#we really fucking need internet disability legislation

[delgado-master]

Apparently Staff has made it so I can’t zoom into photos and videos??? Like that’s a basic accessibility feature??? Hello???

[psithurista]

Hey on the off chance you’re a fellow Australian seeing all our American mutuals in absolute despair today, you need to get really fucking serious right now about our own upcoming election. Historically we follow America into left- or right-swings. This time, we are already there. What happened in America shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who paid attention in Queensland. People in my home state voted for a racist, ultra-conservative Christian pro-life advocate whose only policy was putting traumatised ten year-old First Nations kids into adult prisons instead of the guy promising cheap public transport, free school lunches, and cost of living relief through reduced electricity bills and car registration fees.

You need to look at the Auspol news stories from today alone if you don’t think shit is already fucking dire.

Jing Lee was threatened and intimidated into voting with Joanna Howe’s frankly terrifying abortion amendments despite the prior commitments she’d made otherwise. Parliament is abandoning its responsibility to protect whistleblowers, including the one that revealed the unlawful and unethical debt collection practices in which the ATO was engaging. The government quietly made its response to the DSP inquiry today, and that response was “We don’t need to do anything because it’s been so long since this was raised.” This, following the Disability Royal Commission where over two hundred recommendations were made from the findings and not a single one was implemented.

And now the spineless little cunt who sold out every single one of his values the day he was elected Prime Minister announced the social media ban is going ahead. In order to enforce this, what this will almost certainly mean for you is you will, under legislation, be required to connect your ID against all of your internet use. If the implications of that when it comes to censorship, personal privacy, freedom of information, media and journalistic freedom, the ability to organise and the ability to protest, particularly when faced with the prospect of the reversal of women’s and LGBTQ+ peoples’ rights not to mention the everpresent Newscorp machine don’t scare the absolute living shit out of you, then they fucking should.

We are NOT America. All the posts you’ve seen today claiming third-party or independent voters are to blame for the second coming of Trump do NOT apply to us. We have a beautiful thing called preferential voting. This means that when you vote Green (the only major party working to protect abortion rights AND your freedom and privacy online, the only major party calling for the dissolution of AUKUS, the only major party calling for meaningful sanctions on Israel AND an overhaul of our disgusting asylum seeker policy (especially crucial after the IDF openly announced today they have no intention of allowing displaced Palestinians to return home), the only major party trying to wipe student debt and make uni free again, the only major party trying to protect and EXPAND Medicare, the only major party with a serious climate plan, and the only major party actively prioritising a reconciliation plan to treaty with First Nations people), your vote is not wasted even if you’re the only person in your electorate to do so.

If a single other Australian person is following this silly little blog, please please please realise that we WILL see a repeat of the American election here if we don’t start getting serious right now. I don’t know a single LNP voter who knows fuck about shit about policy and isn’t just voting based on however their family voted, and most of them are horrified when they actually hear what they’re voting for. Talk to your friends, family, co-workers about the policies Dutton and Albanese are proposing. Make a bunch of Volduttonmort memes and stick them up around your city. Just fucking do something.

I'm so scared guys I'm so scared

[thedreadvampy]

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about disability and neurodivergence over the past couple of years (I’ve actually just now accepted a contract to freelance write a section of policy on disability and ableism for my old workplace. I have done this because I hate myself and starting a new job with 1.5x the hours as my old one JUST WASN’T ENOUGH STRESS)

and I have decided I REALLY take issue with the concept of "disabled”. like. at all. I think the construction of “disabled people” is at the root of SWATHES of what’s wrong with our society and how we treat people with specific access or wellbeing needs.

like I think it’s basically fact at this point to take a postmodern approach and accept the common framing of “people are as disabled as society makes them” ie disability is a social construct and who is disabled is purely a matter of who society isn’t willing to work around as default (the usual example is short-sightedness, which historically was a substantial disability but is barely noticeable in a society where using adaptive tech for it is normalised)

but I wanna push it further because either EVERYONE is disabled or NOBODY is disabled imo. “disabled” is a broad enough category to be fundamentally meaningless. it’s a useful umbrella term for like...people whose physical and psychological needs and personhood are often diminished, overlooked or ignored, but it’s also very arbitrary and contextual what qualifies as a disability.

which is kind of what I’m saying about person-centred parenting (which. pinch of salt I am not a parent). EVERYBODY has special needs because everybody’s needs are different. And my experience has been that positing Capital-D Disabled as a specific, blue-badge-holding, Very Serious category, and limiting your concerns about access and wellbeing needs to disabled people is: 

a) unhelpful to people who aren’t disabled per se but who benefit from specific accomodations (for a very trivial example, “having shit internet” isn’t a disability, but it’s still an access need that things like video transcripts, image descriptions and alternate communication routes will help meet) b) unhelpful to people who are “disabled-ish,” who don’t feel able to clearly identify as disabled, or who don’t know they’re disabled (which to be honest is so many of us because invisible disabilities, partial sensory or motor loss, and mental health problems make up the bulk of disabilities and those are often invisibilised or downplayed) c) unhelpful to “properly disabled” people, because it creates a huge othering effect. drawing a hard line between “normal” and “disabled,” or even imagining that that’s a line that exists, allows disabled people to be dehumanised or treated as the sum of their Tragic Suffering, as opposed to the Normal Abled People.

