot understand how a certain action or exercise is helping someone manage their own condition does not give you the god damn right to insult them or insinuate they're "faking".

Grow up, learn some fucking respect, and find something better to do with your time other than trying to insult disabled people on the internet.

[hyperlexichypatia]

One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health."  Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street?  What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?

Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.

For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.

For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.

Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.

One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.

Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.

By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.

The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.

Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.

But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?

Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses. So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.

As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."

[enbycrip]

Big thing I’ve got from my study of disability in the early modern period in Britain, including dissertation research?

Poor relief that gives money out to the poorest people is probably the most benefit per amount of money, but it’s *massively*, *massively* resented by wealthier people. Not only because it’s redistribution of wealth, given it was usually raised by local taxation, but because it takes both control and opportunities to benefit from them.

The big thing money gives is options, choice, and freedom. Wealthier people value having that and massively resent poorer people having it. They much prefer giving charity to paying their taxes because a) giving charity lets them keep control of the money, even at a remove, and b) they usually find a way to benefit more directly from it.

This is basically why we have the current social security systems we have, where so much more is spent on control and policing of the behaviour of poor and disabled people than actually helping. Universal benefits were popular when the systems were set up for a variety of reasons, including reducing resentment by wealthier people, but largely because means-testing is *more expensive* and *less efficient*than universal benefits.

Wealthier people screaming for more means-testing are doing so because they prefer to have more money spent on tormenting people who are struggling with the conditions that those wealthier people create and maintain because it benefits them than that money actually reaching them.

That’s not how they parse it in their heads, I’m sure, but it *is* the reality of the situation.

[yarrayora]

the thing about people calling laios white is that theyre somehow framing it with the mindset of real world's political and social justice context where white privilege exists but this is a fantasy world written by a japanese living in japan where most of the time white privilege isn't something you can utilize so is it any surprise that the manga doesn't discuss race by making it a metaphor for racism in the west?

the black skinned elves are depicted as royals, we've never seen kabru got shit for his skin color but he did got shit for having blue eyes back in his hometown, shuro was never depicted as a victim of anti-asian racism because hey. get this. asia as a concept doesn't exist in dungeon meshi's world. in fact im not sure colorism is even a thing in dungeon meshi world? most of the time we see it based on whether they're long-lived or not, and. well. the racial biases of fantasy races that have nothing to do with skin color.

laios is white in the sense that his skin color is pale, but he's not white the same way white americans are more privileged than poc

[crippled-peeper]

The thing about disability being a social construct is largely true, because when you have a physical issue but receive accommodations + care such that they can do everything able-bodied people can, you're no longer considered disabled. Case in point: glasses. If glasses fix near-blindness, you're not considered disabled, even though you're basically blind without them.

In a hypothetical world where mech suits existed, were cheap and comfortable and accessible and worked well, and were normalised such that people didn't even notice, even quadreplegics wouldn't be considered disabled (although of course that's distant science fiction).

That's what "disability is a social construct" means. In the same way gender being a social construct doesn't mean boobs aren't real, or money being a social construct doesn't mean physical cash doesn't exist.

I don’t agree with this analysis at all.

What hypothetical disabled people might be able to do in the future holds no meaning in the current reality I occupy

You say that quadriplegics will be “considered” abled with exoskeletons - but then you fail to elaborate on the relationship between these devices, their users, and the people who supply them

My father has had type 1 diabetes for 30 years. 30 years is an entire lifetime for some people. The cost of his insulin increased literally that ENTIRE TIME until last year when the Biden admin put caps on insulin prices

Furthermore, his insulin pump retails for 4,600$, and if it breaks, he is still diabetic at the end of the day and will slowly and terribly die without it.

I noticed a lot of people on here have lots of ideas and hypotheticals about how disabled people should and could navigate the world, but their arguments fall flat and topple so easily because you’re not connecting these ideas to anyone’s intrinsic reality

This is why so many physically disabled people are fatigued by the entire “disability is a social construct” conversation. It’s overwhelmingly used by uneducated 17 year olds to minimize and downplay and discredit the real-life, life-or-death interactions and experiences many physically disabled people live with

[alexandraisyes]

Hey chat today's socialization tip is that making fun of someone's disorder is fucking ableist. If you don't have the disorder then don't make jokes about it. Having a disorder that's "similar" doesn't give you clearance to make jokes about it.

As someone with ASPD. I wouldn't make an insulting joke about someone who has NPD, OCPD, or ScPD in regard to their disorder. That would be fucking rude. Just because I have a personality disorder it doesn't give me clearance to make fun of someone else for their personality disorders. Same thing with any other disorder.