@theartofmadeline
Andulka
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taylor price
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
todays bird
tumblr dot com
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we're not kids anymore.
Cosimo Galluzzi
Product Placement
One Nice Bug Per Day
NASA
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tannertan36
Three Goblin Art
Kaledo Art
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@outsider-my-ass
If you have a child with a disability, you’re certain to run into the cheerful declaration: “you are your child’s voice”. You can find it on t-shirts, coffee mugs, jewellery...
“Be an advocate and a communication partner to help your child make their own voice heard. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”
Small, but happy things that I enjoy about being autistic
Seeing something/hearing a discussion relating to your special interest and getting super excited and happy and having your chest fill up with such love and excitement!!!!
Vocal stims when you’re alone and can be as loud as you want (I.E. belting “At Last” by Etta James at the top of your lungs when you’re home alone)
Shirts with nice textures automatically making your day 500000 times better
Being able to stim around your friends and loved ones without them judging you
When your friends and loved ones ask you to teach them how to stim with you because they want to understand how it feels so good to you
Finding someone with the same special interest as yours and talking for hours on end about it
Being around people that are totally okay with you going nonverbal
When people educate themselves about your special interests to talk to you more in depth about them
People sending you pictures relating to your special interest saying “this reminded me of you”
A nice sensory experience making your day a billion times better
Having auditory synesthesia and seeing beautiful colors every time you listen to music
Having auditory synesthesia and seeing the colors of the voices and laughter of people that you love
Feel free to reblog and add your own!!
I’ve been seeing a lot of inspiration porn lately and I just wanted to say something really quick
Disabled/neurodivergent people are not here to help you be a better person. We’re not put into your lives to teach you how to be more patient or how to be kinder or how to never give up or whatever bullshit y'all talk about.
Disabled people are here because they’re here. They’re disabled because they’re disabled, not to teach you some moral lesson(that you could learn yourself).
Able-bodied/neurotypical people can and should reblog this
Viral, please 🙏🏽
Remember the 19 lives lost today #Sagamihara19
I refuse to let this be forgotten, for a hate crime to go unacknowledged, for ableism to go unacknowledged.
This was the loudest silence I’ve experienced in regards to ableism; the most painful erasure.
I feel the erasure all the time.
I experience it when people are cruel before they are understanding of my disabilities & when laws that impact our daily lives are a shock when I mention them.
I witness disabled activists’ work going ignored.
#ListenToDisabledPeople
I got this pin sometime after it happened, holding it down for them, holding them with us.
[Image Description: a pin of a red flower with a banner under that reads “Lest we forget”]!
Society: It’s okay to be different
Autistic Person: (stims)
Society: No not like that!
I have to have surgery in a few weeks please help me out😊
In my diagnosis, I saw the first irrefutable proof of myself. But so many others saw a referendum on what it means to be atypical.
“What people are really doing when they’re trying to determine if I’m a real autistic is figuring out if I make them uncomfortable or sad enough to count. If I show any coping skills, any empathy, any likability, any fun—essentially any humanity—I must be dismissed. “
you know what sucks? that disabled seating is always the worst at concerts. i’m disabled and it’s difficult for me to stand up for 3+ hours straight for a concert (ngl imma still do it for Taylor even tho it hurts) and it’s just a bummer that accessible seating always seems to be the last priority for stadiums over people who can pay 1000 dollars for a front row seat
Today is the anniversary of the Capitol Crawl, an event in 1990 in which disabled activists pulled themselves from their wheelchairs and quite literally crawled up the steps of the Capitol Building. This was done to protest the living conditions for disabled people in the United States, and it was done to pass the ADA. And fuck yeah, they did it.
These activists along with hundreds of others managed to secure rights for disabled Americans for decades to come. However, all that heroic work is now being threatened by H.R. 620.
I’ve been talking a lot about H.R. 620 lately because frankly, it scares the shit out of me. It’s a bill that’s designed to strip rights from people with disabilities, and it has already passed the House of Representatives.
