Look, I get that a lot of the people arguing to gatekeep cripplepunk or who can use cripple are like... right around 20. And that y'all have basically been on lockdown, as have I, because I am multiply disabled and high risk, for the last 3 years. So I get that, as adults, you have not had a lot of opportunity to engage with other disabled people f2f.
So when I say to y'all "you would get thrown out of a meetup if you tried this shit, because it is incredibly inappropriate to ask someone to justify their presence by telling you their medical information," that is not me "making stuff up to be mad about" or making up hypotheticals which never happen. That is me, someone twice your age, explaining to you that if you try this off of Tumblr, the person you are trying to gatekeep is not the one who will be asked to leave. It will be you, because asking people to give you their medical information so you can decide if they're crippled enough to call themselves cripplepunk, or attempting to audit someone's identity in any way, is invasive and inappropriate.
I am not making up hypotheticals. I am telling you how adults in disability solidarity activism are supposed to treat each other, and do.
There has been a lot of conversation on Tumblr about the damage that coerced disclosure and the expectation of oversharing has done to people's sense of boundaries. This whole thing? It's another manifestation of that. Off of Tumblr, in actual organizing and meet-up spaces (which, yes yes, aren't happening right now), you will see people who are self-identified cripplepunks or crips or cripples who do not look disabled. They will not have their disabilities in their headers or on their name tags, and they won't be best pleased if you demand to know what their disabilities are. You will have people who do not reveal their diagnoses. You will not get to know what people's diagnoses are unless they choose to share them, and even then, you'll only know what they choose to share, and if you demand information that isn't offered, you will find yourself the unwelcome party.
I'm not even addressing any of the actual issues with the argument that "you don't need to belong to the LGBT movement cripplepunk, you bi/pan/ace/NBi neurodiverse people, you can have your own thing, just let us shut you out of this thing so we can have this." I'm telling you: this shit is one of my jobs. I've done consulting and con security/accessibility/inclusion and sensitivity reading and writing on disability for a long time. I've been to the RL meetups and events y'all say are just impossible even outside of a pandemic. So when I tell you that you will be the ones asked to leave if you pull this shit anywhere but here, I'm not making things up for a rhetorical point. I'm telling y'all, if you do this, you will be the asshole. That will be your reputation, that will be how people think of you, as the person who pried at XYZ for their medical info, and you will have earned it.
It does not hurt me at all if you don't believe me. It does not hurt me at all if you think I'm very funny or you want to try to mock me for explaining repeatedly that this shit does not fly off of Tumblr or with older crips. I've been on the internet since 1992 - I've been mocked by much sharper tongues for much pettier things over the last 3 decades. You can listen or you can not. The only person whose reputation will get hurt if you don't is you.
