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disabledunitypunk · 5 days

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So, I know this blog has been a lot less active as of late, at least from my part (mod Stars).

I'm gonna be honest; I've been incredibly sick. A combination of some kind of issue with gluten/wheat (may be celiac, or nonceliac gluten intolerance, or wheat allergy) with IBD, MCAS, lactose intolerance and sensory issues, had caught me in such a cycle of degranulation, anaphylaxis, intestinal issues, brain fog, chronic fatigue, and POTS and chronic pain flareups, that I was nonfunctional.

On top of that, anxiety over my partners SSI application (recently medically approved by the administrative law judge, that's a win! still waiting on nonmedical approval but it should hopefully just be a rubber stamp process at this point - knock on wood) has really screwed with my levels of executive dysfunction.

And trauma around medical neglect and abuse, plus being so sick, plus executive dysfunction, had led me to temporarily avoid seeking treatment at all. When I say that the very idea of trying to trick yet another doctor's ego into believing they came up with the idea to test me for the conditions I'm already reasonably certain I have, all while making sure I don't seem too smart, too unintelligent, too articulate, too reliant on google, too self-aware, use too many medical terms, and so on... I've not had the ability to advocate for myself anymore.

Luckily, a friend of mine that's all hellfire agreed to help advocate for me at some of my appointments going forward, so I'm going to be finding a new primary care doc and going forward (possibly seeing my old one a few more times if necessary, just to get re-referrals and maybe get a referral to a non-Medicaid allergist that actually knows what MCAS is) with pursuing diagnoses and treatment again.

Until then, however, I'm pretty much limited to about three foods - plain white or wild rice, "zoup" (a zucchini broth with chunks of carrots, daikon, celery, and wild rice), and raisins. I can drink water and cranberry juice. Between my sensory issues and that tiny list, I've been consistently significantly hungry for a week. I'm struggling to sleep and can't get more than four hours of restless sleep in a night the past few nights. I'm menstruating for the first time in five years for G-d knows why. I feel better and less reactive, especially after an ER visit for some IM decadron, but I am constantly exhausted.

Why do I bring all this up?

This is my daily life. I have near zero quality of life because of the ableism of doctors and failures of the medical system. I'm barely keeping myself alive every day, really only with the help of a lot of caretaking from my partner. I haven't been able to get to my doctor to get approved for that friend willing to advocate for me to be paid for basic caretaking duties by Medicaid. I went out on Saturday for the first time in over a month, and I'll be recovering from that for the next week and a half.

There is not a single minute of my life that isn't profoundly affected by my disabilities. Stress causes a cascading reaction through my MCAS, POTS, ME/CFS. Understimulation causes intense stress and even pain. Listening to music while doing nothing, watching videos, and similar "low energy" activities drain so much energy that they trigger my chronic fatigue, and sometimes cause a lesser reverse cascading reaction.

I can't take an ADHD med to help with the symptoms more disabling than the ones threatening literal anaphylaxis and organ failure because I can't get them compounded without an official MCAS diagnosis, and I'd also need a beta blocker compounded as well (which are are often mast cell triggers) for my POTS because the only ADHD meds that work on me are amphetamines.

I can't take vitamin D or B12 despite being incredibly critically low for the same reasons. I've barely found some OTC benadryl and aleve that I halfway tolerate. I might have a UTI and if I do I'm gonna have to convince doctors 20 years behind the medical literature that IM antibiotics are considered safe and effective and are a safer alternative to oral meds for me, if still risking a minor reaction.

On good days, I can make it between the bed and couch a couple times a day, and between the couch and the toilet. On bad days, I have a chamber pot setup in the bedroom because I can't afford diapers. I'm sure my vitamin D deficiency is not helped by never leaving an apartment that barely gets some sunlight two hours a day because it's in the shadow of the other side of the building.

I used to, on bad days, spend most of the day doing mindless tasks or on slightly less bad days, puzzle games, on my phone. Now, I'm lucky if I can do even that much most days. I AM too sick to play video games. 🥲 I can nap, I can sit with my eyes open, I can listen to music until it's too exhausting anymore.

