Bus stops with no places to sit down should be illegal. I mean this in the most genuine literal way possible.
Buses are the last line of defense and way to be independent for people who can’t drive or walk for long distances (me). If I walk to the stop (already painful) and have to stand there for ten minutes waiting with no seats or benches, is that really accessible? And what about people with a lot more pain and mobility issues than me? All I really have to deal with is moderate foot pain, and that still has me leaning on a wall or sitting down on dirty pavement if I miss the bus and have to wait for the next one in 15 minutes/half an hour. There should be at least one seat at every bus stop. Yes, even the non-covered ones. If you’re going to have kneeling buses and priority seating and pretend to care about disabled folks in that way, at least do this too.
i wish all “body language experts” on youtube, tiktok, and all social media a very Die
not only is it a stupid pseudoscience that is based on ableism and western centric ideals, these people are ghouls who latch onto every controversial subject or person in the spotlight in order to churn out content about how someone’s quick blinking means they’re really a monster with 590492341 mental illnesses (which is what makes them inherently a monster), passing off their vibe and clout farming as Scientific Evidence. they literally salivate for a new person to be at the center of controversy so they can make millions of view and thousands of dollars over their babbling that their new target is a Narcissistic Abuser. and you literally cannot convince these people’s fans that this is utterly fake and also abbhorent behaviour to farm money and fame over others’ misery. they + these social media “therapists”/doctors/health and legal professionals who do the same online are utter scum who are gleefully making money off suffering. but i have a special kind of hate for the body language experts.
and this isn’t just about the heard/depp trial either. these fuckers have been doing this in True Crime TM communities for a while now. they’ve also been the ones boosting the harassment of random people on tiktok like the couch guy and that trans woman who was just dancing in her basement. they make money and clout off all of this. they push so many ableist, racist and transphobic ideas onto people who just drone on about how body language PROVES somebody is lyuing or a serial killer. they ruin lives.
i wish all of them a genuine and heartfelt very die
I am very seriously having trouble not thinking about the bill that would allow employers to put employees through a genetics test. I am having trouble seeing the benefits of such a bill. I am having trouble not seeing it as a selfish allowance. I am having trouble not seeing it as literal eugenics.
You’re having trouble because there is no benefit to employees. It will only be for the benefit of employers, and will allow them to discriminate. It’s terrifying…
That is a conversation that I should have voluntarily, with my doctor, under no penalty, and kept private. It should not be permissible to sell it, and I should not have to incur a 30% fine for not participating in a ‘wellness activity’ with an unqualified person who may or may not use this information against me.
Healthcare should be affordable to everyone, regardless of their predictive health and the health of their families.
Removing the anonymity of genetic information has acutely horrifying implications.
I know I’m kind of preaching to the choir right now, but like… I can’t get it out of my head. I shouldn’t read this stuff before I go to sleep.
hello naughty children its GATTACA time
More than that, it could also be an attempt to “catch” trans people. And I know it’s going to have unexpected results…
See, once upon a time, the people running the Olympics thought they could catch cheats by checking the competitors’ chromosomes. IDK why. Maybe they thought some men were sneaking into the women’s contests so they could win gold medals. Whatever.
In order to not appear like sexist shots, they tested EVERY competitor. And they were all set to land like a ton of bricks on any cheats…
BUT…
The results showed quite a surprising amount of MALE competitors had female chromosomes.
So the whole idea was trashed in short order.
(This story comes second hand from MeMum and may be inaccurate)
Intentionally misrepresenting your sex or gender as a means to cheat in sports has happened before. It is not a common method because the risk is very high. It is also… rarely successful in terms of having ‘easier competition.’
The idea that this bill would effectively out trans and intersex persons at the workplace is just one of the major issues that I have with it.
There is the very obvious problem of racial bias and the prevalence of white supremacy in our country. I should not need to expound upon why I have a problem with that.
But there is also the major issue of the bill’s claimed purpose: to find congenital conditions and enact ‘preventative measures.’ There are lots of people in the work force who are on the Autism spectrum, who have Down’s Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy… who are capable of working with their symptoms and do their jobs. These are also a target for discrimination and there are employers who are more than willing to justify it.
If the only benefit to come from this bill is that companies would be able to save more money, then I am unable to find any good in this bill.
For a good summary, see the Washington Post’s article (linked below, I’m on mobile). This would be straight up breaking the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. This is absolutely ridiculous, and yet another extreme breach of our privacy.
Do you ever think about how we’ll never know if the minotaur could’ve learned to speak? To communicate in any way? What kind of a life could he have lived if he wasn’t torn away from his mother and tossed into a prison for the crime of being born? Do you think of the stories that describe the infant as “ferocious” as if that excuses what was done to him?
