A response I keep seeing to the "a lady called the cops on me and they sent me to the psych ward" post is people, disproportionately white ladies, attempting to discuss this distinction between discomfort and danger. That it's okay to be uncomfortable, but not okay to respond as if that discomfort is a threat to them.
This is not it. Discomfort is the problem. You need to get comfortable seeing disabled people in public, even if we're loud and annoying and have weird tics and talk to ourselves. You gotta. The preservation of comfort is killing disabled people mate.
OK so the majority of times I've had the CAT Team called on me in public were actually people who thought I was a "suicide risk" for being mentally ill in public. That's when the cops show up an if you're very lucky they have a social worker with them, though social workers are often cops, anybody who has had an unnecessary CPS call placed on them for being poor, Black or parenting while disabled can tell you that much mate lol.
Then you need to perform a very specific disabled script to avoid being sent to the ward, reassuring these people that you are cogent and not a threat. This is to allay the discomfort of the pigs. If you can't soothe their discomfort, you are punished.
Discomfort with difference is at the root of ableism. Quiet discomfort is not neutral. You need to actually unlearn it. Work on it. There is a pathway to do so, this is not an abstract "unlearn racism" instruction: volunteer at a day service, read to disabled kids at a local library program, immerse yourself in the avenues of the disabled world we make available to able-bodied people and actually pay attention. Actually listen. Make some friends. Don't just learn how to say "hello where is the bathroom" from an online Sign course, participate in free sign lessons at an actual honest to god Deaf school. Get out there.
You NEED to understand how policed disability is.
We send disabled children to a whole different childhood so your precious little able kids don't need to be scared by their presence, and we tell them and you that it's for the benefit of the disabled kids, to prevent them from being bullied. Mate, what's more "bullying" than segregation? What are we doin?
Because disabled kids don't have a real education as a result of this, and because our social skills are fucked because we've never had to survive in the able world, a lot of us are stuck in the Pit of Despair, with nothing but day services and perhaps if you're very lucky residential care instead of homelessness to look forward to. Understand, I got into a university not entirely on my merits, but because I was shifted from a special school to a "special needs program" at a private Catholic school at 15. If I only had the SPED on my records, no fucking university would ever have considered me except maybe for a wokebucks scholarship.
That is the automatic barrier of SPED, and at the root of all justifications defending SPED is "discomfort." Oh, won't the disabled kids be bullied? Oh, but it's unfair to them to have to perform at an able-bodied level? Ugh, we can't just systematically reform education, that's so much wooork and it's not fair for the able-bodied kids, who "have to deal" (be discomforted by) a change. The system as it is is fiiine, it's comfy this way.
And it runs through everything. Even for non-SPED disabled people. A big part of it is that you aren't nearly as employable, no one wants their patties flipped by somebody who talks to themselves, because that's weird and scary and "are they alright?" Or it's funny, it's so funny man, the peak of comedy is a disabled person existing, because no man, you as a culture aren't this moment cystalized.
This moment is discomfort. This moment is Donald Trump expressing his discomfort, not fear, of a disabled man. That's what "discomfort" is, and being quiet and feeling "safe" in the presence of discomfort does basically nothing for me. This man isn't allowed to be "a journalist," he is always "a disabled journalist," in every room that he's in, all the time. He encounters able peoples' discomfort, and often this is what it leads to.
Disability and discomfort stemming from disability is never neutral because it is the foundation of ableism.
One of the most famous "horror" movies ever made, 1932's Freaks, is just about disabled people existing. Disabled people moving. Disabled people laughing. Disabled people lighting a cigarette.
They used to cart us around in display cages for people to come and look. Later, they celebrated this as liberatory, because of a pseudowoke ahistorical narrative that it let us live in society, like claiming that Ota Benga and Theodor Wonja Michael had it made in the shade because at least they weren't being "mistreated" with violence, or that the only bad thing about their lives as fetishized objects of discomfort was when they were treated with violence.
How do you possibly believe holding on to quiet discomfort, preserving your habitus but drawing the line purely at violence, is what's necessary to make society safe for the disabled?
How do you possibly believe that?
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