I'm tired, and every day surviving is just a monumental effort. Again, the ableism of doctors and... actually, they're not failures if they're intentional; the abusive medical system, have not left a single minute of my life untouched.

Multiple times, when talking about online discourse, I've been accused of "wanting to be more disabled than I am", "being physically abled", being "crazy", "delusional", "on something", etc, etc, etc. All for daring to say that ideas like body-mind duality, exclusionism within disabled communities, and similar, are deeply harmful and affect far more than insular online discourse.

Doctors love to shove off chronically ill people into "psych cases". Have anxiety, autism, PTSD, schizophrenia, DID, depression, etc, etc on your chart? Yeah, you're never getting that physical diagnosis. This is what perpetuating and encouraging ideas like "all disabilities are physical OR mental", "people with abc type of disability have privilege over people with xyz type of disability", and so on, DOES.

Sanism is used to perpetuate ableism. Ableism is used to perpetuate sanism. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that neurotypical physically disabled people, non-mad neurodivergent physically disabled people, and physically abled neurodivergent/mad (all as self-identified categories) get just how deeply compounded ableism is when you exist at the intersection of physically disabled and neurodivergent (especially if mentally ill or mad). Or perhaps, the disconnect exists along a line of "profoundly disabled" vs "can access abled hegemony to a significant extent". Perhaps it's both. There is likely elements of how visible a disability is, how much its able to be masked, the type/level/spread of support needs, and so on. There's definitely elements of other marginalization; race, ethnicity, fatness, queerness, and so on.

And then there's the subcategories. Cognitively disabled. Traumatized. Chronically ill. Visually impaired/blind. Deaf/hard of hearing. Intellectual disability. Mobility disabilities. Fluctuating vs static disabilities, support needs, masking, and so on.

Sometimes I wonder, would the people who think I'm just an abled faker who doesn't belong for not being able to seperate my neurodivergence from my physical disabilities, my neurological organs from my body, my inabilities from my inabilities, would they find I'm the same as them when they spend a day in my life? Would they find it worse? Would they find it unbearable in a completely different way from their own struggles? Would they maybe even find that while it's not quite as hard as their own struggles in some cases, that it's still wildly hard and the two are far closer to each other on the scale than they think? Would they understand that we are both in the midst of an active, eugenicist genocide, and that we're 50-49 bullet holes staring down the barrel of a loaded gun that is held by our oppressors?

Even now, I'm thinking about how this post might be inaccessible. Is it readable for screen readers? Will the length be too much for way too many people? Is it understandable for people with intelligence and cognitive disabilities? How do I fix those things if it's not. What am I missing? What am I missing? What am I missing?

I'm exhausted, I'm scared, and I'm barely holding on. I'm safe, mental health wise, to be clear, I'm just convinced that the only reason that I'm not in significant danger from my physical chronic illnesses right now is because I've always had a body that was stubborn as all hell and twice as resilient. I'm not dying, not because the illnesses aren't trying, but because my body will endure far beyond normal limits.

I've experienced slow acting anaphylactic reactions without anaphylactic shock about once a month for 1-2 years now, usually only going in after several days and nights of severe symptoms. Like I've mentioned, several of my vitamin levels are so low as to make organ failure a constant threat. None of my illnesses are "terminal" per se, but that doesn't mean they can't be deadly. And more to the point, it doesn't mean they can't destroy me, that they haven't utterly destroyed my quality of life, without killing me.

I mean, I started this blog as an attempt at fostering solidarity. We CANNOT be quibbling over who really "belongs" in various disability spaces, who gets to reclaim what words or whatever, when so many of us are dealing with this shit.

For the area with the lowest cost of living in the country, SSI should be 5 times what it is now. For the highest, up to 20 times. People on disability benefits lose some or all of their payments, insurance, and so on, if they get married, even to another person on benefits. I've never met a disabled person without more doctor horror stories than diagnoses, and we all know diagnoses like to come in clusters. We are being abused, neglected, and killed.