Do you think about how the only names we know him by are ones taken from his jailer, the man who locked up a child and sent countless others to their doom? At the very worst he was a pawn caught up in the crossfire of an angry god and a foolish king. But truly he was just hurt. Abused. Neglected.
The prince of a kingdom that feared and reviled him.
yall ever think of the Minotaur as being an icon for how disabled kids are villanized, abused, or even k!lled by their guardians (Disability Day of Mourning), much like how Medusa is an icon of sexual violence, particulary for marginalized genders?
Just a reminder since they’re making it harder to get diagnosed with autism soon, if tools made for either autistic or ADHD people help you: use them. That simple. Don’t worry about taking away resources because most of the time if more people are using a thing the more accessible and normalized it becomes
[Image ID: online article from The Guardian, from Feb 2021. Title: “Fury at ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ notices given to Covid patients with learning disabilities”. Some text includes “Mencap said it had received reports in January from people with learning disabilities that they had been told they would not be resuscitated if they were taken ill with Covid-19”.
End image ID]
Hey all, I’m just here to add that I understand wanting definite answers and guidance for your mental health. But I also want to say that getting a diagnoses is not the be-all end-all, and you can still use the same tools and coping mechanisms without formal diagnoses in many cases.
I don’t want to fear monger, but having formal diagnoses means that said information will always be on your medical record. It is extremely unfortunate, but my understanding of covid response and hospitalizations (particularly in the UK but I’ve also heard people speaking to Do Not Resuscitate orders issued in the U.S. too) is that there are bullshit, genocidal policies issued that doctors should focus on neurotypical patients, and not put in the effort to save those diagnosed with autism or any 'learning disorders.’
So yeah, get a diagnoses if you think it will REALLY help you access specific care, etc. but just know that formal diagnoses themselves are not the pinnacle of care and in some situations, you could argue it’s better not to have one.
Okay so I’m tired and bitchy and I’ve had a rough morning, and because of that I’m probably about to drop an unpopular opinion here, but I really dont care.
Narcissist is starting to become the new sociopath/psychopath/psycho, and I am really, really concerned with where this is heading.
It’s the exact same thing I’ve been seeing for years with my own diagnosis. You say you’re a sociopath, and immediately you’re now an asshole. I’ve had people actually ask me if I have ever hurt someone/wanted to hurt someone because I’m a sociopath, and I’ve had to explain over and over again that no, that’s not what that means, it just means empathy is not something that I can experience like everyone else. I can still be compassionate, I can still be a kind person, I can have no desire to hurt anyone ever, but I still get treated like a ticking time bomb. Even though my disorder actually helps me in a job that saves lives (I work in tissue donation, so not feeling empathy makes handling donor tissue from a 15 year old a lot easier), I still get asked by people at that same job about my “secret dark side” and if I ever did/do things like torture animals.
The same thing is happening to narcissists. You say you’re a narcissist, and now suddenly you’re an abuser. You want to paint someone as a bad person? Call them a narcissist, then everyone will understand how mean and evil they are. I am so sick and tired of seeing tiktoks, tweets, and Tumblr posts going on and on about how horrible narcissists are and how much people hate them. As if narcissists aren’t people! As if narcissists aren’t people experiencing a personality disorder! Y'all are all about “neurodivergent/mental illness solidarity uwu” until you bring in the “undesirable” mental illnesses and personality disorders, and then suddenly it’s “All x people are mean and evil and abusive blah blah blah they can’t get better/better themselves blah blah blah here’s how to argue with them except I’m not going to actually talk about that I’m actually going to just say how horrible they are and how they’re bad people blah blah blah” and it’s like shut up! Shut the fuck up! Those are people! Those are real people with real feelings and you’re just out here saying they’re inherently bad, and for what? For likes? For clout? Do you have any idea how hard it is to come to terms with a diagnosis like that when your view on it is so incredibly skewed, when you think you’re being assigned the Bad Person Disease™️ after you’ve tried so hard to be a kind person and uplift those around you? And now you’re left thinking it was all for nothing, because now you can never be a good person no matter how hard you try because you have Bad Person Disease? Do you have literally any idea how damaging that is, and how much that hurts? But hey, ableism isn’t ableism when it’s against the “bad” people, right?
Anyway, if you’re a sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, have bpd, are bipolar in the “wrong” way, are schizophrenic or psychotic, are the “wrong” type of autistic, or anything else, I see you and you’re doing amazing. Your diagnosis doesn’t dictate who you are and, even though some things are harder for us than they are for others, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.
