today is national coming out day. as i think about what this means for me as someone who is so out, yet so so closeted, friends and i are on a conference call going over notes from a recent summit where self advocates with developmental disabilities worked to create policy recommendations on community living. (sadly this is needed because too many providers use gov’t dollars set aside for community living to do things that are really hurtful to disabled people).

we asked people to talk about what group homes and other residential facilities for disabled people often look like. this is what the notes reflected:

• “You have to share a room or home with someone you don’t want to or know”
• “No freedom to leave or have company over”
• “It is literally outside the community, without transportation, cut off, hidden away”
• “You are called a “consumer” instead of by your name”

we also asked what community living should look like. this is what folks said:

• “You have your own keys for home, access to a telephone, and the right to lock your door”
• “People are allowed to marry if they wish, or cohabitate with a partner or friend(s) if they wish, and there is private space for intimacy between someone in the program and that person’s mutually chosen partner(s) or even just to be completely alone”
• “Freedom to hang out with friends that I choose”
• “Freedom to make my own schedule”
• “People (at church or at the place you volunteer, etc) come to visit you if you are in the hospital.. because they care about you”
• “People support you in deciding what to do with money, instead of deciding for you”

reading these notes while sitting with all the recent suicides and hate crimes has me thinking about community visibility and coming out day. with violence taking place on the bodies of beautiful queer people every day, i understand the importance of community visibility. it’s why i wonder if there are better coming out strategies we could be using or what our work could look like if we acknowledged that so many people do not have the money, safety, access, and support to go to parades, bookstores, and clubs or wear rainbow stickers and leave facebook statuses about being out and proud, let alone come out to others.

i’m not against national coming out day or projects like it gets better – i just want us to talk about what we understand “out” and how this is shaped by privilege. for example, i want a “better” and an “out” that doesn’t require queer folks to leave their communities (which i am in the process of doing, to be out). i want a visibility that understands ice raids, the murder of transgender women of color, and state violence.  i want a queer movement that celebrates queer resiliency instead of insisting on a certain type of visibility that is impossible for so many of us.

most of all, i want a national coming out day that is relevant to the queer people in the room that came up with the recommendations above, and to all the other queers trapped in group homes, psychiatric hospitals, institutions, state guardianship, and the prison industrial complex. i want a national coming out day that means something to more of us.

i have this bookmarked and reread it a lot. a lot. since she posted it again for this yr’s blogging against disableism day, i am too.

moyazb:

I have a lot of people in my family with disabilities, though none of them would consider themselves disabled. In talking with another radical woman of color, it seems that disability is so the “norm” in our communities, it’s often not marked as an identity unto itself. I often wonder about what a release it might be for women of color to see disability as a framework that intersects with race and gender, to not always feel the need to keep fighting, even when it hurts, to let go of the ways that we as cis and trans women of color in particular, have taken up ableism in ways that reproduce harm to ourselves and the communities we “work” so hard and care for. Why does disability mostly look white?

And while it seems so necessary, to bring these movements and experiences together, to use an intersectional lens, I think it’s so important that we don’t flatten out difference when we look for similarities. I think we are so use to ticking off that ever expanding list of race, sex, class, gender, sexuality, age, dis/ability, indigeniety, etc. we forget that intersection does not necessarily mean equal or parallel. While there may be no hierarchy of oppression, I think that there are ways in which our tendency to compare racism to ableism to sexism to homophobia can make us miss the nuances and the unique ways each of those plays out in the unique constellation of individual lives.

this month i am spending a third of my days travelling and sleeping in hotels. all of this is taking a toll on my body and i find myself stepping back and wondering why movements i could do the day before are not possible. on monday, i was in raleigh going down a hill i’ve been down a million times before. the possibility of losing my balance and tumbling out of my chair was such a real danger that i had to call a friend nearby to come walk with me. (and it’s a good thing i called him, not only was my body draining but my chair died and he had to push me back to the hotel.)

i am thinking constantly about the contradiction and the space between wanting to live a disability justice lifestyle — desperately wanting to dismantle capitalist rules of productivity that leave out many of us and force us to give up our bodies and our labor for nothing that frees our communities— but also finding my life very rooted in a disability rights assimilationist model— i can do anything this other person can do, just need the right accomodations, just need more opportunities/laws/connections, just need to work harder… it took me 7 days of working in my first job to realize that no, i am not miraculously more productive than other disabled people in the organization, things were getting done because i had put in 80+ hours the first week to prove i was of value… funny thing is the only one in the org i ever needed to prove this to was myself.

and i have found that when i am at home, working part of the day from bed is the only thing that doesn’t tear apart my body. but feeling well is hard to exchange for the fact that i type much slower in bed, that it takes me twice as long to do what i can do sitting up. i hate how that feels but i am trying to challenge myself to not just to talk about disability justice but live it— self care, interdependent relationships, questioning a system that asks me to give up my body/labor and otherizes me if i cannot. but it is hard.

this tied in with a few other things also has me thinking about what i know intellectually, what i know with my heart, what i know with my body. where those 3 things meet and what they look like. where desire, safety, intimacy fits in. it is all really confusing and i get lost easily.

here is to us finding wellness and joy in 2010. here is to listening to your body.

