#disability justice

[engineofhelll]

[Image descriptions: A Bluesky post by Ro Salarian (username @rosalarian.bsky.social) that reads:

“Please don’t leave disabled people behind in your revolution. Please do not see us as sacrifices for the greater good, or dead weight. Please see our lives as worth saving too.

There are gonna be disabled folks who can’t contribute anything to The Cause. They have no money, no energy, no physical ability, no time. They will need to receive and will never be able to give back. You gotta save them, too. Especially them.”

End ID.]

[majaurukalo]

But the way we perceive health and ability is truly problematic. No, eating protein shakes, avoiding ultra processed food, training everyday, running on the treadmill, etc. don’t put you out of the “dangers” of disability and illness (if we want to call it that).

No one is immune to illness, bad genes, accidents or old age. And becoming disabled or ill isn’t synonym of failure or “bad behaviours”.

Our bodies are fragile. Human beings are fragile. That’s why disability needs to be taken into account more seriously and considered as a social issue. For you, your loved ones and all the people you don’t know of but who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect no matter the state of their health and abilities.

I didn’t get sick at one year of age because I deserved it or because I was morally corrupt. How could I be? I was 1. It just happened. It was an autoimmune disease. That’s it.

[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

[yellow-dress-basil]

Since the Paralympics are happening and I’m seeing all sorts of people saying “See? This person doesn’t let their disability stop them!”

I would like you to remember that Paralympions are OLYMPIC LEVEL ATHLETES.

How would it feel if I compared your output to that of a literal olympic athlete and used that to justify not helping you or giving you what you need?

Oh, well Michael Phelps and Simone Biles can do it - why can’t you?

Thats how you sound.

[liberaljane]

Being disabled shouldn't equal being poor.

Abolish the sub-minimum wage, increase income caps for disability assistance, and establish universal basic income.

digital illustration of a disabled nonbinary person with leg braces. They have a green mullet and are wearing a black t-shirt, purple cargo pants, green chunky heels and a green belt. There's text that reads, 'being disabled shouldn't equal being poor.'

[counterintuitivecomics]

WHY WE MASK: It's Not "Just A Cold": A Handy Scientific Guide to Surviving COVID-19 Together

Here, have a free science zine with a ridiculously long title! Endless thanks to my partner and fellow disabled artist, Kimball Anderson aka @earnestattempts, who helped through the entire year-long process with art edits and image descriptions (located in the alt text). Additional thanks to my friends Dupe and Caitlin, who gave me thorough copy-edits, and every friend who read drafts or listened to me rant about COVID-19.

Feel free to spread it far and wide! And hit me up if you're interested in printing &/or distributing free copies :D

Read WHY WE MASK with Endnotes - includes working URLS so you can read the scientific papers I cited for yourself. Plus links for all the other resources, and a full transcript.

Download WHY WE MASK - Free PDFs to read, print, and share! Any donations go towards print copies &/or local mask blocs.

Can't get enough free printable COVID zines? Check out @newlevant's excellent What's Up With COVID & How To Protect Yourself: 2024 Ed! It was a huge inspiration in the final stretch.

Extra pages under the cut:

[scholarlyhobbit]

Eugenics and Social Darwinism are fantasies of population purification invented by Victorians who were certain they could breed a master race. I cannot stress that enough. They're ideas with identifiable origin points, not long-standing truths about human nature and society. Francis Galton was a statician who mathematically determined the way to make the perfect cup of tea and the way to breed for "genius" in the population, and published his ideas about heredity starting in 1869.

Eugenics as a movement explicitly endorsed purifying the population of a nation and also argued that improving social and material conditions for people was ineffective compared to ensuring good breeding stock. They believed that any improvement in housing or food or poverty was wasted on the unfit, as they could never appreciate them and it's just a waste of money on an undeserving natural underclass.

So when you hear shit about the cost of caring for the undeserving, for welfare queens (also an anti-Black racist stereotype) and benefits scroungers, when you hear people complaining about the burden of disabled people or people who fake disabilities for benefits, you're explicitly hearing eugenics. You're hearing Nazi bullshit that some people need to be executed by the state so that they stop draining resources and birthing defective, parasitic children. I cannot emphasize this enough.

Do not accept Nazi arguments because they seem like "common sense." They never are. They're just asking you to pretend that all humans everywhere are inherently cruel and that your cruelty is justified and sensible. Cruelty is not either of those things. Do not let Nazis seduce you into thinking the cruelty will only benefit you. It can and will always come home to roost and soon you're the undesirable who just needs to be eliminated for the greater good. Never lose sight of that.

DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL CHILD WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME? Because they're all I've been thinking about when I'm sad for the past few days. Their existence makes me less sad.

[nondivisable]

disabled people are allowed to have hobbies that clash with our disabilities by the way

I'm allowed to like journaling even if my hand tremors make it so I can't do something as "pretty" as an abled bodied person

I'm allowed to like crocheting even if it's bad for my joints and it takes me double the time it would take someone else to finish a project

and yes I'm trying to switch to knitting which is lighter on the hands, but even that - even fucking using my phone - makes my finger hurts

I'm allowed to complain about it, just like you - specially if you're abled - are not allowed to tell me off about it

it's so hard for us to find joy, you're not allowed to police the small things that help

[nomoremrnicefat]

in honor of disabled pride month, i want to give a shout-out to all disabled fat people who had to roll their eyes who have been told "you're not disabled, just fat" or "thats because you dont eat well/exercise"

[worldisahouseonfire]

This was really helpful for me to read. I, too, didn't know that they were completely unrelated.

The Lanterman Act is not the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.  Don’t confuse them.

The Lanterman Act, or the Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Act, is an act governing the rights of and services for people with developmental disabilities in the state of California.  Under the Lanterman Act, people are supposed to be guaranteed the right to live in their own homes regardless of degree of disability.  This doesn’t always play out in practice, but it’s supposed to, and it gives people the leverage to do so.  And that’s just one of many important things it does.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short act is about involuntary commitment for people with psychiatric disabilities in the state of California.  It deals mostly with 72-hour involuntary holds (a.k.a. 5150), 14-day involuntary holds (a.k.a.5250), and temporary conservatorship.

I was once dealing with an… interesting… psych survivor/ex-patient group in California.  The woman who ran it seemed so desperate to find any ally anywhere, and any foothold anywhere, that it didn’t actually matter whether the ally or the foothold made sense.  

For example, she was always carrying around Scientology posters at protests.  Scientology has always regarded psychiatry as competition, which is their original reason for being anti-psychiatry.  Before Scientology was made into a fake religion, the basics of Scientology were touted as an alternative to psychiatry.  Psychiatry was in direct competition with them.  After they became a full-on cult, they turned on psychiatry as systematically as they turned on their detractors, the IRS, and anyone else they hated.  They didn’t care about the human rights abuses of psychiatric patients, they just saw those human rights abuses as a means to make psychiatry look bad.  If the human rights abuses weren’t there, and psychiatry was some kind of miracle wonder science free of any serious ethical problems, they’d have just made something up, just like they randomly try to make their high-profile detractors look like pedophiles.  Scientology does things to its own members that are just as bad as the worst things in psychiatry.  And the likelihood of terrible and even deadly things go up if they basically identify someone as crazy.  Here’s an example of what they call the “Introspection Rundown”, a response to a “psychotic episode” or “complete mental breakdown”:

Declaration of Roxanne Friend, a former Scientologist, declaration given under penalty of perjury, references depositions.  Read that over and tell me how it differs from the general range of fucked-up things involuntary psychiatry will often do to someone they deem to be psychotic or having a mental breakdown. And if you want for some reason to hear about a more nightmarish Introspection Rundown, google Lisa McPherson. (Spoiler: She died as a direct result of the Rundown.)

I’m sorry – I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but I refuse to be bedfellows with a destructive cult just because it happens to think that a very destructive industry is competition.  And I refuse to believe anything I hear about psychiatry from Scientology unless i’ve heard it from another source that isn’t a Scientology front group.  (The Citizen’s Commission on Human Rights is a Scientology front group.  Just so everyone’s clear.)  

Also to make it perfectly clear:  Scientology has not helped the psychiatric survivor/ex patient/mad pride sort of movements.  All it’s done is make everyone convinced that former psychiatric patients criticizing psychiatry are actually just a bunch of Scientologists and safely ignored.  Pretty much every time I express a view critical of psychiatry as a whole, someone tries to tell me – or anyone around who will listen – that I must be a Scientologist.  Between Scientology and the so-called dissident psychiatrists, it’s very hard for actual crazy people to criticize psychiatry and be taken seriously.  Like, it’s bad enough that being crazy is enough to discredit us in a lot of people’s eyes – I’ve heard psych survivors described collectively, by psychiatrists, as everything from “psychotic people who have unfortunately never let go of their paranoid process” to “borderline personalities who like drama and attention”.  But even if we get past that stage, we’re going to be associated with L. Ron Hubbard, David Miscavige, Peter Breggin, and R. D. Laing, whether we like it or not.  And that’s only the start of the misconceptions about us and what our actual views are.  We pretty much can’t get a word in edgewise because everyone already things they know what we’re thinking.  

