3. Real Life Facts

(Three)

This is just sort of a combination of part two. But I want to tell you some things you might not know (I guess).

In college, a person with a disability needs documentation in order to get accommodations. Even if the person comes in with severe CP and is like, "I need a notetaker," they still need a professional to have signed off on the fact that they can't take notes.

Usually the documentation has to be from the past three years, in case someone who has dyslexia might have stopped having dyslexia and lied about it just to be an asshole.

A lot of the time, if you are supposed to get an accommodation on tests, you have to get signatures allowing you to do this every time you have a test. Not everyone really has the brains to get signatures every time, but oh well. Not everyone has the brains to go and talk to a professor about their accommodations on the first day of class, which is also something you're supposed to do. But PWD don't get any support in doing that stuff.

If you don't mind me saying, this strikes me as a situation where people with disabilities are assumed to be con artists who are just trying to get sweet deals like enlarged handouts in class or their own special room to take a test in because they think they're too awesome to be in the same room as other people. It seems like PWD basically are supposed to get punished for being disabled and thinking that it might be their right to have school be as accessible to them as it is to everyone else.

I don't have experience with this, but my impression is that a lot of this stuff also happens when a person is on (or trying to get on) Medicaid or SSDI, or when a person is on disability leave from a job. They are assumed to be lying. Pretty much anything will prove it. I remember reading about a woman who was fired because she appeared smiling in a picture on Facebook, while she was on leave for depression. I think we have all seen people (including politicians) Tweet about how anyone who gets any kind of disability benefits, and also socializes on the Internet or in a bar, must not be really disabled. Doing anything fun or political or emotionally important to you means you are not disabled. If you can get yourself together to go to a bar for one hour, you clearly can get yourself together to work full-time. Even if you were in bed for 20 hours that day?

I saw a person Tweet during the TPGA dialogues about how self-identified disabled people writing TPGA posts and participating in comments could not possibly be struggling that much, which brings me around to what I was saying. These snap judgments of ability (and automatic attempt to discredit people who claim to be disabled) are exactly like real-life snap judgments that can have a significant effect on a disabled person's REAL LIFE.

So when you say, "You obviously can live on your own,"

and the person actually can't, and it is really scary because she can't live with her parents anymore, but she also knows that most people would assume she can live on her own and she won't be able to qualify for any kind of help, or even ask people she knows for help because they won't believe that she actually needs help,

her response to you is likely to be:


(Realistic Haunter.)

2. Unevenness and inexplicability

(Two)

One of the reasons I don't write primarily about my disability (if you were wondering), and also a reason I am balls at self-advocacy, is because I'm a person with--DUN DUN DUN!--uneven skills.

I actually don't believe in uneven skills! It's a social construct and this is obvious in the fact that--while people sometimes make practical blunders like assuming someone with a physical disability has a mental disability, or talking to someone who is blind the way you might talk to someone who is hard of hearing--most people would admit if they were asked that there is no logical reason someone who is blind must also be deaf, or someone who is physically disabled must also be mentally disabled. And no one feels the need to say someone has "uneven skills" because they can hear but not see.

But within categories of disability, especially the mental disability category, there's this expectation of evenness. If someone's abilities aren't exactly at the same "level," whatever that means, they're possibly an amazing curiosity, but probs lying.

A person can write but not talk? A person scores high on IQ tests but can't do well in school? A person does well in school but can't figure out how to go grocery shopping or make a meal? A person can cook but not clean? A person can make some kinds of phone calls but not others?

No way guys, all these people are just liars! Check it out, this person claims she can't talk, but I found a video of her SINGING! Oh hey, you said you can't make phone calls, but I know that you made a phone call one time. Caught in the act!

As a person who can't make certain kinds of phone calls, like phone calls to follow up on jobs for example, I would never be stupid enough to tell anyone this. When someone tries to give me advice on finding a job and the advice includes phone calls, I just stop listening to what they're saying and start smiling really big to show them that they're helping me LOTS.

"Why can't you make those phone calls?"

"I don't know."

"How can you not know?"

