#disability hierarchy

[asexual-amanita]

Yes, you can be more disabled than someone.

It’s not an attack on your accommodations or your experience, it’s just a fact.

Some people need more support and accommodations than others. Some need more equipment or more medical interventions, or more whatever.

Being less disabled than someone is not a bad thing, and it doesn’t invalidate your disabled identity or make your needs any less valid. It does however mean that you are privileged in a sort of way. And people with any kind of privilege have the duty of advocating for less advantaged people and uplifting the voices that so often get ignored because of prejudice.

[only-knives]

disability is a spectrum. it's a spectrum.

and i'm really tired of the backlash against mild/moderate/severe. like are you really going to sit here and tell me that like...

a) someone who experiences a mild aching in their back that causes distress & difficulty sleeping, but they can still work, socialize, & take care of themselves otherwise

and b) someone who experiences constant, distressing, and debilitating back pain to the point of not being able to work, socialize, take care of themselves, or get refreshing sleep

are just experiencing chronic pain, and it's wrong to say one person's chronic pain is worse? that one of them is severely disabled by their pain while the other is mildly disabled by it? in what world is that being ableist?

it's not about telling the mildly pained person that their pain doesn't matter. or that they should just suck it up. or that they aren't really disabled. any amount of chronic pain is awful to deal with. any amount of chronic pain can cause difficulty functioning and distress.

which is why it's so important not to flatten disabilities by advocating against mild/moderate/severe language. people with more severe disabilities do not deserve to be cut out from expressing the extent of their struggles. people with more mild disabilities deserve to be allowed to express that and have that accepted and treated seriously.

as far as the chronic pain example, i am the person B. i used to be the person A (minus the working). if anything, the progression of my pain has given me more compassion for the less-disabled version of me that will never again exist - and people with mild chronic pain in general (though, there is a level of envy due to my own grief).

because i know how easy it is to blame yourself when your symptoms are mild. i know how easy it is to shrug it off. i know how much people minimize the struggles of people with more mild disabilities. and it's a major factor in those people not getting the care they need, and then becoming severely disabled.

a mild disability is still a disability that needs treatment, respect, and accommodation. no one deserves to struggle alone, and no one deserves to progress to severe disability due to neglect. and without the terms mild/moderate/severe, this becomes much more difficult to talk about. which does nothing to help anyone.

[ira-407]

What is Aspie Supremacy, Actually?

A lot of people know what aspie supremacy is, but don’t seem to actually know what it means. For one, its origins can be traced back to Mel Baggs. It’s possible someone else used the term before sie did, but the framework for it that people are most familiar with originated with hir. Mel also coined autistic supremacy before that. They’re not necessarily one in the same, but I don’t think it’s bad to use them interchangeably, especially since one is often accompanied by the other anyway. It's a similar idea to the disability hierarchy and "My Mind is Fine" doctrine that preceded it, and is directly related to these things.

Autistic Supremacy is an autistic person acting like or outright stating they’re superior to non-autistic people. This often comes in the form of what was called “NT-bashing” in the usenet days. I personally don’t see it as different enough from Aspie Supremacy for the distinction to really matter, but it was something Mel came up with before Aspie Supremacy and is linked to it. Someone is an autistic supremacist when they make a space that is only for autistic people and they don’t even allow cousins in. Autistic spaces are important, but I think what makes a space autistic space vs. not one is who is in the majority, and moreover, who is in control. So I don’t care so much if it’s all autistic or not. I feel like that mindset does more damage than it helps. “By and for autistic people” doesn’t need to mean “autistics only, sorry”. It’s part of what made the Facebook group Just Us Autistics so bad. Anyway.

Aspie Supremacy is autistic people acting superior to other autistic people. This was much more blatant when Mel devised the term but is absolutely still a thing. It runs a lot deeper than I think most people are willing to admit-or, to be more specific, the people who are perpetrating it. As much as I’ve mentioned Mel already, I don’t think the definition of Aspie Supremacy is beholden to Mel and Mel alone, and I don’t think sie would think so either. Based on what I’ve observed, I think the examples I’m about to give are very much things Mel would have agreed qualify as Aspie Supremacy regardless. Aspie Supremacy isn’t simply when someone declares themself an aspie or when a person clings onto the Asperger’s diagnosis despite its extinction. Sure, that counts as it, and many people who do that also do other things, but that’s just the most apparent form of Aspie Supremacy. There are more covert examples that I argue are more insidious, and are done by people who would be very quick to denounce Asperger’s, but only because the person it’s named after was a nazi and for no other reason. 

Examples of Aspie Supremacy:

 Failing to mention anything related to disability in your advocacy-ergo, talking about autism as its own thing or solely as a cultural identity

Moreover, failing to contextualize autism within the scope of the broader disability community and rights movement. MAYBE saying something about ADHD but that’s it.

