#uhhhh specifically because i fucking hate fire alarms

[innocent-until-proven-geeky]

Cool, let’s talk sneaky ableism in the form of conflicting accommodations!

Sneaky ableism is a phrase I use a lot in my personal life. I also say things like “sneaky racism” and “sneaky queerphobic” and “sneaky sexism”, but I personally have the most experience with the ableism. This generally includes one of two things: 1) ableism that is in some way socially acceptable to a point that only the disabled notices it; 2) ableism in conflicting accommodations, which we’re going to talk about here.

“Ableism in conflicting accommodations” is basically just a Ver way of saying “you helped this group but now my group is having a harder time and you seem to be having trouble considering that”.

An example:

At the end of my senior year of high school, a friend of mine and a sign language interpreter for a Deaf student formed an ASL club, because the ASL class had unfortunately been cut a couple years prior. During one meeting, probably the day of or the day after a fire drill, although I don’t remember now, we found ourselves on the subject of fire alarms.

Modern fire alarms for public spaces like schools are really cool. They’re designed to be loud and buzzy, and they have the big flashy lights too. This way, although Deaf people can’t necessarily hear the alarms, they can feel the vibrations and see the lights.

Unfortunately, as an autistic person, I personally have only the worst experiences with these alarms. Emergency drills used to elicit panic attacks from me, and eventually I got to a point where I needed to either leave early (we always knew about drills beforehand) or I would essentially freeze. The sensory overload when these alarms, as multi-sensory and loud as they are, was so bad that I could not actually get out of the building without someone guiding me.

(Before you get all “oh, but you have someone guiding you,” please think about how humiliating it is to have this happen in front of the entire school, and maybe about why we have fire alarms like this in the first place: because it’s humiliating and frustrating and kind of scary to know that you can’t get out on your own, and Deaf people maybe deserve to not have that? Like what do you think people did before these fancy fire alarms?)

Here’s the issue: the advisor for this club couldn’t seem to grasp why these fire alarms, an amazing accommodation for Deaf students and teachers, might be so awful for students like me.

That’s the sneaky ableism. She was (and, I assume, still is) an amazing advocate for our Deaf students, and when I didn’t understand the purpose of these fire alarms that made me feel so awful she explained them to me. But then she couldn’t understand the reciprocal. (Personally, I doubt she intentionally would have ignored it.) She didn’t think about autism and sensory processing issues and disorders as much because she was a sign language interpreter, and she fell into a trap of forgetting that this disability may have conflicting needs with the one she advocates for.

(And if you caught my earlier statement, so did I!)

This does not make her ableist. Or me. This trap, this sort of conflict of interest, doesn’t make anyone ableist. It is still a form of ableism that you, and I, and everyone need to be aware of. It is a form of ableism, and it is sneaky because each of us acknowledged one disability and the accommodations necessary for them but couldn’t really acknowledge the other disability. In our advocacy, we were still making ableist statements. Sneaky of us.

Here’s the deal, though: there may not be an easy solution to your particular conflict of interest. There may be no solution at all, and one community is unfortunately going to get the short end of the stick every once in a while. We can’t make everything fair and accommodating, even though I wish we could.

What we can do is listen and hear everyone out and refuse to fall into the trap of “my disability is more important than yours”. It’s not. No one’s disability is more important than anyone else’s disability. Let’s be intersectional about our disability advocacy and do what we can to be as inclusive as possible. Without sneaking in some ableism.

[canaryatlaw]