I cannot stress how much, not that this intracommunity discourse "doesn't matter", but that it does at a deeply harmful level. It's just perpetuation of the abuse we face at a lateral level. We're mimicking the government and doctors and general abled society and getting into petty but deeply dangerous inane arguments that are just us carrying out the only way we've been taught to treat disabled people.

Being a disabled activist and advocate means questioning everything you know about ableism. It means prioritizing first and foremost disabled people. And honestly, speaking as someone whose platform here is dedicated to that, that's really fucking hard. It means believing people about their experiences with disability and oppression in a world that teaches us that the vast majority of disabled people are lying privileged fakers.

It means not believing that people know more about what people with a disability they DON'T have face because of their own disabilities. A little confusing, but essentially someone with disability A without disability B who faces oppression X, can't say that someone with disability B DOESN'T face oppression X, just because they face it. It means not calling the very real harm someone has experienced "misdirected", or making their suffering about you or your subcommunity, just because you've experienced the same or similar harm.

It means unlearning reactivity as a group of extremely traumatized people. It means learning to meet people where they're at, and assume "can't" rather than "won't". It means accepting that sometimes not only will someone's disabilities cause conflicting access needs with your own, but that sometimes people's disabilities can actively cause them to do harm, and that they still deserve rights, community, and support if they do. It also means recognizing that the harm that a disability may cause someone to do is going to look VASTLY different than abled expectations of "harmful" disabilities. It means, even and especially when this happens, recentering the perspective not around how the disability affects other people, but around how it affects the person with the disability.

It's all of this and so much more. It's a lot of effort from people with not a lot to give. It's fighting an upstairs battle with no ramp, so to speak.

And I guess I just... I'm at a loss on how to keep that up. Is just focusing on getting myself well enough to participate again, putting my own mask on first, enough? When there is not a single moment of my life untouched by the extremely deep and extremely systemic harm of ableism, is it enough to try and access the care continually gatekept from me at an individual level? Can I even do so, against such intensive pressure?

How do I live this life, and also go on untangles the narratives of "disabling neurodivergence isn't really a real disability and neurodivergent people face almost no real ableism" and "physical conditions are obvious and so get all the care and face no real ableism". How do I fight the concurrent violences of hypervisibility and erasure within the community that only serve to strengthen abled people bludgeoning us with them?

How do I focus on things like organizing, community building, activism, advocacy, dismantling the system, dismantling our reliance on it, and so much more, when I can't even get out of bed?

All I can do is write about it, right now. Sometimes I feel like that's all I've ever been able to do. Everyone I've ever known has acted like some day my "pen" will be a tool of liberation, but I'm at a loss for how. I'm just some horribly sick mad cripple on a dying microblogging platform on the internet. I don't know - not if I'm enough, but if anything ever can be.

And I don't mean to sound hopeless. I know that change can happen. I know that it is, in tiny and sometimes larger ways, every day.

This is kind of a self-centered post, in the most neutral way. This is just my perspective. This is about me, and how I'm so very disabled, and how people assume I'm not (and how wild that is, considering), and how ableism affects me so deeply, and how I don't know how to face it or fight it...

I can only hope that maybe my word resonating with people means something. That maybe, as much as we never want each other to experience what we have to, that it's also a comfort to know we don't experience it alone. That maybe this will serve as a reminder that it's okay to be scared, to feel lost, even hopeless, to struggle; to not know how to fight or where to turn. That maybe this will reach someone who CAN do something, and maybe it'll reach the people who need to NOT do anything other than take care of themselves, and that maybe it will help both of them.

Maybe that's too grandiose, I don't know. I hardly know what my point is here, other than: this is me, crippled and crazy as all hell. This is the violence I face. This is why I started this blog, because we need to stop hearing "you're a lying abled privileged faker trying to take advantage of and take resources from real disabled people who really need it" from abled people, and saying it word for word to each other. Because what abled people mean by "real disabled people" is just a theoretical disabled person. A perfect victim. They don't mean any real disabled person, especially not those who can advocate for themselves. They mean they think every single one of us doesn't need or deserve accommodations, treatment, respect, humanity, or even life.