A little background:
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, the year I was born. Because of that, I have lived under its protections for just about my entire life. When my high school tried to prevent me from graduating because of my medical struggles, we were able to use the ADA to procure a 504 plan. When my dorms and classrooms were inaccessible, it was the ADA that got me accommodations. I am afforded extra assistance when traveling, when voting, at the doctor, and the only reason I can do any of these things is because of the ADA.
I now have a college diploma and a full-time job. I would have neither without the ADA. It’s not a perfect solution, but the protections it does provide have been invaluable in my life and the lives of my family. (My family members with a different disability have also Gone Through Some Shit but that’s really their story to tell.)
I think most of Americans know that some semblance of protections for PWD exist. I’m not sure most Americans understand how difficult they are to use. It’s not like the ADA provides, idk, inspectors who go around looking at buildings to see if they’re accessible. They don’t take complaints from PWD if the elevator in their building stopped working and their landlord won’t fix it. There is no safety & health inspector of the disabled world. The ADA is instead enforced via lawsuit.
To put it simply — if a disabled person has been discriminated against, they have the right to get a lawyer and sue the establishment that has discriminated against them. They cannot sue for damages. They can only get the place to change. (Though some courts have levied additional monetary damages for noncompliance.)
This is already a pretty arduous process. I mean, you have to get a lawyer and go to court. No one enjoys doing that, especially when you know there is no financial reward. But H.R. 620 aims to make this process much, much harder. It requires PWD to gather a ton of evidence and documentation, it requires a system of letter-writing and complaints, just a mess of things that many PWD will not have the time, money, energy, and/or know-how to be able to do.
More importantly, though, H.R. 620 changes how businesses need to comply. H.R. 620 aims to change it so a business or institution has six months before they even need to start showing a plan to change. I repeat. This is not six months before the work is done. This is six months before they even need to start moving. Six months would have been an entire semester when I was in college! And even then, all they need to do is show “progress”. Progress can mean anything! It sure doesn’t mean that I can get in the building!
In effect, this would strip PWD of their ability to actually have the ADA enforced. It puts a very onerous process on the back of the people being discriminated against so they’ll be too confused, tired, or burdened to exercise their rights in the first place. And then, if they get through that wholly unnecessary roadblock, the place they need to get into may not actually become accessible for — well, ever. There is no part of the desired amendments to the ADA that would actually require accessibility. Ever. Which is mind-blowing.
H.R. 620 is popular amongst business conglomerates and real estate developers, for obvious reasons. They don’t want to deal with the extra expenses that come with making their properties accessible. Because of this, they have started a misinformation campaign saying that PWD are using the ADA to attack small businesses with frivolous lawsuits, which puts undue burden on people ~just trying to make it~.
Wow, talking about what “burdens” PWD are. Like that’s not a misconception that leads to self-harm and discrimination every day.
There is no evidence that there is an outbreak of frivolous lawsuits. There are a couple lawyers who have been engaging in fraudulent lawsuits, but frankly, it’s not hard to find an unscrupulous lawyer, and none of them have been successful in court.
Even if there were some uncontrollable outbreak, taking away protections is not the way to deal with this. I can’t imagine this being the reaction to any other group’s civil rights. “Oh, well, some lawyer’s being a dick, better take away civil rights for an entire marginalized group just in case someone tries to abuse it!.” There are so many better ways to deal with misconduct than systematically stripping a marginalized group of its civil liberties.
Again, PWD CANNOT MAKE MONEY FROM THESE LAWSUITS. There is no one sitting in some wheelchair made of gold that they got from taking sandwich shops from cute grandparents who just wanted The American Dream ™. This is a boogeyman that does not exist — but it does play into a lot of nasty stereotypes about disabled people.
It is telling and depressing both that PWD fighting for their right to live with the rest of society is being framed as “frivolous”. So many things that disabled people need are framed as frivolous every day. So many things people insist we don’t really need. This bill would deny us access to stores, hospitals, schools — you know, the things we need to survive. But even if it were just some shop down the road? The ability to live in equality with our peers IS NOT FRIVOLOUS. Our enforced separation from the rest of society has led to a series of abuses against us that can only be rectified if we are allowed to live lives as independently and openly as possible.