"I don't know? I just don't? I guess probably you could locate it in something about phone calls feeling insincere, and worrying about bothering people, and not knowing what I would say in the phone call, all of which are kind of horrible things, multiplied by like a hundred because I applied for a hundred jobs so there isn't even an end in sight."

"Oh so you could make one phone call."

"I mean, theoretically, probably? I'd sort of deal with it all day. I'd write myself a letter about it. Maybe someone could sit with me. But it isn't one phone call, it's a hundred phone calls."

"Why can't you make a hundred phone calls if you can make one?"

"Because it would take a hundred days."

"So you can make phone calls!"

"You're totally right, if I took a hundred days and used them to only make phone calls and felt calm about everything else. I could probably do it in less than a hundred days if I had my own personal phone call aide to support me in all the phone call problems and keep me from running away from the phone. Maybe I could even do it in a few days, with a phone call aide. You win. Great job. Are you going to hire one?"

"No, that's stupid."

"I know, so why did we have this conversation?"

No one knows!

One time my dad tried to have a conversation with me because I said something about it taking me a lot longer to do certain things than it took other people. He kept asking me why. I was like, "I don't know, but towards the end of college I started having to pull one or two all-nighters every week, because I could only get work done if I had that much time to do it in." My dad kept asking me why I didn't do things like "sleep for a few hours, and then wake up and work." I was like, "I don't know, because I know that wouldn't make any sense for the problems the all-nighters were supposed to correct?"

We had started having this conversation because I didn't think I could write letters that night if I also wanted to go to bed at a normal time. My dad said, "What about you bring your letters downstairs and I sit with you and make sure you write them right now?" This sounds nice, but I already knew what kind of conversation it was! For some reason I agreed anyway just to see what happened.

When I went upstairs, I said, "If I don't come downstairs in ten minutes, will you remind me to come downstairs?"

My dad was basically like, haha! Caught in the act!

Because--you saw this coming if you have "uneven skills"--the fact that I asked my dad to remind me to come downstairs showed that I actually was just lazy and didn't want to take responsibility for my own actions. Asking for this was the final straw that pushed him over into thinking that the whole problem I was describing (which he'd obviously made it clear he had his doubts about) was too ridiculous to be true.

I don't know if it seems weird that my dad wouldn't believe I was telling the truth, since I have been diagnosed with some disability or other since I was a little kid. In my family, whether I'm disabled is not a controversy. But when I try to tell my parents a fact about my disability, it is always assumed to be not true.

Uneven skills can also be called inexplicable impairments and they are basically anything someone thinks is ridiculous or impossible. I guess you might be wondering why I am just writing about myself, when I am supposed to be writing about Internet arguments. The reason is that, first of all, random Internet judgments of someone's ability tend to be made out of the same mindset that assumes someone is lying because their disability seems too "uneven" or unlikely.

Someone with a developmental disability is typing? Someone with a developmental disability is writing a blog? I saw on their Facebook that they're in college! My bullshit detector is going off--this combination of facts is simply too ridiculous to be true.

So first of all these judgments often come from the fact that most people have a poor understanding of uneven abilities (especially when those abilities are stated by a disabled person and not a parent or best of all a professional). But second of all, it's because so many disabled people are really used to having people (at best) smirkingly accept our stated impairments, if not outright challenge them, that it is so upsetting and frustrating to have some random person on the Internet imply we are not disabled because we have a blog. At least my parents tell me to my face that they think I'm trying to get away with something.

1. Irrelevance

(One)

Ability statements are somewhat related to the tradition of the self-narrating zoo exhibit, and I'll explain why. First of all, I think people tend to get told their disability is mild (or something else, but whatever the words are they usually imply it's not a real disability) when they haven't gone into a lot of detail about their disability and how it affects them.

The thing is though that there's no correlation between how much you talk about your disability and whether your disability is real or not. So why do people imagine there is? I think it has to do with the expectation that disabled people who talk about disability will always be talking about their own disability. A writer who self-identifies as disabled, but isn't describing her own disability, produces writing that is inconsistent with what's expected from a disabled writer. Maybe this is why the legitimacy of her disabledness gets called into question.