That's the point, really. We're all we've got. We've gotta fight for each other, not fight each other. And G-d, I know how hypocritical that sounds coming from my ragey, rabid ass. I just... that's all I know to focus on right now. Not necessarily all coming together and holding hands and singing a song about unity, but just... not being ableist to each other. Tolerating each other even if we can't stand each other. Presenting a united, unbroken front to ableist society, and pushing until they don't have any power over us anymore. Doing the work of activism, which is often neither easy nor feel-good.

That's what I'm trying to do here, at least. I try to get a little better at it every day. I try to listen a little more. I try to keep up hope when my body and mind are crashing down around me.

I don't have a mic-drop conclusion to add to this, so just: I'm opening the floor. Anyone who has anything to add, feel free to do so. What you have to say is valuable.

#ableism #sanism #unitypunk #cripplepunk #madpunk #neuropunk

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disabledunitypunk · 25 days

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Why hasn’t this been done before?

#people who can't recognize how symptoms differ on darker skin should lose their medical licenses and I'm not kidding #(I mean I think like 80-90 percent of the medical field should lose their medical license)#(bc of the rampant bigotry - racism. ableism. queermisia. intersexism especially. and so much more)#(but this is so BLATANTLY a failure of the most BASIC function of the medical system - and an intentional failure at a systemic level)#(that it really should be grounds for not being able to practice medicine at least until it's corrected - & for some not then either)

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disabledunitypunk · 25 days

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disabledunitypunk · 1 month

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anyway here's to disabled people who are not healing. disabled people who are not recovering, ever. people with disabilities that only get worse and worse over time. people who cannot access treatment for their disabilities or whose disabilities simply aren't treatable. people who know they'll only get more and more disabled as time goes on. people who know their disability will kill them sooner or later. you are seen, you are important, you are not dead weight, and you deserve support.

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disabledunitypunk · 1 month

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We'd cure our MCAS in a heartbeat, but you can pry our autism from our cold dead hands. Every disability of ours exists on a spectrum between those two extremes. We are not ever fully represented by healing wish fulfillment or characters remaining disabled alone, because BOTH apply to us.

People are allowed to feel about their disabilities however they want and write about them however they want. This goes for ANY feeling for ANY disability. If someone who has severe chronic pain wouldn't give it up for whatever reason (not an experience I can understand, but will defend nonetheless), that is their CHOICE. It's literally just about disabled autonomy.

And these attitudes do bleed into treatment of real disabled people. We're judged for "choosing not to get better" when we have good reasons for not pursuing treatment options (dangerous, bad side effects, exacerbates other conditions, allergies, inability to take medications via certain routes, expense, etc etc etc). And to be clear, any reason is a good reason, because it's our CHOICE.

This is why we are so vehemently against FORCED recovery, but for recovery always being an OPTION. We've been both forced into and gatekept from treatment, and it's been equally harmful.

It just literally doesn't get simpler than: respect the autonomy of disabled people. To be fully represented, we need characters that get magically healed AND those that don't. Hell, we need characters that choose not to get magically healed when it's an option, and personally in order to process the trauma we've endured, I know I need characters that have been forced into being magically healed who are traumatized from it.

It's almost as if disability is a complex, nuanced, and highly individual thing. Yes, I'm being snarky, but not at anyone upthread. I'm being snarky at people who reduce "good disabled rep" to only one thing, as if just about any disability representation can't be either handled well or mishandled.

I just also want to be very clear: pain should not HAVE to be endured. But as long as the option is there to not be in pain, someone who chooses to continue being in pain is not bad for it. That is not bad rep either. Whether a story is examining the complexities of making that choice in the context of all options having consequences, or is about the author's deeply personal relationship with their disabled identity, or any other number of things - the part that matters is that at the end of the day, we should always have the final say as disabled people. It should always be our choice.

Listen. I'm disabled. I broke my spine in an accident that was technically my brother's negligent fault when I was nine.

I live in constant pain. The most effective pain medication for me is cbd cream, and it works straight up miracles as far as I'm concerned. But even released from my constant (chronic) pain, I have limitations.