The ADA was passed almost thirty years ago. Properties that are not accessible have already had almost thirty years to fix this. Businesses aren’t given thirty years to make sure their fire safety measures are up to code. Restaurants aren’t given thirty years to make sure their health measures are up to code. This is a law that already wasn’t being enforced, and now you act like this is some new issue that’s onerous on property owners? Good lord. Historic buildings were already exempt — what, are y’all just waiting until every building is old enough to be historic? Jesus.
The long and short of it is that the businesses who make money off of our oppression are trying to turn us into the villains of the story so they can pass legislation that will remove their financial responsibilities and take away our civil rights.
H.R. 620 has already passed the House. It moves on to the Senate shortly. Please, please call your senators and tell them that you support the ADA and want them to vote against H.R. 620. So few people are even talking about this issue, but it is a matter of life and death for a lot of people. This, paired with our current administration’s other crimes against the elderly and disabled, is looking to make this country uninhabitable for PWD. And that’s terrifying.
Please help us.
(Note: If you’d like more info on H.R. 620, the ACLU has put out a handy guide on myths and misconceptions about the bill.)
March 12th 1990
I checked (https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/620) and the Senate hasn’t done anything with it yet as of this writing (May 7 2018) so keep an eye on it and start educating those senators!
asking for straight pride is like asking for able bodied parking spaces
thats a really good comparison because there are about seventy able bodied parking spaces to one disabled and able bodied people still insist on using the ones that arent theirs
this is seriously a great post
Hi guys. I wish i wasn’t coming back to disabled tumblr this way again but sadly disabled actor Verne Troyer has passed away today. he was 49 years old.
every death of a visible public figure in this community hits hard, especially because this year, with the loss of Dr. Stephen Hawking just a month ago, it feels like we’re losing role models without having anyone new to look up to. In the 90s, when i was born, there weren’t only no celebrities in a wheelchair or on canes, there were no disabled people almost anywhere in the media. so every time anyone popped up who was -- i hate to use the word -- strange, that person was your kind of guy. they were the ones who might understand the kind of things that worried you about life. you could look at someone like Verne and say “if that guy’s happy, if he’s married, if people care about him, then maybe I can be happy too.”
You can criticize Troyer’s most famous role all you want, and there are a million things wrong with it as you can probably guess. but in a world after Billy Barty and before Josh Blue or Peter Dinklage, if you wanted an average guy who was visibly disabled. Verne Troyer was your dude. He was a normal guy. He didn’t have any sort of trademark persona, he wasn’t a reality show star or a socialite, he had no pretension outside of his movies. He was a middle aged man, he was married, he liked selfies and sunglasses and taking pictures of his house on twitter. And at times he seemed so content. He had that comfort with his life that every disabled person strives for, and back before there was a larger space for disabled bodies, that’s all we needed out of a hero.
As someone with a long term health condition I would like to appeal to any parents or future parents of people with health problems. Don’t just dismiss your child when they call themselves disabled, sure, it might not be the exact right term but I’m sure as hell not able-bodied and it makes you feel like you’re nothing and your identity isn’t valid. Basically, support your fucking kids because they bloody need you.
Autism acceptance month, day 12
To celebrate autism acceptance month, I’m going to post something positive about autism every day through April.
Allow me to introduce the Japanese classical composer Hikari Ōe:
Ōe was born in 1963 with a herniated brain, autism, epileptic seizures and visual impairment. The doctors described him as “severely disabled” and strongly urged his parents kill him, claiming that he would become a vegetable otherwise. His parents (including his father, famous author Kenzuburo Ōe) refused the offer and Hikari Ōe survived the birth thanks to surgery.