The truth is most people think being disabled is a death sentence but instead of advocating for disabled people they r convinced that they’ll never become disabled as if being disabled is some biblical punishment. Guess what? Accidents happen. You will get old and your body will stop working like it used to. Imagine if we live in a world where disability is seen as normal. Where we actually take care of each other.
Also I don’t think we have as many abled body people in the world as we think. I think many people are so terrified of being disabled that they r willing overwork themselves to prove they can do it. Many people deal with chronic pain and physical health issues in silence. Because they don’t want to be burden. I think we should be burden to each other and i think labor should be shared.
its just so fucking unfair that disabled people need extra support but in order to actually get that extra support we have to have both the energy and ability to express ourselves to deal with the bureaucracy of getting that support and i just. i am so tired.
Often the capacity to go through the bureaucracy of the system efficiently and effectively without it being massive, incredibly difficult burden means you would not qualify for the overly strict requirements of disabled, which I am certain is on purpose. I’m convinced the cruelty is on purpose. They just want us to die and they put as many obstacles in our way as possible for that reason.
Hey, as a disabled and a chronically ill person, I find it alienating when mental health advocates and positivity blogs say things like “mental illness is just as important as physical illness”. While that is true, honestly, the preconception that society is properly understanding and accepting of physical illness as it is is simply not accurate.
I see this a lot, and while I understand the good intention of these types of posts to shed light on the importance of mental health, which often goes ignored, it’s detrimental to physically ill communities because it trivializes the ableism we face. Why not leave it at “mental health matters,” with no comparisons? It’s still completely true.
I sympathize with how that must feel. Typically when people can’t see a disability they pretend it isn’t there, though I know not all physical disabilities are always visible, which I’m sure is also a problem for those physical disabilities that are not visible. That is what the phase is trying to address, it is saying that mental illnesses should be treated as something that exists. This unfortunately often does not happen. However, I think there is always room for improvement on how we speak about both mental and physical illnesses.
You know people constantly invalidate physically disabled people even if their disabilities are visible? No, of course you fucking don’t, because anyone who defends this problematic fucking phrasing obviously does not have a physical disability. Mental health activism and advocacy matters, but if you speak over disabled people when you do it you are part of the problem! As an anxious cane user with OCD and a schizoid spectrum disorder I can assure you that these things are treated very fucking differently by abled people, and anyone who tries to claim that physical disabilities somehow receive a sort of sense of priority and legitimacy in an abled person’s eyes is obviously not fucking disabled.
I’ve had my cane ripped from under me and been pushed down the stairs, by my mother. I’ve been called an invalid, had people roll their eyes at me and tell me I was a waste of time and money. My parents refused to let me present myself as a disabled person in public for months and wouldn’t let me walk with my mobility aids even though I obviously needed them. I have people constantly tell me I’m too young to use a cane, that it’s a shame that I’m not able to exercise because no one will ever manage to love me, that I should be grateful for my parents who do me the grand service of not sending me to another country to be euthanized, and that Jesus will make me abled again if I pray. None of that happened because of my mental illnesses, and it’s fucking constant! But no one takes me seriously when I talk about ableism because “that’s just people being shitty.” No, no it isn’t. It’s fucking systemic oppression, and “mental health advocates”LIKE YOU will dismiss it and act like it doesn’t exist.
Erasure is what neurotypicals do to mentally ill people, huh? Well, guess what the fuck you do when you talk like this to physically disabled people?
You talk over me, erase my experiences, when you don’t fucking know how people actually perceive physical illness. You don’t want to listen to people whose experiences differ from those of your own, and that is why you are part of the fucking problem. My experiences are already invalidated by doctors, relatives, and strangers.
As a young male-aligned person with an unstable self-image, toxic masculinity always taught me that anger was a sign of strength, a marker of power. Let’s talk about that. I don’t believe that.
I believe anger in itself can be a very powerful thing, a tool for venting hurt and gaining respect that should have been given to you all along. My only qualm with all that is this: I don’t want to be the kind of person who doesn’t listen until people get angry. I don’t want to have to be angry in order for my thoughts to be tangible, and I don’t think anyone should have to yell for me to listen. Anger is a huge effort to put up as a front on a daily basis, and no one should be forced to anger in order to be taken seriously.
This doesn’t mean I am in any way condemning anger or the purpose it serves toward justice. Even well besides that, I believe everyone is entitled to any genuine emotion they are feeling and anger is no exception. And if ever I am not listening to your whisper, by all means, yell at me! I want to hear you! But it’s not fair that you have to yell in order to be heard. I should have listened in the first place!! Anger should be an option, not a prerequisite; that’s all I’m saying.
It’s a matter of responsibility on behalf of everyone to care about what someone has to say regardless of their volume, tone, or word choice. My only prerequite for discussion is accessibility; anger is entirely your choice.