And bottom line– Scientology/the CCHR make this all worse, not better.  They hinder our ability to get human rights abuses exposed and dealt with.  And then they try to recruit people into what’s basically one giant human rights abuse disguised as a religion for a combination of tax-evasion and recruiting purposes.

But to her, they didn’t like psychiatry so she was on board 100% and didn’t care what anyone said about the hellish things that happened in Scientology.  (And yet wanted people to listen to her about the hellish things that happens in psychiatry.)

So on that note…

One day I was grumbling about the governor.  He was threatening to repeal the Lanterman Act to save money.  (It was unclear that this would actually save money, but even if it would, that’s not an acceptable reason to remove people’s right to live in our own homes.)  I was legitimately afraid, because I was getting Supported Living Services through the Regional Center system and all that could fall apart and I could end up in an institution permanently, or on the streets, depending on whether the system chose abuse or neglect as their basic response.

Her response? “The Lanterman Act is what makes involuntary commitment possible.  They should repeal it.”

I was like… “I’ve read the entire thing.  I didn’t see that there.”

She insisted it was, in fact, there.

I do have reading comprehension issues.  I concluded I must’ve missed it.  I told her that removing the Lanterman Act would likely land me in an institution.

She started yelling at me about how I was – this is almost a direct quote – “just like the people in the concentration camps who were willing to sell out their fellow inmates because they got a few favors from the Nazis”.  Which… seemed pretty harsh for a brief conversation about a topic we both seemed fuzzy about the details of.  And she decided to support the governor because of his desire to repeal the Lanterman Act.

I later scoured the Lanterman Act and couldn’t find any of the shit she talked about.  I had little enough self-confidence that I assumed I must be totally misunderstanding something major.  

Much later, almost by accident, I learned two things.

One, I was right.  The Lanterman Act is not the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, and the governor had no plans on repealing the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act.

Two, even if it had been the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, I don’t think she was thinking it through.  Because… the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act sucks.  In huge ways.  It allows for things that are quite dangerous to people.  I’ve been 5150ed and 5250ed more times than I can count.  

The local adult psych ward was a death trap I was lucky to escape alive without getting snagged into a hold cycle until something happened I couldn’t get out of (I have a deadly reaction to one of their favorite meds, and both psych professionals and ER professionals are trained to be cynical about anyone who says they react to them, even though my reaction was originally witnessed and documented by a gaggle of professionals).  They routinely drugged people until their throats tightened up enough they had trouble speaking, and then took them to their commitment hearings in that state to be talked about in the third person and made to look as incompetent as possible while unable to talk back.  One thing our group did was visit to keep an eye on patients who didn’t have anyone else looking out for them.  And they did everything in their power, including spontaneously changing visiting hours the moment they saw us, to keep us out of there.

So I’m no fan of California’s involuntary commitment policy or the fact that people could be stuck in places like that particular psych ward.

But repealing the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act would not actually get rid of involuntary commitment, nor would it improve the conditions for people under involuntary commitment.  What people don’t all seem to realize is that the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act was put into place to limit indefinite commitment times and to limit the reasons for involuntary commitment.  It didn’t do enough, obviously.  It didn’t end it.  But before the L-P-S Act, you could commit people indefinitely and for incredibly vague reasons.  So the L-P-S act overall reduced commitment times and made it harder to commit people.  People who want commitment to be easier are always complaining about how hard it’s been made to commit people.  It’s not that hard, in my experience, but it’s still harder than it could be.  Harder than it used to be.  Harder than it would be without it.

If they want to do away with involuntary commitment, that doesn’t take repealing the L-P-S Act, it takes writing new law to govern what would actually happen instead, and then repealing or replacing or amending it or however that kind of thing works.  It would, in fact, probably very similar to parts of the actual Lanterman Act, at least at first.  The Lanterman Act didn’t do away with institutionalization of people with developmental disabilities, but it took huge steps in that direction and made alternatives to institutions part of the new way things were structured.  

And it is really inappropriate to ask someone to risk backsliding into institutions after progress has been made in doing away with those institutions, just because you think it might make it harder to put you in an institution for 3 to 14 days.  And to gratuitously call them a Nazi collaborator if they don’t instantly agree with you – on a point of view that in this case didn’t even turn out to be based on something real.  So for all I know this lady is still out there trying to get people with developmental disabilities put in institutions permanently so that (as she imagines things) it’s harder to put her on a temporary hold in an institution.  This is why it’s important to actually look up a law and its history as best you can, before throwing resources into changing it.  Because whether she hit the right law or the wrong one, getting it repealed would in either case result in long-term, even indefinite or permanent, involuntary institution stays for a lot of people.