If I write a story about someone with an agonizing disability who gets their shattered body repaired by benevolent mystical/alien/whatever forces, it's not me removing representation. It's my fantasy of being able to walk across my house without hurting or losing feeling in one leg because of how pressure distributes in the small of my back.

I get to have that. I should get to have that without being shamed for it.

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disabledunitypunk · 1 month

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This is a real long shot but... any writers who see this who have hypermobility or a hypermobility disorder, please feel free to share your tips! How do you make writing sessions comfortable for your body?

Sincerely, a person with g-HSD whose pinky knuckles have a personal vendetta against touch-typing.

Non-hypermobile people please feel free to share this around<3

#resources

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disabledunitypunk · 1 month

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disabledunitypunk · 2 months

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I wanted to put out a post asking if there are any black nonverbal or deaf/HoH people who use BASL who would be willing to consult on an animation project?

My junior year of art school starts this fall, and I will begin working of my junior-senior thesis 3D animation, where the main character is a black nonbinary person who, in the beginning and ending scenes, is seen communicating with sign language. I am white and more-or-less abled-hearing (I have Auditory Processing Disorder but I don’t know if that counts), but I know there are differences between ASL and BASL, and I wanted to have a lot of sensitivity around using this dialect accurately and respectfully.

The consultation would involve taking videos of your hands as you sign the ‘dialogue’ I have written, which would then be used as a reference in the 3D animation. I am a relatively broke student but I am willing to pay for your consultation. Please DM me if you’re interested!

Note: I apologize in advance if I have mistakenly used any offensive terms in this post, I tried to do a lot of research but I’m sure I have shortcomings and gaps in my knowledge.

#boosting

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disabledunitypunk · 2 months

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#racism #ableism #sanism

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disabledunitypunk · 2 months

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like what I mean by I have privilege over many other autistics is that I've seen a fully grown adult thrown in an isolation room for not working on his AAC with an abusive 1:1 paraeducator whereas I'd only been thrown into an isolation room last when I was in middle school.

I was working as a substitute paraeducator in a transition classroom at 21 and I met a young woman between the ages of 18-21 (didn't ask, she looked younger because autism) who dreamed of being a veterinarian but was praised for buttoning up shirts the best at Value Village for monopoly money.

When I was being assaulted by teachers/paras and locked in seclusion, they were frustrated at me for "wasting potential". The kids, and ADULTS, I worked with had paraeducators and teachers who thought of them as useless eaters.

I can't tie my shoes or work (at least a normal job, at least currently, etc.) but I can leave my house when I feel capable of doing so independently. My colleagues living in group homes have to wait for "community day." I can go online and get support. My colleagues need support with using the computer and they're not getting it most of the time, except for self advocacy meetings.

I feel I'm worthless because of what happened to me. My friends and so many of the people I've worked with feel worthless because of what HAPPENS to them.

I was institutionalized for two weeks once when I was 7.

I know people who were in the state institutions for 30 years.

Yes, I have privilege. Many autistic people have disability related privilege over other autistic people. For some reason people think this makes me "just quirky." And some people want to deny that these are privileging experiences at all. If you got called high functioning, even as a tool of abuse, you have relative privilege over people called "low functioning," or even just "low." That doesn't mean you're not disabled or not a big target of ableist systems.

Whatever we mean by "low support needs" and "high support needs" (I think the disability field I work in has a more restrictive definition of this than I see in Tumblr), we do have more in common with each other than not.

The terror I saw from my students was immediately understood by me. I feel extremely seen when I read Mel Baggs' blog. I use AAC more and more often now. I struggle with ADLs and this will likely get worse as I age.

I know that the world I need is a world that liberates nonspeaking autistic people who require 1:1 professional support for behavior and activities of daily living. I need a world that values nonspeaking autistic people who can't use AAC. I need a world that treats every single autistic person as a human being. Centering the most impacted is a disability justice principle.

What we're not going to do, though, is build a dichotomy in our mind of "those people with the serious disease that means we can treat them as less than human" and "quirky assholes appropriating real struggle."

