#crip flag

[intervex]

Can I get a flag for crip? Like crip theory crip. In a pan-disability sense. I don't have any particular iconography in mind, only that it shouldn't give a vibe that this is exclusive to physical disabilities. If you can link it in some way to the Mad & Deaf pride flags that'd be nice.

Thank you!

Crip Pride Flag

This is a flag for crips and those who feel represented by/part of crip theory, crip pride, and/or general cripness. [SVG version on WC]

Crip is a term that is open to people with ALL disabilities (physical or otherwise) and also to groups who share the crip mindset. (Note different spelling from cripple.)

For folks who like details: I'm gonna explain what crip is for those who may be new to the term! Then I'll talk about the flag design how the different stripes represent different models of disability. 💜

What is even is crip?

Like how "queer" is to LGBT+, "crip" is to disabled. It's an umbrella term, a way of seeing the world. Activist reclamation of "crip" goes back to the 1970s, with disabled performance artists popularizing the term in the 1990s.

Crip theory began in the early 2000s by building on queer theory. Expanding on your [QCI's] recent post, its characteristics are:

Understanding disability as socially constructed.

Fuck capitalism: the social construction of disability as we understand it was a result of the development of capitalism.

Fuck eugenics: Ableism and racism have been entwined for hundreds of years and cannot be understood in isolation.

Fuck colonialism: which is itself debilitating. Violence disables people, and Global South activists have been clear it's important to talk about how war, landmines, etc are disabling.

Disabled people are creative. Where queer-ing refers to a way of being critical of categories, cripping tends to focus on subverting ideas of ability. Disabled people ARE the original makers/hackers.

Disabled people are experts: we know shit. It is *us* who should be the epistemic authorities on disability, *not* physicians.

Crip as a term is open to anybody experiencing the violence of eugenic thought, regardless of identification as "disabled".

Fat studies scholars have been locating themselves as within crip theory since day one. Similarly, reading Cripping Intersex by Orr has made clear to me that intersex has always been crip.

Again, drawing a parallel to queer & LGBT: kink and polyamory may not be LGBT but they are Queer. 🌈

Flag details

The design is based on @capricorn-0mnikorn's Disability Pride Flag. In line with newer meanings for the Disability Pride flag, the stripes represent different models of disability associated with crip theory:

Purple represents the social construction of disability and the influence of queer theory. #82609b is from the Mad Pride flag.

Red represents postcolonial understandings of disability such as debility. Understanding that which chronic illnesses receive care and research is *political*. The choice of #CF7280 is a nod to the AIDS flag. I took the red from the disability pride flag and shifted the hue (but not chroma & lightness) to that of the AIDS flag.

Yellow represents the affirmative and identity models of disability. The opposite of the tragedy model. Many disabilities can actually be beneficial! The choice of #f4db75 is a nod to the intersex flag.

White represents how crip pride and crip theory are pan-disability. It stands for models of disabilities not otherwise represented here. The #E8E8E8 white is also a nod to the neurodiversity flag.

Blue represents the social model of disability, the intellectual progenitor of the social construction model (and crip theory in turn). The choice of #83bfe5 is a nod to the Deaf flag.

Green represents eco-crip theory, the eco-social model of disability, and other crip engagements with environmentalism. The choice of #48af75 is a nod to the nonhuman flag. Because being a cyborg (alterhuman) is a proud tradition of crip theory.

The repetition of purple serves to show crip pride & theory exist within a social construction framework. Also it widens the amount of the flag which is stripes, reflecting how crip includes groups not consistently understood as disabled (e.g. fat, intersex).

As with the disability pride flag, the dark grey (#595959) represents the lives lost to ableism and our collective grief.

Tagging @radiomogai @mad-pride @liom-archive for archival. And I wanna acknowledge @scifimagpie for giving me feedback on dozens of prototypes. 💛

Finally: I release this flag design as public domain! 💜

[intervex]

Cripintersex (intersex-disability survey results part 4)

Cripintersex: an intersex individual who considers the intersex community to be a member of the broader disability community and/or that intersex rights/justice should be considered part of the disability rights/justice movements. 💜

In the survey I recently ran where I asked people about candidate terms & flags for disability-intersex intersections, this was the overwhelmingly favoured candidate term for this meaning.

It had a weighted average score of 4.4 out of 5 (5 is strongly agree / highly suitable). Screenshot of spreadsheet is at bottom of this post. Part 1 (has a similar flag) - Part 2 (has analysis info) - Part 3

For the Discourse-Averse

Given this is Tumblr and the word crip has a way of evoking Discourse, multiple survey respondents and people in my notifications requested that a non-crip term ALSO be coined should cripintersex come out on top. Which it did.

I'm going to suggest sociodisabled as a term for identifying as part of the disability community, and politicodisabled as a term for identifying as part of the disability rights/justice movements more specifically. So intersex-sociodisabled would be sociodisabled on the basis of being intersex.