“Disabled” is, as I say, a useful generalisation/abstraction sometimes, but when we’re talking about actual material things (whether that’s material need or material change) it’s not a useful category. I honestly don’t think we can create a society which consistently confronts ableism while we’re trying to operate in a binary framework centred on “disabled” vs “not disabled” or “neurotypical” vs “neurodiverse”. We need to be willing to throw out the whole construction of “abled” and instead commit to handling needs without interrogating cause. 

This DOES NOT MEAN that doctors, therapists, individuals, communities etc shouldn’t try to diagnose, treat or understand conditions, or that we should throw out the idea of labelling condition groups. It just means that we need to flip how we look at it, and take a descriptive not prescriptive approach. We need to understand that these labels (whether something as broad as “disabled” or as specific as “Ehlers-Danlos type 2″) are useful as groupings, but that the function of them is to give a general idea of what issues might arise and what might help.

Every person with, say, EDS type 2 is using that to refer to the same symptom grouping, but a) they’ll all manifest, experience and describe symptoms their own way and b) they’re all individual people with other shit going on in their minds and bodies, and so what helps one of them may absolutely fuck another up. And somebody who doesn’t have EDS type 2, but who finds using a wheelchair helpful, potentially has more in common with EDS patient A (who uses a wheelchair) than Patient A has with EDS patient B (who has no mobility impairment but huge digestive problems).

And like. ok. I’m not hearing impaired but I do have audio processing issues, so subtitles are really, really useful to me. I’m not, technically, disabled in that way. it would be dodgy for me to claim I was. but it’s still super useful for me to feel able to request that. and then we have to ask - where’s the line? I’m disabled because my knees are fucked at 27. but if my knees were in this state at 80 I’d be in rude health. but if I was 80, it would still be an absolute pain in the ass to climb 5 flights of stairs, even though contextually I am healthier than expected. 

Or like...I was chatting to a pal about disability disclosure and all the little things you don’t notice affecting your life and therefore don’t report or ask for help with. I said “I have agoraphobia and there’s this like. physical resistance I have to push through to leave the house so I stand around going ‘oh no I have forgotten something’ because I’m procrastinating on having to go outside.” She said “oh I also do that but in my case it’s because I usually have forgotten something so I’m always paranoid.”

forgetfulness isn’t a disability (except when it is). and ultimately although the root is different the material impact is broadly the same. and the world is full of things we find hard that others find easy, but that may not be socially understood as disabilities. I just think we’d get a lot further if we took a solution-centred view on this. it does matter to me why I can’t leave the house, because how I handle it is affected by what the problem is. but it shouldn’t matter to eg my work why I need to give myself an extra 20 minutes to get out of the house (whether it’s agoraphobia, forgetfulness or something else) as long as we can, between us, figure out a workaround.

anyway that’s why I keep textdumping on that parenting post. because we shouldn’t have to ask “does my child have ADHD” or “is my child autistic” or “is my child trans” in order to justify finding ways for them to manage being restless, depressed, overwhelmed, manic, afraid, angry etc, or to let them wear what they feel right in and self-describe how they want to. It might be helpful to know if they’re ADHD/autistic/trans/whatever, because it can help you get ideas and resources for strategies, but it shouldn’t be necessary, and “because this thing is harmless and makes them safer/happier/calmer” is fundamentally a more important justification than “because they are autistic”

idk. treat people as people. try to do right by them. don’t build a hierarchy of Normal and Abnormal problems. just meet common needs and create space for people to express their needs without needing to disclose their whole medical history or litigate their disability status.

(TO BE CLEAR: in the current world legislation specifically related to defining disability as a protected characteristic and disabled people as at-risk/special interest groups are VERY NECESSARY. but in a world governed by an expectation of tailored accessibility and wellbeing approaches I think that necessity would at the very least be heavily reduced. and in communities trying to do more than the bare minimum to create an anti-ableist space I think the best single thing we can do is almost always to remove gatekeeping and disclosure barriers to asking for adaptations)