The Queer Disabled Historian

Thoughts on queerness, disability and marginalisation in history and culture by a 40 year old disabled and neurodivergent nonbinary person. If you would like to tip me for my work my Ko-Fi is https://ko-fi.com/thepalequeen

[enbycrip]

I have quite a few different blogs for different aspects of what I do.

@enbycrip is my main blog for thoughts on history, culture, intersectionality and marginalisation as a queer, disabled and neurodivergent person. It’s also where I post about academia and life stuff.

@ds9-polycule-tales is specifically for DS9 AU queer polycule fiction and general Trek fandom stuff.

@queer-crip-grows is for gardening, urban food growing, environmental and sustainability stuff, plus some solarpunky stuff too

@a-queer-crip-writes is for my short fiction and poetry

@a-queer-crip-arts is basically just a place for me to put the various art stuff I try so I can see progression with practice. One thing I can actually thank the GenAI bros for; I spent enough time talking about how anything an actual person makes is so infinitely superior to trash churned out by a plagiarism engine and how art is a skill learned by practice, not an innate talent, that I actually convinced myself to start putting my money where my mouth was.

I take commissions - copy editing and proofreading, plus sensitivity reading as a queer nonbinary disabled person. I take writing commissions for academic historical research and analysis, popular history, perspectives on queerness, disability and marginalisation, and also for fiction! Please PM if you would like to discuss a commission!

If you would like to tip me for my work, you can send it to my Ko-Fi. Thanks!

Buy Red Hamilton Russell a Coffee. ko-fi.com/thepalequeen

Become a supporter of Red Hamilton Russell today! ❤️ Ko-fi lets you support the creators you love with no fees on donations.

[transtarks]

“you have to stop buying every mug you think is cute” what’s that? i can’t hear you over the sound of all my mugs clinking together in the cabinet as i try to find space for this new mug i bought

[enbycrip]

ID: A Facebook post by Sarah: Changing the Narrative:

“This post responds to Sarah Whately’s false claims about the Motability Scgeme made on Sky News.

Summary: Helen Whately’s comments about Motability and disability benefits were factually wrong, deliberately stigmatising, and Sky News allowed every lie to go unchallenged. Disabled people deserve truth, not scapegoating.

LIAR.

Nothing Helen Whately MP said about benefits or the Motability Scheme was true.

Not one sentence.

And Trevor Phillips letting those lies slide is Sky News being complicit in normalising disability hate.

This is the pattern we keep seeing:

Invent a story → blame disabled people → distract from political failure.

It is discrimination, and it is deliberate.

1. Whately claimed:

“Millions are getting benefits for anxiety and ADHD, along with a free Motability car.”

Reality:

There are not “millions” with a Motability car.

The scheme supports around 815,000 people across all disability benefits.

Only 593,700 PIP claimants use Motability.

You cannot turn that into “millions”.

And there is no such thing as a free car.

We give up our entire mobility component of PIP/DLA to lease a vehicle — and many of us pay thousands in adaptations and advance payments.

2. Whately claimed:

“It is absurd that in parts of the country one in three new cars come from Motability.”

“The system hands out new vehicles for low level mental health conditions or tennis elbow.”

Her language, “hands out”, “low level”, “tennis elbow”, is designed to ridicule and dehumanise.

Reality:

• The “one in three” figure applies to Wales, where disability rates are higher and public transport is worse.

• Across England and Wales combined, it is closer to 16%.

And again:

Motability does not hand anything out.

It is a lease disabled people pay for using their benefits and often their own money.

As a disabled woman who cannot rely on public transport, I know how essential adapted cars are to independence.

We are not props in her culture war.

3. Whately claimed:

“The scheme has stretched beyond what it was meant for, it was designed for the seriously disabled.”

Reality:

This is false.

Motability has always included anyone who qualifies for the higher mobility rate of PIP/DLA, including people with:

• physical impairments

• sensory impairments

• neurodivergence

• mental illness

• fluctuating or invisible disabilities

There is no such category in PIP as “low level mental health”.

She invented it to justify hostility.

Calling ADHD, bipolar, PTSD, autistic burnout or severe anxiety “low level” erases the lived reality of millions of disabled people.

What the DWP data actually shows

• 174,700 Motability users have a primary psychiatric condition, about 29%, not everyone.

• Only 10,400 have ADHD.

• Many have severe, enduring and complex disabilities.

This isn’t “mild anxiety and free cars”.

It’s a politician punching down on disabled people.

Why this matters

Disabled people especially those with invisible impairments, mental distress and neurodivergence are already:

• denied accessible transport

• accused of faking

• shouted at in public

• abused online

• victims of hate crime

• navigating cuts and gatekeeping

• blamed for problems they did not cause

Whately’s messaging adds fuel.