Hey, as a disabled and a chronically ill person, I find it alienating when mental health advocates and positivity blogs say things like “mental illness is just as important as physical illness”. While that is true, honestly, the preconception that society is properly understanding and accepting of physical illness as it is is simply not accurate.
I see this a lot, and while I understand the good intention of these types of posts to shed light on the importance of mental health, which often goes ignored, it’s detrimental to physically ill communities because it trivializes the ableism we face. Why not leave it at “mental health matters,” with no comparisons? It’s still completely true.
The reason I’ve hated Pride and Prejudice (2005) since it came out and have a personal prejudice against it (ha!) is that they cast rail thin actresses in the roles.
I had absolutely no idea about fat liberation when it came out, but I have always been a history nerd, and the changing beauty standards of history is so much a part of my love of historical romance. It’s one of the reasons I adore the mini-series with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. She’s exactly the kind of beauty that fits modern standards enough to not fit in with the Regency era’s, and fits Regency era enough to just escape being cookie cutter Hollywood. In Sense and Sensibility, Kate was full-figured and tremulously lovely in a way that was absolutely perfect for Marianne Dashwood, and Emma Thompson’s slender figure fit the fact that Eleanor wasn’t considered very attractive by Regency standards.
It’s the same when it comes to Bollywood biopics. Kangana Renaut looks fierce as hell as Manikarnika but the Jhansi queen was full-figured and probably well-muscled because she was a queen and a warrior, and there are portraits of her. Only an ill-fed peasant would have been as slight as Kangana. Even Bollywood beauty standards skewed to wide-hipped, full-throated and large-breasted bodies until around the 1970s.
(Rekha could still eat the role of Manikarnika, but that has nothing to do with her figure. I have no idea whether she’s ever been fat or thin, because my god her eyes. Deepika gets the same reprieve, more or less, because her face fills the screen, but Priyanka Chopra was the one who looked like a believable Rajput queen. Not historically accurate one of course, because royal beauties of the time were a lot more well-fed, but also not someone who’d be laughed out of court.)
Now as a disabled person whose very life hinges on fat liberation, I have even less patience with the entertainment industry’s casting choices. I don’t even need most of them to be actually fat. Just at least find women with natural curves, like Jennifer Ehle, Kate Winslet in her younger years, or literally any brown actress. Or, you know, make the thin ones eat enough for their roles.
sometimes you’ll see wheelchair users get up and walk a bit or a cane user pick up their cane and carry it instead of using it to walk and it doesn’t mean that they’re faking or they don’t actually need it, and it doesn’t give you the right to question them or ask them to prove they’re disabled. if you see a disabled person temporarily stop using their aids, mind your business and stop assuming you know anything about their situation. people who wear glasses don’t suddenly gain sight when they take them off, and i don’t magically become able-bodied when i carry my cane instead of use it. don’t assume otherwise.
Keep thinking about this. It means that the people who receive SSDI can literally NEVER be a part of the group legislating the program. I feel genuinely sick to my stomach…because like…that’s the formal structure. We’ve all accepted this??????????
“The focus on cis white male presentations of autism creates a massive diagnosis barrier for marginalised people. Our actions are viewed differently depending on our race / gender etc. We need better representation in media and we need academics to understand and embed cultural nuance, not seek to further restrict diagnosis.” (@girl_unleeshed on Twitter)
Here’s the second comic I worked on for Autism Acceptance month! This comic is a collaboration with Leesha (@girl_unleeshed on Twitter). Please check out her Twitter to read more of her awesome and thoughtful writing!
i need people to understand that whereas theres nothing wrong with being disabled, a disability does imply a defect or damage. it means that something isnt working properly. autism is not any kind of defect or damage. nor is it caused by any kind of defect or damage.
autistic brains are functioning as they should. optimally. and are a natural variation in the same sense that any normative variation in personality is.
autism is not a disability.
autism is not a disorder.
the fact that autistic people have a harder time than others in modern society is not evidence that autism is the cause, but that modern society is flawed and has not taken us into account.
arguing that autism is a disability is equal to arguing that being transgender or gay is a disability, because it is a variation in much the same way and it negatively impacts the person with that label for much the same reasons.
if you need an ambulance and you use a wheelchair that doesn’t fold, they will force you to leave it behind. wherever it is, wherever you are. just abandon your autonomy and ability to move around and potentially tens of thousands of dollars of equipment
imagine if you needed an ambulance and they said fine but you can’t bring your legs
people have taken issue with my use of the word ‘force’, so, after rolling my eyes so hard i can now see my brain, i will clarify that, no, they can’t 'force’ you to do anything. they will simply not take you to the hospital if you refuse to leave your wheelchair behind.