These terms weren't in the survey (alas!) but came out of a suggestion made in the open-ended feedback for sociodisintersex as a non-crip alternative. Thank you, anonymous respondent! 💜

I posted a similar-looking flag for this meaning in Part 1 of the survey results, that I'm tentatively thinking of as the intersex-sociodisabled flag. This flag is different in two ways: - it uses the stripes from the Crip Pride Flag - the yellow background and purple ring now match the yellow and purple used in the Crip Pride Flag (which I'm also hoping will help with eyestrain 🤞)

And now: Some Discourse

With that out of the way, I'd like to carefully point out a few things in good faith. I've been doing a bunch of thinking on this and reading a lot more about cripplepunk. 💜

Some folks have pushed back on the idea that crip would be appropriate for intersex on the grounds that "crip is for physical disabilities". I would gently like to respond that the most common interpretation of the term "physical disability" is a disability which affects the body (i.e. not mental). 🙂

If one is to understand intersex as a disability, and then try to categorize it as mental/physical/sensory, intersex would be a physical disability. Being intersex is a physical, embodied thing. It is not a gender. It is not a brain thing. It's a category of physical differences. Physicians understand us as physically disfigured and/or having a chronic condition. They consider us within the scope of teratology research, just like Down Syndrome and kyphoscoliosis.

This is why there's a long history of physicians using the term "cripple" to describe intersex people. Historically, intersex people have been understood to have a physical deformity. This language persists in modern medical literature: e.g. hypospadias cripple is still a formal diagnostic term being used in medicine. 😬

Those of us who understand intersex as disabling tend to be doing so because in ways that relate to how intersex is embodied. Intersex people who identify with disability because of the chronic pain they have as a result of IGM. Intersex people who have unstable hormones because of IGM. Intersex people who have needed accommodations to take time off from work/school for surgeries. Etc.

The reasons that intersex people like myself identify intersex as being in line with the disability community is because our rights struggles revolve around our bodies. Whether we get bodily autonomy. Whether we have to expose our genitals to doctors just for their curiosity. Whether we can access the medicines we need.

The controversy around crip tends to revolve around cripplepunk being explicitly for physical disabilities only.

The tenets of cripple punk that I see shared around state explicitly that: "Cripple punk is not conditional on things like mobility aids & 'functioning levels'" and "Always listen to those w/ different physical disabilities & different intersections than yourself. Do not speak over them"

To those of you who believe that crip(ple) should only be for physical disabilities, I ask you, in the spirit of cripplepunk, to consider that intersex, if understood as a disability, is a physical disability. Best I can tell, room is made in the cpunk community for chronic illness and chronic pain. Why not intersex also? 💜

As best as I understand it, the controversy about who is/isn't cripple largely centres on a sense that people with physical disabilities need space to talk about our experiences without neurodivergent people monopolizing the conversation. 👀

Intersex people participating in disability conversation are very aware that we are on the margins here. People like myself who are inclined to see intersex through a disability lens tend to have other disabilities - often mobility ones (I'm a part-time wheelchair user). I obviously can't speak for every intersex person out there, but from where I sit it seems really unlike that intersex people would "take over" the crip space.

Intersex may not be rare but it's also nowhere near as common as mobility disabilities or neurodivergence, and we're nowhere near as coordinated. As a community we are incredibly fractured, and still in the consciousness-raising days. We are not an organized threat, we're a bunch of people in pain, trying desperately to get doctors to stop performing coercive surgeries on our bodies. 🫤

For some of us, disability rights/justice looks like the best route to go to try and make that happen. I'm far from alone in feeling that the queer community has done an underwhelming job of advocating for our issues, and many of the gains we intersex people have gotten have come thanks to disability organizing.

It's maybe worth noting that a large number of intersex people are resistant to seeing intersex as a disability. Indeed, one survey respondent (out of 30) shared they found pretty much the whole survey to be offensive. This is not something that intersex people are united on. Intersex folks have a wide variety of feelings about where intersex best belongs (queer community, disability, both, neither, etc).

Crip is More than Cripple Punk

This post has ballooned in length but I do want to note a couple of other things about the term crip:

Others have already pointed this out, but crip and cripple in practice are not being used the same ways, and it may be productive to think of them as different words.

"Crip" was reclaimed as a pan-disability term, starting in the 1970s. It made its way into the performing arts in the 90s, and then academic crip theory from there. This activist tradition has been using crip in a pan-disability sense for a long time at this point -- much longer than cripplepunk (coined 2014). Terms like crip time and crip labour come from this pan-disability framework.

Crip continues to be a pan-disability organizing term, such as in #CripTheVote and Crips for eSims for Gaza. Tumblr may skew towards cripplepunk but other spaces lean a lot more towards the pan-disability context - all of the in-person activism I've participated in has uncontroversially understood crip as pan-disability. 🤷

Honestly, I'm not sure what is best going forward when it comes to the cripple usage question. 😵‍💫 Crip is a word with a very well established pan-disability sense.

And it's clear from the survey responses that it resonates with the vast majority of disabled intersex respondents. I didn't think to ask people why - I can only guess that some individuals identified with crip out of the pan-disability sense, and others out of a sense that intersex is a physical disability.

For anybody who wants a breakdown of the ratings of the candidate terms, here are the averages (weighted so people who identified with a given use case / column had a bit more of a "vote"). The use case of intersex-in-disabilty-community is the column titled "COMM".

As always, my flag designs are public domain unless otherwise noted. You are 100% welcome to repost the flag and its definition without all my Discoursing.

I have one more post to write up in this series! We're nearly done! 😅 Thank you for reading, thanks once again to the survey respondents, @scifimagpie, and I'd also like to thank the archival blogs I keep tagging repeatedly for this 💜

Tagging for archival @disabilityflagsarchive @radiomogai @liom-archive @varsex-pride @radiomogai