Sky News amplifying it without challenge legitimises it.

Every time these lies circulate, another disabled person becomes a target.

CALL TO ACTION

If we want to stop this hostility escalating, we must challenge ableist narratives wherever they appear, calmly, factually, collectively.

How you can help:

Like (not “angry react”) to boost reach in the algorithm

Share posts that centre disabled voices

Comment to increase visibility

Support disability-led organisations

Write to your MP demanding they challenge misinformation

Be intersectional, ableism rarely exists alone; it intersects with racism, classism, sexism and xenophobia

Silence enables hate.

Visibility disrupts it.

Please like, share and comment to boost disabled voices and push back against misinformation.

If anyone wants the details to complain to Ofcom they are in the comments. If anyone wants help with it please contact me.

#ChangingTheNarrative #DisabilityRights #StopTheStigma #AbleismIsReal

#MotabilityFacts #DisabilityJustice #NothingAboutUsWithoutUs

#InvisibleDisability #Neurodiversity #MentalHealthIsHealth

#CultOfRacism #UKPolitics”

I’m sharing Sarah’s devastatingly comprehensive takedown of Sarah Whately’s truly damning screed of lies about the Motability Scheme on Sky News, which Trevor Philips truly horrifically allowed to proceed utterly unchallenged and Sky presented without fact-checking or comment in full because it is excellent.

I am sharing the Ofcom details below and asking anyone who has the spoons to write to them complaining that a supposedly impartial news channel has allowed and showcased a UK Government Minister simply and blatantly lying about a scheme that allows thousands of marginalised people to work and take part in community life - paid for out of already deeply inadequate social security payments they are legally entitled to access.

Complain about a programme that I saw or heard

[a-queer-crip-arts]

Two embroidered lavender bags made in character as an NPC while running Wise Women LARP at the Garenin blackhouses on the Isle of Lewis

[enbycrip]

Tens of thousands of disabled people and hundreds of DPOs in the UK have put energy into responding to the DWP’s incredibly biased consultation exercise to thoroughly demolish every bit of their plans for massive disability benefit “reforms”, ie cuts, they have released, and the way the DWP has released that shows their utter unwillingness to engage with their legal obligations to actually consult the marginalised and mostly very poor group of people this will impact.

I would like to point out the massive amount of effort and work from disabled people, including those of us with massive energy limitations due to our health, that have already gone into this.

Imagine a government who was actually willing to engage with this intense willingness to design a less cruel system?

It wouldn't be the point, but I can only imagine it would likely cost less than the huge amount they currently spend on torturing disabled people via the benefits system. It might actually mean more of us being in a position to pay income taxes, even, were they willing to incentivise employers to employ disabled people, penalise those who don't, and/or create flexible wfh jobs as multiple DPOs have suggested.

Labour's issue, like that of other right-wing parties, is not with spending money. It is with spending money to fulfil the needs of poor and marginalised people rather than the interests, including corporate interests, of the wealthy.

The DWP just quietly released a huge report into its benefit reforms

The DWP has published over 40,000 responses to its reforms from chronically ill and disabled people - but it has whitewashed them

[cherryjams]

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

[bladespark]

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

[wormpton]

[ID: A black-and-white photograph of a pair of hands with nail polish using a metallic tool to weave wires through a frame. End ID]

[enbycrip]

Hello from the Garenin blackhouse village on the Isle of Lewis where we are taking a lunch break from pre-Time In workshops for Wise Woman, a historical LARP about women’s experiences set in 1953 (with just a touch of the occult), using group community singing as a metaphor and mechanism for interactions with fate and magic

[covid-safer-hotties]

Employees with long COVID face pushback in the workplace, research finds

From having accommodation requests rejected to struggling to afford care, many of those with long COVID see a dearth of employer support.

Also preserved in our archive

An important factoid this article doesn't mention: The majority of long covid sufferers are women. May have something to do with the "pushback."

[danikriatura]

This is how to run a Free Food Program by the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Please show this to your friends and adapt this to your local conditions. Thank you.

[enbycrip]

This needs to get out there to as many people as possible.

The Black Panthers did so much fucking irreplaceable essential work on community survival and if it breaks your heart as much as it breaks mine to see how white suprematists have turned them into a vilified caricature, it’s another reason to get their work out everywhere so more people can find it and *use* it. Honour that work and honour them!

[enbycrip]

I have come across a number of things in books and podcasts about historical West Africa recently which have made me think about our current society and how we as humans handle prestige, class, resources and stability.