okay, so today was a little nuts and stressful, but overall okay. just, a lot. my alarm went off at 7 and for some reason I reaaaaaaaaaaally didn't want to get up, like more than just normal, so I said I’d uber to work and slept till 7:45 and still really didn’t want to get up but I couldn’t justify skipping work so I made myself get up and ubered to court, which of course I was late for and just blamed the CTA because they’ve fucked up enough to take the blame for this. I wasn’t assigned to a specific attorney to shadow so I texted the one I was with yesterday and asked if I could shadow her because I was going to a deposition with her later anyway, and she said yes so I met her in the courtroom, and other lawyer guy I get put with a lot was already there with her, which I didn’t know, but oh well. turns out it was good there was two of us because we ended up having to run to a bunch of different courtrooms to keep track of cases while the attorney desperately tried to finish each one before dashing off to the next, so it was a lot of texting “they’re on this number now” then as soon as they’re done at the bench they leave and you’re there drafting an order and making sure OPC gets a copy. so that was fairly intense, and went on till 11 when we were finally done. The deposition was at 1, meaning we should be there to prep our client by 12, and we had two depositions scheduled back to back again, so it was gonna take a while. only problem is one of my responsibilities is drafting the court schedule for two days out, and I hadn’t been able to do it at all yesterday because I’d been out with this same attorney at deps, and she was also the one in charge of me drafting the list that’s quickly becoming the bane of my existence so I was like uhhhh I need to draft this at some point? She gave me her “laptop” (it’s an iPad with a keyboard attached) and I sat in Starbucks trying to type it up because there’s no wifi in the courthouse (thanks, Cook County). I was able to get most of it down but then we had to head to the other lawyer’s office for the dep. there was a woman in the starbucks that had started talking to us who at first just seemed really nice and complimentary but the longer she went on talking the more you could tell she wasn’t exactly right....my best guess was she was bipolar experiencing a manic episode and is either off her meds or wasn't on them to begin with (in my non-professional psychological opinion) so that was...interesting. but we left and got to the office fairly quickly, and we prepped the client while I tried to format the schedule the proper way so it would be nice and need but it was not cooperating so I stayed in the room and tried to get it fixed while they started the deposition in the other room, but I got it fixed pretty well (or so I thought at the time, stay tuned) and went to the dep but we didn’t have wifi there either and so we had to get a hotspot from a phone and it was the whole mess trying to send it from my phone and I was just like okay let’s just be done with this. And so I thought it was done and dealt with. so, then there was the deposition. our client went first as is usual, pretty simple car accident case, rear ended, she was the passenger but had some medical bills to pay. The fault was really please (or so we thought) and we expected it to settle quickly. However, when the defendant came in, things did not quite go according to plan. According to the defendant, she never hit there car, and this was a conspiracy against her with a falsely filed accident report, and our client (who was literally across the table from her) didn’t even look like the same woman that was there that night. It was honestly one of the worst displays of lying I’ve seen in a long time, because it was just BAD. like it was so excessive and ridiculous and I could tell our attorney was getting really pissed about it, and of course she got into it with OPC a bit about it because like why are you just letting your client clearly commit easily disproved perjury while under oath????? I don’t fucking understand. so by the time that was over we were like LOL we’re done and she didn’t want to go back to the office and was like we’re just gonna be done now (it was like 3) which I was like okay that’s fine by me 😂 and we got on the bus up to where she was picking up her daughter from school, and I just stayed on the bus the rest of the way home. It is another option from the red line, it just tends to be slower because there are a lot of more stops, but I may start using it more frequently when it gets colder and those 20 minutes each way walks start getting rough. So I get home and I just wanted to get the schedule for Thursday done so I didn’t have to think about it tomorrow since that was what I should’ve been doing today, so I spent a while going through that and making sure it was all right before sending it out. Made some dinner, and watched The Gifted, which was pretty good. I liked the “mutant rights lawyer” character for obvious reasons, and I’m excited to see the cast at their panel at NYCC this weekend that we won in the lottery to get to see. When that was over I remembered I was still behind on Wynonna Earp and should watch that. I initially thought I just needed to watch the finale, but when I got to the end of that episode there were two more, so I guess I was more behind than I thought. Towards the end of this episode I got a phone call from the attorney I was with today rather panicked about a bunch of cases being left off the list. SHIT. I mean, I double checked the goddamn thing, I was super thorough, but it’s also the responsibilities of the assistants to respond if things for their attorney are left off the list, and none of them did, so we had a very panicked phone call where she relayed the info to me and I updated the list then sent it out to the assistants. When I actually got back to the report and compared it to the list I realized the cases we just talked about were on there, but I specifically remember writing them down because some of the names were unique and I had to think about how I wanted to write them, and the missing ones were all in like a cluster on the list anyway, which led me to conclude part of the list must’ve gotten deleted without me realizing it while I was trying to fix the damn thing, which means this is really my fault for fucking up the list (the other thing was if they weren’t on the list at all that would’ve also been the assistant’s fault for not putting them in the system) so I had to text the attorney and explain what happened and was like I’m so sorry idk how this happened but I swear I had those names on there” but she was chill and was like it’s okay it’s still the assistant’s responsibility for not catching it (I think I mentioned before, but there’s like a low key civil war going on with the assistants right now and like at least two have up and quit in the 3 and a half weeks I’ve been here and I feel like the chances more of them are gonna get fired real soon are fairly high judging by how things have been going). So that panic was over, but I was so stressed out at that point from knowing I fucked it up I was going to be peeved about it for the rest of the night. oh well, not much I can do about it now. So I watched the next episode which was the second to last of Wynonna Earp and when that was over I started getting ready for bed and here we are. I’m always trying to get to bed earlier and not procrastinate and yet it’s already 11:58 pm and I’m getting less than 7 hours of sleep and ugh I hate being tired all the time but I’m really trying to do better, it’s just not working. sigh. oh well. Guess I’m signing off now and trying to get some of that sleep. Goodnight dearies. Stay lovely.