Human rights activists have long called out aversives [shock therapy and similar tools], restraint [physically immobilizing someone] and seclusion [keeping someone away from everyone else, also known as involuntary confinement] as human rights abuses.

These are practices that are rightfully considered torture if done to prisoners but ones that still happen in our public schools. disabled youth are targeted every day for things like hand flapping and speaking out. When these abuse tactics are used, the media says nothing, schools try to hide it, and parents often do not find out this has happened until their children are showing signs of PTSD [post traumatic stress disorder], bruising and broken bones.

Here is a video by annam20 that describes this silent abuse [trigger warning]:

You may also remember advocates fighting for the closing of the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in recent years. JRC is one school that continues to use shock therapy and other “treatments” on children.

Recently, a bill has been introduced in Congress that addresses restraint and seclusion.

The bill, the Preventing Harmful Restraint and Seclusion in Schools Act (H.R. 4247/S. 2860), includes:

* A prohibition on the use of restraint and seclusion in schools unless a student’s behavior poses an immediate danger of physical injury and less restrictive interventions would be ineffective.
* A prohibition on the use of any mechanical restraint, chemical restraint, or physical restraint that restricts air flow to the lungs, and any other aversive behavioral intervention that compromises health and safety.
* A requirement for adequate training for school personnel imposing restraint and seclusion.
* A requirement for immediate parental notification and a school debriefing following each incident of restraint or seclusion.
* A requirement for states to create a state plan that incorporates the minimum standards and report annually on the number of incidents of restraint and seclusion.

[To sum that up--- stopping use of r & s unless student is physically attacking someone ---also know as "immanent danger"---, stopping anything that restricts air flow and other potentially life-threatening moves, better training for school personnel, letting parents know right away, school addressing each incident, and each state being required to make a plan for carrying it out and reporting.]

Right now this bill is in need of sponsors… Please use this form to contact your congressman or via congress.org asap and let them know that you will not stand for human right abuses in our schools.

mala linked to a story about a young autistic boy, Francisco Hernandez Jr, who went missing and road the NYC subway system for 11 days. her response to the story reallly struck me…

“I live in NYC and am angered that this is the first I am hearing about a Latino child missing for 11 days. I would have been on the lookout for real.”

and a commenter on the article…

“if only he could memorize skylines and drew them, then maybe someone would care.” -jacque mehoff

as well as Francisco’s mom…

“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention” (on lack of support from police)

and Francisco himself…

“Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”

(if you are curious, this is what “intersectionality” really looks like. lives of disabled youth of color being structurally unvalued… or immigration status x disability x race x xenophobia x class… ).

*

intersectionality= idea that all issues (race, disability, etc) are connected and if people are going to be free, society has to address them all, not just one.
structurally= big picture, by the people with power
xenophobia= being scared and not liking “outsiders”, normally people from other countries.

cripchick: i feel so queer today 3:10 PM
friend: you are so queer
cripchick: yeah??
friend: of course, you are like a queer super star

i need to write. write or die. benefit of being a disability organizer is that i can be around people who share my disability politic all day everyday. i can also be around people of color locally and globally— folks who understand the landscape of my community, folks i can feel safe with. but people who have a queer politic? folks who don’t think my style of loving is selfish/greedy? folks who get white supremacy* AND heteronormativity* AND disability?… i only know them through writing. poetry circles. zines. media collectives. old audre lorde texts. blogs. what happens if these words dry up? i feel like i am a little bird sitting on the edge of a branch, it’s fall or fly and i never know which way i’ll go.

-

last week i went to meeting in atlanta with folks in the reproductive health field who are creating a model for including disabled people in programs. i was kind of amazed to learn that a.) they weren’t coming from an administrative service-y model (where folks “giving” the service have all the power) but one that is based on ableism* analysis and 2.) that their grant was less than $2500, they weren’t doing this for money. i am so curious as to how they got here— who planted the seeds? who did all the groundwork ? i met a cool health equity* activist (who is Deaf! and queer! and so on point!) who has been working in the field with them and was a part of the workgroup, too. it kind of reshapes my understanding of folks doing work in the academy*, policy world, media reform* arena, social work field, etc, even if i still don’t understand how they have the patience for the loneliness that must come with slowly chipping away at a system, the only gripped chisel in sight. so much respect for them though.

*
white supremacy = system of power that keeps white people in power
heteronormativity= when society tries to make one gender and sexuality normal to keep straight people in power
health equity = looking at access to things that keep people healthy and why some people do not have this access
the academy= institution that studies people and the world. this often often happens at colleges.
media reform = work people do to change mainstream media from the inside.