(I am aware I’m writing this as a white European and that the people this knowledge passed to me through had European or American accents and names; while all of them referenced academics with African names, I am acknowledging as a starting point here that there is going to have been flattening of power relationships, oversimplification, translation issues, issues with how oral histories reach academic writings, and the issues of a colonial lens *at the very least* in the transmission of knowledge to me here, and that’s before whatever misunderstanding and issues with my lack of context and structural racism have occurred in how I have processed what I have read and heard.)

So it seems that, in a lot of medieval West African kingdoms, particularly historical Ghana (relationship to the modern state of Ghana is complex and not really geographical), land was neither owned by individuals/families or by the king a la European feudalism; it was in something closer to corporate wider kin/tribal group ownership.

Unlike the situation in *most* of medieval Europe, there was just not a land shortage; there never seems to have been an issue with any individual or familial group having security of tenure of a particular area of land as long as they had the capacity to work it.

The issue of shortage was *labour*, not land itself; it’s basically the complete inverse of the situation in Western Europe in the 14th century just before the decade preceding the Black Death, when there was so much labour due to population growth that all the marginal land was under cultivation just to feed everyone and there was this underclass living in serious poverty and food insecurity, who were, horribly and familiarly, the first people to start dying in the decade of disasters that led up to the Black Death.

This kind of situation, where *land* is the prestige resource, is the one really baked into the European and colonial mindset, and you can still see the effects of it stretching into our modern western capitalist mindset when, in a lot of ways, that doesn’t entirely make logical sense. But, in medieval to early modern West Africa, the prestige resource was *labour*, not land.

Hence the long, stable social history of slavery in West Africa; when labour is your scarce resource, holding and controlling labour is how you gain, hold and demonstrate power and prestige.

And because it is long and stable, the institution of slavery in West Africa seems to have had a lot more in common with serfdom in Europe or thralldom in early medieval Scandanavia than chattel slavery in the Americas or Roman slavery. Because both of those depend on an Imperial mindset. While a society can *absolutely* persist stably with manifest inequality and exploitation, and even dehumanisation of whole classes of people, it can’t *use up* people the way those institutions did and still remain stable.

It’s not even simply an issue with birth and replacement rates etc; there are conditions of life that humans can tolerate on a generational scale and ones we can’t. We are these highly social apes that evolved to survive and thrive in small, hierarchical but highly interdependent clan communities. So there are certain kinds of stress we can tolerate an enormous amount of *if* we have other protective factors.

Imperial societies do not allow their underclasses these factors because they do not only seek to *maximise* output of resources at any given time; they see the maximum theoretical output as their “right”. They work slaves to death and exploit land to infertility because they can always conquer more land/take more prisoners/buy more slaves. The fact that they *can* acquire MORE people, and/or more land, quickly becomes a social imperative; they are *duty-bound* to acquire more people and/or more land; to EXPAND, and not doing so becomes a “loss”.

(Yes, Augustus set Rome’s imperial boundaries; it didn’t stop them continually starting wars for resources and prisoners to become slaves until the collapse of the Empire.)

I think it is fairly clear that modern capitalism is a global imperial society. You can, in fact, explicitly see that evolution. Capitalism was born at the same time as Spanish imperialism - and colonialism-genocide - in the South Americas; it was South American silver that was the resource injection that allowed the beginnings of the stock market in the Netherlands. Both of these were part of the Spanish Empire at the time, and the Netherlands’ nascent capitalism powered itself on that resource injection and used it to leap free from Spanish control and immediately begin its own colonial ventures.

Capitalism was part of the imperial machinery of the Dutch, French and British Empires; the American Empire has been more explicitly capitalist than it has been imperialist, as one became more overtly acceptable than the other. It didn’t really change its nature; just moved it from a national base - and let’s be clear; nation states are as much social constructs as anything else is, and the fact that they are somewhat anchored to a geographical location does not give them more objective reality than, for example, money - to something more diffuse that nonetheless still operates to systemically entrench power and privilege to certain people and marginalise others.

[enbycrip]

I’ve been on a little deep dive into the Great Famine in Europe 1315-1322.

This is inadequately covered by a lot of history because of the worldwide impact of the Great Death/Black Death in the 1340s. A lot of the demographic impact of the Great Famine has been swept into the Great Death.

The population had been increasing for about two centuries due to the Medieval Warm Period, which saw the best harvests of premodern Europe of about seven to one; seven grains produced for each one planted. The population had reached levels that would not be seen until the late 18th century, which was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the UK though not in all of Europe.