Doubly so if you ignore the I/DD-led Self-Advocacy Movement

Not centering people with I/DD in your advocacy at all

If you do mention people with I/DD, it’s brief and basically an afterthought. Perhaps as a statistic or vague example of something.

Separating autism as its own thing from the rest of the neurodivergent umbrella

Saying you “stand with nonspeakers” and do nothing to actually engage with them beyond sharing their stuff on social media

Saying you “stand with nonspeakers” only to say very stigmatizing things about them

When being called out for this, you don’t listen and perhaps try to argue that you’re actually right. Bonus points if the person you’re arguing with has I/DD and/or is nonspeaking.

Tokenize nonspeakers and silo them into their own special subclass of the autistic population

Use “Medium/High Support Needs” as a stand-in for “low functioning”

Assert that you are nothing like people you deem to have higher support needs

Using your autism as an excuse for racism and calling people ableist for rightfully criticizing your behavior because “[the racism] is one of my autism symptoms”

Wanting more autism subtypes to be officially recognized like AuDHD or PDA

On that note, using PDA as an excuse for shitty behavior, ESPECIALLY if you consider it a “pervasive drive for autonomy”

Trying to rebrand PDA as a “pervasive drive for autonomy”

Your advocacy being highly academic and intellectual-sounding with no effort in making it sound more accessible

On that note, not engaging in the actual community that is outside of academia's ivory tower, unless it's for academic research

Being against the idea of autism or ADHD being considered a disorder

Caring significantly about the distinction between “disorder” and “disability”

Forcing people to exclusively use identity-first language and not even considering person-first language’s origins

Talking about the social model of disability in the misunderstood concept of “people are only disabled by societal barriers”, denying the existence of disability that comes from personal impairments at all

Supporting the removal of autism and maybe ADHD from the DSM but only those because they’re “identities” 

Thinking that autistic people are direct descendants of neanderthals 

Armchair diagnosing people with mental illnesses just because they don’t do things you like

Denying the legitimacy of someone because they use FC, RPM, or a similar method to form words

Saying things like "that's not autism or intellectual disability it's apraxia" or some other form of that statement

There are definitely more but these are all of the examples I could readily think of. All of which I have observed from other people. So as you can see, these are things that are actually quite common in autistic spaces. Really, most of these are signs of being a generally indecent person. It’s pretty damning how many people I know do this, and to be clear, they aren’t people I like. At this point, I have zero tolerance for Aspie Supremacy. It’s one thing to still be in the learning process and having a commitment to doing as good by certain people as possible, but it’s another thing to do the stuff I listed above *and be proud of it*. As for one particular example, I will say there’s nuance to saying you’re not like another person and some truth to it. Where I take issue is when you do this with another autistic person in a way where you’re saying you don’t even have the same disability as them, especially if you’re saying they don’t deserve the same rights and basic respect as you do. That autistic person who doesn’t speak and has an intellectual disability is likely more like you than you think, and to deny those similarities is wrong and exclusionary. 

TL;DR Aspie Supremacy sucks. It’s something people need to check within themselves. It’s also a lot more prevalent than one may think, and denouncing the specific labels of aspie and Asperger’s does not recuse oneself from it. 

[autisticsunitedca]

Catapult | Are We Ever Disabled ‘Enough’ When You Don’t See Our Disabilities? | s.e. smith

A column from s.e. smith on all the ways disability can be invisible and all the ways able-bodied people willfully make disability invisible.

The experience of disability is very different for a powerchair user who uses a ventilator, a mentally ill person, an autistic person, a blind person. So different that these experiences cannot be mapped across each other in neat, tidy, obvious ways; to say that a mentally ill person knows how it feels to use a wheelchair full time is ludicrous, just as it’s silly to say that a blind person understands what it’s like to have Ehlers-Danlos, to suggest that having treatment-resistant depression means you understand schizophrenia. These experiences and lives can be complicated by race, gender, sexual orientation, other elements of ourselves; a Black deaf man existentially fears police in a layered and complicated way, just as a gay wheelchair user can find Grindr a singularly frustrating place. We cannot possibly speak for each other, and yet we often speak over each other. This is made especially labyrinthine by the fact that many of us are dealing with multiple disabilities that interact with each other (some blind people have Ehlers-Danlos and know exactly what it feels like) and the world, in very different ways. 

[bossybroads]

Disability Hierarchy is Real and It's Holding Us Back

'Disability hierarchy is “a social construct that makes certain kinds of disabilities more acceptable than others,” This hierarchy was culturally established by the non-disabled and it revolves around disability being a negative presence in life.