#holy shit thank you for the nuance #you can have privilege over another person with your same disability and still be profoundly disabled #I also think it's contextual on what your support needs ARE in the first place #because needing to wear a diaper is NOT treated the same as being unable to do other ADLs without help #as an autistic disabled person who uses diapers (for reasons partly related to neurodivergence and partly to physical issues)#and someone who needs moderate assistance with ADLs #they are treated VERY differently #although struggles with hygiene are judged much more harshly than like. stuff with food or other stuff #(words aren't wordsing)#but yes stop treating privilege as if it means you're basically abled #acknowledge that it's contextual #(and even that two people can each have privilege in different ways especially at the same support needs level)#just thank you OP for this compassionate and nuanced take #we've been craving this

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disabledunitypunk · 3 months

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on the bright side I did just find a company that makes medical equipment for stuffed animals and dolls so maybe there is some good in this world

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disabledunitypunk · 3 months

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@theeskeleton

Here I'll add some additional nuance for you: a black person has the right to consent to be called that by anyone they please, because they are the ones systemically oppressed in a way that causes that word to be harmful to them. I will not speak for black people on if anyone else can reclaim the word, except to say that white people specifically cannot because they are unable to be harmed at a systemic level due to possessing societal power over people of color. Even if a white person consents to another white person using it on them, it can still harm black people around them, due to the specific capacity the white people have to be violent to the black people without significant repercussion or consequence.

This is the most basic premise of understanding racism and racial inequality. I do not know whether you are a person of color or not, so the explanation may be redundant, but I do know that activists of color have repeatedly stated that racism does not map to other forms of oppression, and that comparing them as if they do is often racist. Using it to shut down discussions of marginalization and bigotry in other communities is often more so.

I must have thought I added the disclaimer that's on a different post on my personal blog: that I do not claim to speak for identities that I do not hold. I do not speak for people of color or for ethnically marginalized identities, because I lack knowledge and nuance to be able to approach those specific forms of bigotry effectively.

I also hold social power that would make it very easy for me to do harm, even with the best of intentions, so I choose to only platform people of these identities who are more capable of doing so than me; as well as to speak out and act against bigotry in the ways educators among those groups have specifically asked those with privilege to do.

I can also add some additional context that was explicit but perhaps unclear in the post: this post originally came from a place of being annoyed about intracommunity gatekeeping of language. As in, "neurodivergent disabled people aren't the white people of the disabled community and don't have the power to oppress physically disabled people". As in, "dynamics of queer identity are intensely complicated and only further complicated by other marginalized identities".

But I also stand by my statements as they apply to nonqueer and abled people. If an allocishet endosex person wants to reclaim queer or other queerphobic slurs, I'm going to assume they have a good reason to do so. Perhaps they've been degendered and barred from cis privilege due to disability. Perhaps they are gender nonconforming and have faced transphobia.

If an abled person wants to reclaim disabled slurs, I'm going to more likely assume that they actually have an invisible disability that they haven't disclosed, but even if they haven't - perhaps a black victim of psychiatric violence is reclaiming "insane" after being treated as such to suppress their civil rights activism. Perhaps, like my dad, a mexican person has been treated as stupid their whole life and faced violence for it.

I do actually think people other than the "intended targets" of a specific type of bigotry can still face it (often as a result of another type of bigotry) in such a way that they are still regularly, significantly, and systemically directly affected by that other form as well. It's not NOT ableism or queerphobia to literally use ableism or queerphobia to oppress an otherwise marginalized nondisabled and/or nonqueer person.

Bigotry is intersectional, based on bigots' perception of your identity, but also at a fundamental level. White supremacism/racism/colonialism relies on sexism/queerphobia/alloamatonormativity/intersexism/transphobia relies on ableism/disableism/sanism/(ableism against intellectual/cognitive/developmental disabilities) relies on childism/adultism/ageism, etc.

All forms of oppression uphold and strengthen each other, and serve as the foundation for kyriarchal control - essentially meaning that everybody benefits at different levels from even any specific individual form of bigotry. An abled queer jewish person of color does not benefit from ableism or abled hegemony in the same way that an abled nonqueer gentile white person does, and every variation of those identities in between also experiences ableism/abled hegemony in differing ways.