Mistaking Lanterman for Lanterman-Petris-Short makes sense, but it’s a hell of a mistake to make and all the reason to be more careful.  And I wouldn’t put it past some law somewhere to give rights to one group of disabled people and take that same right away from another group of disabled people simultaneously, but you can’t just yank the rights out from under that first group of people without replacing it with something else, or you’re just reversing the situation.

[hussyknee]

People seem to think this is fake because it's written in English. Apart from the racism in believing that Arab doctors and nurses aren't fluent in English (a second or official language for half of Asia), Palestinians have deliberately been addressing their audience in English on every social media, from journalists to children, because they know speaking English to Westerners immediately makes people more human in their eyes. Because language is one of the ways the imperial cultural hegemony conditions us (yes, everyone in the world) to see who qualifies as "people" and who are simply a mass of bodies who were always made to suffer and die. Gazans know this deeply, which is why they have been using English to beg and plead through social media, "We're not numbers! We're not numbers! We're people like you, we speak your language, we deserve to live!" all the while they're systematically slaughtered.

Israeli forces also encircled Al Shifa Hospital yesterday and bombed it for several hours while shooting dead anyone trying to flee including medical staff moving between buildings. Not sure whether it's still continuing because WHO lost all communications with its staff there a few hours after. The last new report said that thirty-nine babies had been removed from the incubators before the power went out. It's extremely unlikely they will survive.

Please understand that these atrocities depend on the war of attrition between governments and public attention. The momentum of public outcry is difficult to sustain through repeated stonewalling and bureaucratic intractability. When we're flooded with these reports and a sense of futility and despair replaces the anger, it allows compassion fatigue to set in and the violence to become normalized. Massacring hospitals, killing sick children and openly targeting humanitarian aid workers (Netanyahu just declared the UNRWA is in league with Hamas) will become simply more news articles that fade into the background, and open genocides will soon become part of the "lesser evil".

Take care of yourselves how you can, take distance where needed, but please never tune out and give up on the two million people for whom we are the only witness and hope. Never stop boosting and sharing the news and posts you find, never stop getting out there and joining every protest you can, however small. Anger burns out, which is why activism must depend on an immovable sense of justice and uncompromising value for human life. It's not just about Gaza, it's about the kind of evil our generation will be coerced into accepting as unchangeable and inevitable hereafter.

[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.

[testosteronetempation]

everyone wants solidarity but nobody wants to put on a mask. everyone wants third spaces but nobody wants to put on a mask. everyone wants mutual aid but nobody wants to put on a mask.

[sayruq]

[autisticmudkip]

Save a Disabled Child's Life!!!

Do you care about disabled people’s lives? I hope you do. Disabled people are all worthy of love and respect, and disability rights and justice are vital to building a better, more just world.

I truly hope that you care about disabled people. Maybe you are even disabled yourself. Here you have an opportunity to save the life of a disabled person. I dearly hope that you will help save him.

Nour Ashour @noor-yashour has two children. One of them, Muhammed, is just four years old, and since his birth has living with a condition that causes muscle relaxation and inability to move.

To treat his condition, Muhammed requires medical treatment, and regular physical therapy sessions. However, due to the ongoing war he and his family are suffering through, he has not been able to recieve proper treatment for over a year. Without treatment, Muhammed will DIE. He will die solely for the sake of being a disabled boy in Gaza. This is deeply unjust.

On top of Muhammed's pressing medical needs, the Ashour family needs help getting other necessities to survive as well. The need to be able to purchase food, water, and safe shelter for the coming winter.

Despite how urgent her family's needs are, and how diligently Nour has been working to raise funds for her family for months, she has only reached a small fraction of her goal! Donations have been extremely slow. Muhammed can't afford this. Without treatment, he will die.

£6,825 / £80,000

Please, I beg you, donate to Nour. Muhammed doesn't deserve to die. Nour doesn't deserve to lose her son. None of the Ashour family deserves to starve or freeze this winter. Donate whatever you can! Even a small amount, just £10 or even £5, is much better than nothing! If you absolutely cannot donate, please share Nour's campaign as widely as you can, both on tumblr and with people you know in person.

Please, just do whatever you can to save Muhammed. Give this disabled child a chance at life!

Vetted here by 90-ghost

Donate to save Muhammed!!!

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