With disability being a negative, the more non-disabled someone appears to be, the higher up the hierarchy they are.'

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Woke up in the middle of the night, couple nights ago, thinking of Resham Khan.

On June 21, 2017, Resham Khan was out celebrating her 21st birthday and looking forward to her job interview as a model, when a man came up to her car window while she and her cousin were stopped at a traffic light, and squirted corrosive acid into her face, likely scarring her for life.

And probably scuttling the career of her dreams for life, as well.

...And what I woke up thinking in the middle of the night, and the thought that has kept coming back to me in the days since is this:

In my version of Utopia, Ms. Khan would still be able to get a job as a model, scars and all.

And I keep thinking how ridiculous it is that we expect models to be flawless in every way, anyway.  I mean:

People know that wearing a certain outfit isn't really going to give them a perfect complexion, right? Whether someone has a scarred face or a set of crooked teeth, or a broken nose (or no nose) isn't going to affect how well the clothes fit (or function), after all. People know this?

But I know that "Utopia" literally means "no such place." And corporations will probably always insinuate, through advertising, that whatever they're selling will be the magic talisman that can transform you into our culture's definition of "perfect."

And until either: a) Capitalism collapses for good, or b) our culture broadens its definition of perfection to allow the existence of facial scars, Ms. Khan will likely never be the model she dreamed of being.

I’ve been composing this post in my head for days, now. I was already planning on linking back to this Tumblr post about the Greek god Hephaestus I replied to, and point how it's an example of how people see physical disfigurement as a marker of unworthiness, to the point where they're willing to erase or ignore that aspect of a god (and think that they’re praising him), much less a mortal young woman like Resham Khan.

... Then, last night, it popped up on my dash again, with someone coming to the defense of the OP, saying (paraphrased): "She never said he wasn't disabled; she said he wasn't disfigured!" And my timeline for posting about this went from: "soon" to "now."

Because as long as that remains the general reaction to "ugliness," Ms. Khan will have a place in the Disability Community (if she wishes to claim it), regardless of whether her scars themselves ever cause impairment to daily life.

And, in case you were wondering, "ugly" disabled people are just as worthy and inherently dignified as the beautiful and handsome ones.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Medical Ableism & the Disability Hierarchy & the Intersection of Race and Disability

So this all happened three years ago. But the memory of it just resurfaced a few days ago.

At the very start of 2014, I had to go to the hospital for days of intravenous antibiotics for sores on my feet I thought had cleared up, but had actually just gone under the surface.

Anyway, after I was well enough to be released from the hospital, I still needed to have the dressings changed several times a day, which I could not do for myself. So I was moved across the street to a nursing home / rehab facility.

Because I have Cerebral Palsy, and that’s often assumed to come with “mental retardation” [sic -- the official medical term that’s still in use through inertia in some places], the first few days I was there, I pushed myself to be snarky and clever and “witty” in response to almost everything anyone said to me, just prove I wasn’t intellectually disabled.  Not because I believe being intellectually disabled is bad, but because if people assumed that about me, I knew they’d be more likely to abuse me, and disregard my needs.* Even though I felt like c~@p, and didn’t want to spend the energy.

And the thing is, this strategy worked because I have White Privilege, so my jokes were taken as jokes (even if they were ultimately unfunny). If I had had the audacity to be brown or black while also having a “Developmental Disability,” I most likely would have been labeled “Uncooperative,” even if I were doing everything I was told to do with a smile.

That’s why we need to a) dismantle the disability hierarchy, and b) recognize our privilege even while fighting our own oppression (yes, Virginia, you can be oppressed and privileged at the same time).

*(And don’t you dare say: “But you don’t know that! Not everyone’s a bigot!” Listen, Sugarlump, I grew up in the medical industrial complex, I’ve seen how doctors, nurses, and therapists treat kids they assume are I.D. all my life -- they were in the beds next to mine, sitting next to me at the table in the camp dining hall, a couple feet away on another exercise mat in the therapy room.  Just because you saw one feel-good human interest story on the news/Facebook about that PT who treats her clients with respect, doesn’t mean your anecdotal evidence has more credibility than mine).

[withasmoothroundstone]

What’s this, “Nothing about us without us, but nothing about you without a note from your mommy”?

-Laura Tisoncik

In the year 2000 or so. Responding to the (USA) National Disability Party’s policy of explicitly allowing only delegates with a particular disability to exist In each delegation, and having a general place for all parents and caregivers… Except autistic people, where parents were allowed in the supposedly autistic-only delegation, over the objections of almost all the autistic people present. On the basis that autistic people were fundamentally different from all other disabled people. Where “all other disabled people” explicitly included plenty of other disabilitiess that can in some forms prevent a person from speaking for themselves in a way others are likely to acknowledge.