cripchick's blog

From ADAPT, our brave warriors who, on their third day of protest, faced massive storms and accessible restrooms being taken away:

ADAPT activists begin third day of protest at Democratic National Headquarters

Washington, DC – As dawn breaks in the nation’s capitol, approximately 30 disability rights activists, most with disabilities, from ADAPT continue their vigil on the sidewalk surrounding the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

On Tuesday, July 21, 2009, in 25 cities across the nation, ADAPT groups took their message to Democratic Party offices and its leaders. Forty ADAPT members in Washington, DC protested in the DNC headquarters, and were physically removed by law enforcement from the building at approximately 6:00 PM, although no arrests were made.

The protesters were demanding that the Democratic National Committee:

1. Apologize for creating Medicaid’s institutional bias which has forced millions of seniors and individuals with disabilities needlessly into nursing facilities and other institutions;
2. Issue a public statement calling for elimination of the institutional bias in 2009 either as part of healthcare reform or as separate legislation, known as the Community Choice Act (S 683/HR1670); and
3. Facilitate a meeting between ADAPT and Democratic leaders, including Representative Henry Waxman, Senator Max Baucus, and Valerie Jarrett of the White House to develop a plan to pass the Community Choice Act.

In most cities, the Democratic committees agreed to relay ADAPT’s demands to the DNC. In some cities, the staff committed to working with ADAPT to influence the leadership of the DNC to support ADAPT’s goals. “Our state party leaders really worked with us to identify how they could help us influence the national leadership,” said Nadina LaSpina, an ADAPT organizer in New York City.

However, in our nation’s capital, the DNC still refuses to meet any of ADAPT’s demands. During the vigil’s second day, ADAPTers chanted and distributed informational materials. “We even were able to meet with Members of Congress right here on the street who expressed interest in becoming co-sponsors of the Community Choice Act,” said Cassie James, an ADAPT organizer from Philadelphia.

As darkness fell, the vigil continued and many of the protesters went to sleep in reclining lawn chairs and sleeping bags, some in tents and others under a lean-to constructed from PVC pipe and plastic tarps in front of the DNC. Several large banners throughout their sidewalk encampment show the group’s support for the Community Choice Act.

The ADAPT members in Washington, DC are committed to maintaining their presence in front of the DNC offices in an attempt to pressure Democratic leaders to work with ADAPT to discuss plans to pass the Community Choice Act.

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Follow them on twitter or check out more about their action at www.adapt.org/takeaction to stay in the know and support CCA. Free our people!!

i’ve been wanting to talk with others about gender and disability but have been very uncomfortable with writing things as i’m not a gender scholar (damn you academic industrial complex!) BFP’s recent post, what is butch?, is pushing me forward and i’m hoping that this can be a place where we can talk about gender x disability x queerness x everything.

in the comment section of that post, BFP tells another person she reads me as a total femme. i don’t know if other people would be as delighted as i was but my natural reaction was the immense need to take that as a compliment— with disability being understood as such an asexual thing, no one ever affirms me even having gender. the traditional disability narrative puts me in this place of being something else: that if gender was a binary, i’d be in a third gender realm. (my friend mia has the perfect example of this, bathroom symbols that have the man, woman, and then wheelchair*). our bodies are objects that are not supposed to belong to us and by recognizing our genders, it implies that we own our bodies, think about them, take pleasure in them. maybe this is a big jump but to me, affirming our gender also recognizes our personhood: it says we are human and have a right to not have our bodies raped, abused, sterilized, experimented on, harvested, and more… 

it’s only recently that i’ve been thinking about gender presentation. maybe this is because i finally have a PA who knows that part of her job is being patient in helping me try different outfits and that if i don’t like the way something looks, i should take it off. if i want to see if a fedora, vest, dress pants combo looks good, i can.  if i want to stand in a dressing room and try on every piece of lingerie in the store, i can. a lot of disabled people don’t get to do that, especially with so many of us living in institutions, having unpaid caregivers, experiencing days when we are in total pain or lack energy, etc. there needs to be a word for disabled people taking part in intentional, pleasurable gender play in their own way. part of the oppression we face is being asexualized, otherized and denied gender identity so playing with gender and demanding respect for our identities is resistance and a refusal to accept that ableist narrative…

i don’t know that i’m femme, butch, etc, i just know that i like to play with roles and gender. for me, the word to describe this gender play or personal recognition of identity i’ve been having lately is cripchick. cripchicks (or gimpgirls) are fierce, strong disabled women who interact with the world on their terms. when i am cutting up a tshirt everyone is wearing so it looks good on me, that’s my way of being a cripchick. lately i get a lot of pleasure in mixing up disability with a fierce femme show so i am insistent on that tee looking good on me, even if i do it in a way that traditional femmes may not. as cripchicks, we’re dealing with issues that force us to create our own relationships with gender presentation but we do it and feel good about it.

do you know how powerful that is? for disabled women (w/ all disabilities), what does gender look like for you?  am i wrong here?