I think some people who have made ability statements would argue that they weren't telling the disabled person her disability wasn't "real." They were just arguing that as a talking person, the disabled person doesn't understand the experience of people who can't talk (or whatever the ability in question is). But in the context in which ability statements appear, they almost always are jarring in the extent to which they don't follow naturally from the conversation.

"I am disabled, and I think--"

"You can talk."

"I know I can talk, but anyway I'm disabled, and I think--"

"You're less disabled than someone else."

"I know I'm less disabled than someone else, but I was just saying--"

"You can attend college."

"Actually I had to drop out of college for reasons related to my disability, but anyway, I had something to say, and this is kind of offensive."

"Why are you denying that there's a difference between you and people with severe disabilities?"

As a queer person, I can make this comparison, I think: someone who's talking about something "as a queer person" doesn't usually have a lot of straight people clamoring to tell him that he's bisexual rather than gay, or that he's "straight-acting," or that he came out late in life.

Queer is a pretty broad word and so is disabled. If someone is talking about disability as a broader category than some really specific thing like not being able to talk at all, then I don't really see the motivation for needing to pin down a lot of specific facts and--it often seems--put the disabled person in her place by highlighting ways in which she is "less disabled" than someone else.

I don't think it is surprising how much it happens, because the way disabled people are treated is often all about putting them in their place for wielding the term "disability" themselves instead of letting someone else have it (and that has to do with the next thing I'm going to say). But when it happens it is really offensive because it takes a conversation that was often more abstract or general and steers it into being about the details of the disabled person's life.

Ability statements are a personal attack because they are dehumanizing. By throwing them out there when they are irrelevant, you indicate that a disabled person doesn't have the right to just express ideas and feelings like you do. She must be on display.

Ability Statements Are a Personal Attack.

I just figured someone should post a to-the-point explanation of why this is the case. I think some people, especially people without disabilities, will say something that they think is pretty innocuous, like, "You obviously can live on your own." But then they check back on the comment thread and the person they said that to looks like this:


(Realistic Haunter.)

How come?

1. Irrelevance
2. Unevenness and inexplicability
3. Real Life Facts

the ultimate (ridiculous) showdown

The reason I've been thinking about intersectionality even more than usual is that I keep seeing these little queer/trans (usually just queer, but trans, in this case) vs. disabled setups.

Sometimes the person doing it doesn't see it.

A queer person attempts to talk about intersectionality and they list race and class. Talking about situations where disability would OBVIOUSLY be an issue, they list race and class.

A guy wrote a column in the school newspaper saying that the "It Gets Better" project is comparable to telling someone to stay in an abusive relationship and it should be called the "You Can Make It Better" project. (Maybe I need to explain my reaction to this further, but--how does he know?)

Then these actual open conflicts happen. How dare anorexic cis people say they have body dysphoria! Or, my favorite--how dare Autistic people (assumed to be straight, usually wrongly, as the Autistic community is heavily queer) try to explain our situation by saying, "What if all the dialogue about gay people was controlled by straight people and was about curing homosexuality?" We obviously don't understand Their Struggles. After all, a gay person pointed out in this conversation, no one gets killed for being Autistic.

Brilliant, guys.

In terms of the Autistic community, at least, it just especially bugs me because...it's so queer, and not just because many of us are. A straight person in the Autistic community is so much smarter and more familiar, when it comes to queer stuff, than nearly any non-disabled straight person, because you just can't get away from queerness. So like, when a bunch of queer non-disabled people who know nothing about disability, the Autistic experience in particular, or our community, start fucking trying to educate us because they think we're cluelessly comparing ourselves to them, I just explode. My head explodes. There are little pieces of my skull and hair lying on the floor around me.

QUIT IT.

I'm taking a student-taught class where we watch Disney movies and analyze the portrayal of (mostly) gender and sexuality, but other stuff when it comes up. Most of the people in the class are queer. Someone asked me what my paper was on, and I said it was on non-humans trying to be human and how that relates to disability. "Oh, wow, disability?" the person said like I was so creative for thinking of such a thing.