Ōe didn’t speak a word until he was 6 years old when he identified a specific birdcall on television as that of a water rail bird. After buying him a record with tracks of various birdcalls, Ōe’s parents noticed his talent at memorizing specific sounds, so they hired a private piano teacher for him. While Ōe still doesn’t speak much to this day, he quickly learned to express himself through classical music. In the following years, he learned to play both the piano, flute and violin expertly.
He began composing his own music when he was just 13 years old and released his first album when he was 29. The album sold over a million copies and won Japan’s top prize for classical Japanese music. All his later albums would become commercial successes as well, both in Japan and America.
You can hear his first album on YouTube. Give it a listen, it’s beautiful:
While his music in itself is worth celebrating, there is a specific reason I wanted to talk about Ōe in particular.
Whenever anti-neurodiversity people try to argue against neurodiversity, one of their main arguments is usually the good ol’ functioning label. “Think of the severely autistic!” they say, as if being “severely” autistic means you can’t be happy or successful.
I wanted to share Ōe’s story because it goes direcly against that toxic ideology. Despite being “severely handicapped”, Ōe went on to live a highly successful, happy life. After his birth, he became one of his fathers biggest influences for all his later books. Absolutely nobody can argue that the world would be better off if the doctors had killed Ōe at birth like they wanted. His existence changed both his parents lives and the world of classical music for the better.
It doesn’t matter if people are “low-functioning” autistic or “high-functioning” autistic. We’re all human beings and we all deserve respect. Even the most “severely handicapped” like Ōe can often go on to do incredible things.
Happy April to all autistic and neurodiverse people! I hope you all have a wonderful month.
(Day 12/30, follow #aprilautismpositivity for more)
listen we’re always pushing back against anti-vaxxers with the science showing that no, vaccines don’t cause autism, but can we please talk about the underlying problem here which is that people hate autistic children?
even if the poorly researched pseudo-science was right and vaccines had any link to autism in children, i would still want myself and my children vaccinated because guess what, there’s nothing wrong with autistic people.
what i hear when people say they don’t want their children vaccinated against deadly illnesses because they believe that vaccines cause autism is not just that they’re horribly misinformed, but that they’d rather have a sick, dying, or dead child than an autistic child. and honestly, that’s pretty fucked up and just goes to show that neurotypical people don’t view us as people who are equally entitled to life.
*PUNCHES REBLOG BUTTON*
Bruh in your post about how inspiring Stephen Hawking was you can't even spell his name right??? Disrespect. Google is free
it was a grammatical oversight. he died around 11p my time and i was tired. although if you got “inspiring” out of that you’re probably not the core demographic tbh
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
- Stephen Hawking
RIP
[Image is of Stephen Hawking looking into the camera while in his wheelchair.]
I’d like to take a moment, as we all are currently, to mourn the loss of astrophysicist Steven Hawking. He passed away in the morning of March 14th, 2018, at the age of 76.
When you live in a community as underrepresented as disabled people are, I suppose you could say the upside is that you don’t have to write many obituaries for public figures. However, the ones that you do have to write hit you kind of hard. For many people around the world, Hawking was not only the greatest scientific theorist since Einstein, but also the most widely recognizable wheelchair user in modern history. His lifelong issues with ALS were difficult and they were visible, which made the reality of his disability prominent in ways that challenged social norms. He could not be infantilized, because he was a grown man with children and a complex romantic history. He could not be spoken for because he maintained a voice of his own, and he couldn’t be ignored because to do so was to silence the thoughts of a scientific genius.
Steven Hawking was the greatest proof that a disabled person’s equipment was a part of them; after a complication damaged his vocal chords, he famously bought up the rights to a computer voice he often used in order to make it uniquely his. Steven used it in public appearances and in some cases, he even did his own voice acting with it, until the computerized voice was more publicly recognized than his previously strained voice.
He was, in many aspects, a disabled superstar, and reached larger realms of visibility than anyone previously thought possible. Very few people can be as intellectual as a groundbreaking physicist, but in many other ways all disabled people were just like him. Rest in Peace, Dr. Hawking.