This is basic theory that I primarily learned from disabled and queer people of color. My understanding of intersectional transfeminism is deeply rooted in the work of queer black feminists, and my understanding of crip theory and mad liberation is deeply rooted in the work of disabled black activists.

Again, I don't know if you know this already. This is as much for everyone else who sees this as it is for your sake. You have chosen to take this post in the worst faith possible, to the point of actively ignoring the repeated specification of "lateral aggression", which white oppression of people of color by definition is not. You have also chosen to ignore the repeated usage of the word "reclamation", which someone who is in an oppressor class by definition cannot do. You have ignored the point that marginalized people can be affected by slurs that are most typically aimed at a different subgroup of marginalized people, or that marginalization can cause you to experience forms of bigotry unrelated to your actual identity.

Saying "But what if someone with societal power who benefits from oppression of a marginalized community uses that word against them, in the specific context of racism which is functionally unique from the context of disability justice that this blog is based around" is not an effective whataboutism to "hey, within marginalized communities maybe we should actually listen to people when they say a slur has purposely been directly and violently used against them and their specific identity" and "two disabled and two queer people don't need to have the right specific sublabel to reclaim slurs in good faith, and here's how to identify good faith usage."

I sincerely hope that you were not just attempting to shut down a conversation about how policing of language is used as a form of lateral violence within marginalized communities, and how bigots see and treat all people within a marginalized community as every slur that applies to that community (and often additional ones that don't typically apply as well). I hope that your comment was a well-meaning attempt to discern whether we as a blog held harmful racist ideals and to redirect us if that was the case - essentially, to remind us that racism functions differently to ableism, queerphobia, and other forms of bigotry I personally have experienced.

If Mod Cloud wishes to comment, as a system of color, I will welcome their input, but otherwise:

Tl;dr No it is not okay for "a white person to call someone the n-word if they're not mean about it", Using that as a gotcha in a conversation about reclamation, lateral violence, and marginalized intracommunity dynamics is minimally deeply unserious and very possibly racist as well.

I cannot get over just how much policing slur reclamation doesn't matter or help in the grand scheme of things.

Here's a handy chart for determining if someone is doing harm by using a slur.

Are they using it for someone who has not consented to it in any way?

Are they using it in a negative or derogatory way towards others or themselves?

If the answer to the first question is yes, it is harmful because it is using loaded language with a history of being used to harm people without permission, therefore furthering the trauma from oppression even if not intended as negative.

If the answer to the second question is yes, then it's reaffirming the idea that the way someone exists (as described by the slur) is bad and wrong, and that therefore anyone who shares that specific aspect of identity is bad for it.

If the answer to both is no, then quite frankly, it doesn't fucking matter. If someone uses a slur to describe themself or an explicitly consenting party in a positive way, they're literally not harming anyone. Quite frankly, I do not give a shit if they have the "correct" identity to reclaim that slur. I'm going to assume they find it meaningful to their specific identity in a way that makes it useful to them, and leave it at that.

You can make all the arguments you want about how you don't know why someone might be using a reclaimed slur, how the relevant identity might not be visible, how someone can be profoundly hurt by a slur without having the "right" identity, how erasing what a related group of people face based on the violence being "misdirected" and "actually aimed at [other group]" is lateral violence, how you can't actually determine how a word is used against a group you're NOT in and therefore can't actually determine it's exclusively or primarily used against only your group in most cases - and I have made those arguments!

But at the end of the day, I feel like that's meeting laterally violent people where they're at. At the end of the day, it may be uncomfortable to you to hear other people reclaiming certain slurs, but it absolutely does not do material harm if the usage is not negative and the people being labeled as such are consenting.

However, harassing people over the language they choose to apply to themselves and explicitly consenting others, barring them access to community spaces and resources, and essentially enacting punitive justice on members of the community for the crime of... using language for themselves that you don't like?

That IS harmful.

Kill the cop in your head. They are antithetical to our liberation.

#racism #ableism #queerphobia #slur discourse #unitypunk theory

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