I’m someone who was disabled as a child in ways that were easy to explain away with 90s brand sexism. It wasn’t weird for children who were perceived as girls to have severe mood swings and fainting back then. As a result I lived my entire childhood unaware that I had any.
It was only in the 2000s when living as a teen and young adult with untreated disabilities that compounded into more disabilities that I finally realized that my body had a problem that wasn’t going to get better.
This experience is not unique but it does color and inform how I navigate the world as a disabled person. What I’ve noticed is that there is a cultural divide between people who grew up as openly out disabled children and those who weren’t. What I’ve also noticed is that the raised disabled community has a very harmful and ableist rhetoric about disability.
There’s been this viral post going around saying that disabled people who have the “I won’t let my disability stop me” mindset are ableist and doing a micro aggression against other disabled people. To this poster there is clearly a hierarchy of disability and people who present as the most disabled person in the room are at the top of that hierarchy and must be catered to by those that are deemed lesser by the factor of being able to do more. This is just an insane concept by itself but the post at its core is ableism.
Disability is an intersectional experience. What that means is that not only does every aspect of your disability affect your life but every aspect of your life affects your disability.
What that means is that there are a lot of things that aren’t your disability that decide whether you can and cannot do things. For example your geographic location, your income level and your social status impact your ability. Everyone has a unique set of stats.
Since I had my disability dumped on me all at once while I was navigating a series of traumatic events between the ages of 18-25, I developed a “I can do it despite my disability” mindset because I did not have the privilege or access to social support or the financial means to buy that support. My family couldn’t help me, my friends couldn’t and my university wouldn’t because I was legally an adult so I had to learn very quickly how to navigate the world disabled and how to advocate for myself by myself. I’m used to being disabled alone and when you’re living like that you have to have a despite mindset to survive and do the things you need to do. It doesn’t make me morally superior to someone who doesn’t have that mindset but that is how I do and will continue to live my life because I’m not rich and I live in a f***ing red state by myself and I’ve always been disabled as an adult. If I don’t do it despite I will die.
People who grew up disabled often have the immense privilege of family and social support. They have not navigated the world disabled alone nearly as often because of that infrastructure of support but there are unique social pressures that come with that. Often they learn to think of their disability as their primary identity and the thing that gets them access to human connection. They learn the toxic lesson that if they’re the most vulnerable person in the room they’ll get the care they need exactly how they need it.
As a result disabled people like me are a threat. If I’m stomping around with a similar disability holding down a long term career and filing my taxes without assistance I might as well be Godzilla. I contradict the narrative they base their identity on. I unmask that a lot of the things preventing them from doing what they want are social, economic and accessibility issues. I reveal that it’s not always their disability stopping them.
Unfortunately a lot of the world is lazy and selfish. Particularly in the US. It’s a lot easier to teach a disabled person to limit themselves than it is to make the world truly accessible in the way they’re legally required to if someone disabled wants to participate. Parents of people with disabilities, I hate to say this, choose their battles because they’re overwhelmed (parenting regardless is A LOT) and sometimes they teach their kids to limit themselves to convenience themselves. It’s not intentional discrimination but it is ableism. So what happens is you have this whole subsection of the disability community that has hardcore internalized ableism and an incentive to buy into the disability hierarchy narrative.
As a result you get crazy viral posts that are really mean and demeaning to other disabled people. Social media only making dissemination of that hierarchical structure easier because you can be an influencer when you’re living with a financially supportive spouse or family. Social media is how a lot of newly disabled people get information about disability so if the Internal Supremacist Ableists are the primary sources of information, those new people are going to absorb and internalize those ideas.
This is really harmful for the disability community because we need pioneers who are willing to trail blaze a path into inaccessible places. ADA compliance doesn’t happen unless there are disabled people in the room wanting to do things. Unless we have despite mindset people around change for the better doesn’t happen. Personally just as a single person I’ve made every workplace and location I’ve been to permanently more accessible just by refusing to go home. I’m proud of that. I worked hard and I talk about it openly because it matters to me and is a part of my life.
For some to try to silence that simply because they’re uncomfortable with self reflection is silly. They’re being immature and mean—and they’re being ableist because they’re refusing to recognize real accessibility issues that affect more than just themselves. They’re ignoring the larger world that we live in.
I guess this long rant is to say I hate that post and I think it’s bad. I think the person who posted it has a lot of personal baggage around their disability that they need to work on and I think they’re hurting themselves and the community by staying in a place of self limitation. I feel angry that someone thinks I should shut up when I work really hard in my life to make the path easier for people who come after me. It hurts my feelings and just in general is a bad vibe. Not a fan.
