As I got older and started to actually meet hearing people with other disabilities (a wheelchair user who happened to be one of my sign language interpreters in high school; a guy on my college dorm floor who happened to have cerebral palsy) I gradually started to realize that we had more in common than I had thought in terms of dealing with stereotyping and myths about disability, accessibility issues, etc. Later I started participating in cross-disability organizations (for other reasons, as part of my career path) and am fully committed to a cross-disability struggle. I think we NEED cross-disability spaces just to help remind ourselves of the many commonalities that cross-cut all disabilities and also to strengthen the struggle for equality.

But I agree that we all ALSO need to have spaces where we can connect with people who share the same disability. Or for people who have impairments that are so rare they might have difficulty finding people with the exact same condition, then at least people who share something reasonably similar.

For example, I was recently diagnosed with myotonic dystrophy type 2 (an adult onset form of muscular dystrophy) … so far I’ve only connected with the on-line community of people with DM (mostly type 1, which is often a childhood onset form, but a few with type 2). And most of the people I’ve come in contact with simply view it as a disease that needs to be treated and not as something that connects them to the wider disability community or the disability rights movement. But eventually I would like to meet people with DM2 who approach disability from a rights-based perspective rather than a purely medical perspective, which is what I’ve found so far. I think it could be interesting to talk about what’s happening with our bodies in a context where this is not seen as inherently tragic. Or at least be able to talk about our bodies in a context where I don’t have to worry about hearing people praise Jerry Lewis for his fund raising activities without criticizing him for the pity-image he has created of disability *sigh*

My college-campus queer group was not always supportive/understanding of my physical difficulties. (Only two people took the time to drive out to visit me.)

At the same time, not all disabled people are allies to the queer community.

But then, that’s the issue with all multiple identities, isn’t it?

I think real institutional change comes from building coalitions around common issues. Identity politics screws everyone over.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with either of these, but a really good organization that deals with prejudice reduction and coalition building is the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI http://ncbi.org/). There’s also a really awesome documentary made by black gay men with HIV/AIDS about reclaiming their identities, bodies, and spaces. It’s called Tongues Untied (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongues_Untied).

Also, I wrote a blog post that’s modeled after “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” that you might be interested in. It has to do with ableism (http://healinglesstraveled.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/abilitys-invisible-knapsack/).

I’m interested in exploring more of your blog!

The trick, I think, is to choose both sometimes. I was part of a general moms group and a couple moms left for a disability-related moms group, one left for a single-moms group… I actually got benefit from being in the disability-related AND the general one. Needed both and my presence in both (and a church and a book club) created this sort of Venn diagram that brought about interesting possibilities.

Now it is possible to overdo this (I read your last post too!) But it is worth building in some ‘both’ when you can, I think.