Then there were two years of basically constant rain. Chroniclers record less than ten days of no rain per year in 1315-17 fairly consistently across Europe, regardless of location (those will ofc be different days etc etc but the trend is very clear). Seeds were washed from the ground and topsoil washed away; there are, for example, areas of Yorkshire that still show the impact of this in topsoil depth because by 1317 they were little more than bare rock. Herds of animals were reduced from hundreds to dozens, both because of murrains (cattle illnesses), animals being washed away and people eating their herds in starvation - and this had a huge and lasting impact on peasants, whose main source of dietary protein was dairy. Whole towns were washed away and others became depopulated as people fled to forage in the forests and commons.

There is increasing evidence the Great Famine was a huge part of the reason the demographic impact of the Great Death was *so* high. Childhood malnutrition has lasting impacts on lifelong health, particularly on immune function. People who were children during the Great Famine succumbed to the Great Death in their thirties in massive numbers.

As I said, the Great Famine is underrepresented in scholarship. And some of the only attention that has been given historiographically has been scholars *blaming* the peasants for the Famine. Conjuring up everything from failing to maintain crop rotation to maintain soil fertility to planting on too much marginal land out of greed.

Let’s say it has been impossible for me to miss the parallels with the media and popular discourse blaming people on benefits for their own food insecurity. It has been thrown into particularly sharp relief with the situation with SNAP benefits not being paid in the US rn due to the fascist-engineered governmental shutdown, but it is an ongoing phenomenon here in the UK too.

Let me make it 100% clear; we, as the technological society we are, would be utterly fucked by two years of constant rain. We depend on topsoil and growing food in it as much as medieval Europe did, on a societal scale. We can’t stop it raining and our (lack of) capacity to replace fertile topsoil has been thrown into relief by climate change-induced flooding in the past decade. Even with the technological alternatives we theoretically could access, such as vertical growing, hydroponics etc? Doing them at scale would require a willingness to organise, take control of food production and to collect and spend public money on a scale every government on Earth has shown a complete incapacity and unwillingness to do in response to far less immediately impactful threats.

I feel I don’t need to push the many, many parallels here. The death from the Great Famine was in no way equally distributed across society. The people who died in the greatest numbers were those who were already on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. The poorest people.

And, of course, those who survived from that class were also the ones with the largest remaining health effects that left a time bomb which hit them when the Great Death hit. The resulting deaths from the Y.pestis pandemic were also unequally distributed in Europe and the Near East (I know less about the demographic effects in the rest of the world and it was part of a whole Several Decades of Calamities in China that was so horrific the demographic effects of the Plague are actually quite difficult to pick out there!) with the poorest people very broadly suffering the highest casualty rates. There has been a lot of debate about the reasons for that historiographically, but there is now increasing evidence that the lifelong immune impact of the Great Famine was a very notable factor.

Where am I going with this? Well, broadly, I’m giving a long view as a historian with evidence of why we need to organise immediately with a view to eliminating human-caused food inequality in all of our societies, and to preparing for as much societal resilience to climate change-caused food insecurity as humanly possible as well as eliminating fossil fuels. This particular idea of deliberately starving our society’s lower economic levels to fulfil the screaming demands of disaster capitalism - which is 100% what current lack of price controls and benefit slashes are doing; we currently produce so much food we could give mass amounts away for free that are currently destroyed - is societal suicide on top of being horrific by every human scale imaginable. We are weakening our entire society’s resilience to the climate disaster and accompanying epidemic disease we know is coming by every piece of scientific evidence we collect.

This is one of the reasons I keep breaking myself to do Food Not Bombs. The radical impact of feeding people, and a space for uncoupling food from our current disaster capitalist exchange, is almost impossible to measure. It’s only going to get more vital going ahead.

(Necessary caveats; I am not a mediaevalist. My area of expertise is the early modern period, although there are classifications that include the 14th century in the Long Early Modern period because of the long impact of these events. My thanks to Michelle Butler and Anne Brannon of the True Crime Medieval podcast for sending me on this particular dive.)

[enbycrip]

Timms doing everything possible to block attempts to uncover and expose the ways the DWP is hamperimg and preventing disabled people from getting and keeping work, despite Labour rhetoric

Timms goes back on his word by refusing to provide crucial evidence of Access to Work cuts

The disability minister has gone back on his word by refusing to provide crucial information that would help expose a “perverse”, secret pro

[enbycrip]

ID: “THE LONDON ECONOMIC

"Everything is too expensive and nothing works. £200bn of our money has been paid out to shareholders for privatised utilities like rail, mail, energy and busses.

That's money that could have gone into reducing customers' bills or investing in infrastructure. It hasn't, it's gone out in the form of shareholder profit. If you look at social care, which is really the monster under the bed when you look at any local authority's budget, the role of private equity is disgusting. So the first thing we need to do is admit that privatisation has been a failed experiment, it has cost this country dearly and it is an experiment that needs to end."