*sidenote about bathrooms. i think the wheelchair accessibility/bathroom safety connection is totally powerful and love places that have a single stall gender neutral bathroom where people are safe. that’s not what i mean with the example mentioned above about third gender.

everyday people brush us off  ’cause we talk a little differently, think a little differently, move a little differently or because we are from group homes, in the foster care system, etc. they just don’t know. i love how creative you are.  give you thirty minutes, markers, poster paper, and you come up with hot shit like this:

we get painted as consumers, objectives of charity and service. when we’re quiet, they think we don’t have something to say. i love your activist heart and how fiercely it beats when we come together.

while debates around language are storming around us, here you are unashamed and carrying disability pride posters, naming our tables the “disabled and proud team”, and wearing hot crip gear. i love how subversive i feel when were populating the room with resistant bodies!

the other night when we were doing check-in, you all said you were doing great because you loved being with each other. i wasn’t sure if you were just telling me what i wanted to hear. it’s easy to get sucked up into the non-profit industrial complex and even easier for this to be just another disability conference on the calendar. i love how much this means to you. i love that, like me, you were so excited about seeing each other this week you couldn’t sleep. i love that you drove 3 hours to get here. i love that even though we were in the middle of this spontaneous, unorganized group meeting, you said we were more organized than everyone else because we had tshirts. : )

i love the way that every time there was a time to speak, it was our crew picking up the mic! (how did this even happen?)

i love the way that you are leaders. it’s funny to me, we moved away from a “youth leadership model” into one of community building and ironically, we have more leaders than before.

i love the way you are not afraid to speak your mind. you know how to kick it with legislators, other disabled people, allies, the cop coming to check our permit—everyone!

i love the way you look out for each other. i love the way we know each other’s access needs and the interdependence that happens when we are together.

i love the way you create safe space for each other.

i love the way you know how to party.

i love the potential we have. i love how beautiful you are!

total Disabled Young People’s Collective fangirl here. isn’t my crew amazing, yall??

update (5/16): to see the newsweek article mentioned below, click here. it will also be in the 5/25 issue (hitting newstands on monday). to thank newsweek for the coverage, please write to editors at letters@newsweek.com. thanks!

abfh and i are on the same wavelength! i recently made a donation to the autistic self advocacy network as a way to fight the hate and death threats those involved with ASAN are receiving. hope you will consider doing this as well. you can find out more about this at abfh’s place and donate through the change.org website. below is a letter i wrote in regards to newsweek’s upcoming coverage of neurodiversity and the response to it.

-cripchick

Dear Newsweek,

As someone that witnesses the struggle of disabled people fighting to have their voices heard every day, I want to commend you on your recent interview with Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. I hope you will move forward with the pending article as the mainstream media continues to miss the struggle of this rising civil rights movement in their overwhelming coverage of autism issues.

History continues to illustrate that every social movement first begins when a group of people realizes both the power of their own agency and the birthright of self-determination that they carry as human beings. Once this realization has manifested, people move towards freedom with an urgency that seems unstoppable.

Unfortunately, history has also illustrated that when a group of people begins to believe in their own power, other people will attempt to silence their voices by claiming that these people are unable to know their own experience, let alone speak in their best interest. We saw this with first wave feminists and the resistance they faced from government, fathers, and husbands when they began to believe that they could speak for themselves. We also see this with other struggles, such as those of people of color, workers, and others who are still fighting for self-determination.

You may have seen a blog post titled “Ask Newsweek to Kill Ari Ne’eman” from John Best, a blogger who also writes that Ne’eman should be “put to death” and calls autistic self advocates “psychopaths”. As a leader of an organization that promotes autistic people’s right to self-determination, Ne’eman has received death threats from people claiming that he is not a “real” autistic and that autistic self advocates are so ignorant that they could not possibly ever understand the breadth of experiences that make up their community. There are other bloggers, such as Jake Crosby at Age of Autism, who, among other inaccuracies, say that Ne’eman and other advocates of neurodiversity deny autism as a disability* and despite scientific evidence that says autism is not vaccine-related, continue link to radical fringe groups on their sidebar.

Sadly (and quite outrageously), these inaccuracies are often what cloud mainstream media’s coverage of autism issues and the community rarely gets to hear from self-advocates. As a Newsweek subscriber, I’d rather read about the important work advocates of neurodiversity are doing, such as last year’s victory against the Ransom Notes campaign, advocacy against aversives and school abuse, or work promoting the right to receive services in the community. I hope you will remember ways that other social movements have been denied ownership of their own experience and continue publishing pieces like the one that is to come out soon.

Respectfully,
cripchick

*For those that say Ne’eman and others do not recognize autism as a disability, here is a link to a keynote Ne’eman recently gave at National Federation of the Blind’s Jacobus tenBroek Disability Law Symposium.

DONATE TO ASAN IN HONOR OF TROLLS HERE.