-ASH SARKAR”.

The big thing to remember about this, and what all of us must keep reiterating when we talk about it, is that the justifications about “efficiency savings” for privatisation were simply blatant lies.

We need to make it clear that we are absolutely aware that the motive for doing so was private profit and the transfer of public assets into the hands of private individuals, many of them the actual people, or related to the people, who proposed it and/or keep perpetuating it. So every time said politicians talk about the need for “savings” on the back of people on benefits, receiving social care, or workers in the public sector, we turn their narrative onto these facts.

[enbycrip]

Just as a general thing, I am seeing an unfortunate rise in tramsmedicalist rhetoric in certain trans spaces atm. It’s not huge, thank gods, but there are certain people out there going “the trans community’s greater acceptance of nonbinary identities and binary trans folk unable to access transition care, for whatever reason, was actually a PSYOP TO DENY US ACCESS TO TRANSITION AND HOW WE GOT TO THE CURRENT MASSIVE ATTACKS ON TRANS PEOPLE”.

Obviously I have no idea if these are actual trans people or just assholes playing divide and conquer, but if you see this in any spaces you are in, could you please jump on it hard? Remind anyone you see parroting those kinds of talking points that nope, *fascism* is how we got to the current attacks on trans people, and if the community can’t stand together in the face of them we become even more vulnerable?

Ta, folks.

[neverenoughmarauders]

I've not been able to stop crying for two hours, but it is tears of joy. I've waited so many years to see this news. 23 years I've waited. I cannot begin to describe what this means to the Huntington's community.

One day I'll write about what it's like to grow up knowing you might have a terminal, incurable illness, and not be allowed to test yourself because "it's such a serious decision" they don't want it hanging over you until you're an adult (as if it doesn't hang over you as you witness a parent die, and know you've got 50% chance of inheriting the same illness--as do your siblings). One day, I will talk about how, in the fear of traumatising children with the knowledge they might be incurably, terminally ill, they also took away their right to decide over their bodies to a degree that is traumatising. One day.

But today I am going to cry. Because it's over. Because no child will ever have to go through the same uncertainty, because at least they will know there is a treatment option available. A treatment option that one of my siblings might come to rely on. With all the shit things happening around us, my childhood hope and dream have been realised. That's got to count for something.

Huntington's disease successfully treated for first time

One of the most devastating diseases finally has a treatment that can slow its progression and transform lives, tearful doctors tell BBC.

[napkineater]

Fuck it, shout out to people who take longer to do things or have to do stuff slower than the average person.

Shout out to people who need extra time on tests.

Shout out to people who take longer to internalize information.

Shout out to people who take longer to talk.

Shout out to people who walk slowly, or take longer to get from one place to another.

Shout out to people who take longer to form connections with others.

Shout out to people who write slowly.

Shout out to people who read slowly.

Shout out to people who need extra time to rest between activities.

Shout out to people who can only do so much in a day.

Shout out to people with low dexterity that makes them do things slower.

Shout out to people who in some way have been deemed “slow”.

I see you, I hear you, and I will gladly wait for you if you want me to. I see effort you put in. I’m sorry that you have to be rushed so much. I hope that you can have the time you need, and that you get a support system that understands. You deserve to be able to exist at your pace.

And to the rest of yall, please for the love of fuck be patient. We are doing our best. We are going as fast as we can.

[enbycrip]

Your ongoing reminder that small local coffee shops, restaurants and other venues are frequently less accessible than large chain ones.

Yes, there is absolutely a structural issue to this; large chains have the ready finances to build new locations, whereas small businesses very rarely do, and in many places accessibility in existing shop fronts is horrific.

But this leads into the fact that small businesses, while they do absolutely often have narrow profit margins, also make choices based on what they see their customers valuing. And they do not see abled people valuing accessibility.

If you have a physically inaccessible venue you like to visit, please *ask* them about accessibility. Mention that you are choosing not to spend time and money there with friends due to their inaccessibility.

Certain councils in the UK apparently *do* offer grants to help small businesses increase their accessibility, though the information I could find about it online was spotty at best.

If they specifically identify cost as why they are not providing an accessible bathroom or a ramp into their store or venue, it’s always worth volunteering your time to help set up a crowdfunding campaign. Remind them that small businesses live and die based on their local community, and that by inviting the community to help them become more accessible to more of the community they are increasing their engagement with them and showing who they value.

Abled people having these conversations with other abled people and volunteering to take on some of the work of increasing accessibility is praxis.