The emails have been arriving steadily. Subject line: ‘Thought you might be interested in this’ ‘Have you seen NPR’s story on disability?’ ‘Thoughts on this?’ ‘Saw this, thought of you’ ‘WTF is wrong with this story?!’ ‘Wait, how much of this is actually accurate?’ The content is sometimes just a single link, to This American […]
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
The media and the Internet are abuzz with the shooting death of law graduate and anti-domestic violence advocate Reeva Steenkamp in South Africa last week, an event made all the more prurient to many media consumers by the fact that the accused, her boyfriend, is a Paralympic and Olympic athlete with an international reputation. As […]
Content note: This post discusses sexual assault committed against disabled people. People have repeatedly asked me to write about a case from Connecticut involving a rape conviction that was overturned on the grounds that ‘No reasonable jury could have concluded that [the victim] was physically helpless.’ And I get why you want me to write […]
I’m still seething over this post at Reproductive Health Reality Check, in which I am essentially informed that my life has so little value, is so not worth living, that I was such a burden on my father to raise, that I should have been aborted. Things like this are why I have problems interacting […]
I’m not sure when I first understood that my brain worked differently from other people’s, and that the feelings I experienced weren’t like the feelings other people experienced. There was no defining moment I can point to, no instance of ‘aha,’ just a slow sense of deterioration, interrupted by periodic visits to counselors and doctors […]
April is Autism Awareness Month. Are you aware of autism? Excellent, we’re done! Just kidding. Let’s start over. April is Autism Awareness Month. Originally developed in the 1970s, it’s designed to educate the public about autism and what it means to be autistic, demystifying autism and fighting ableism directed at autistic people. Like a lot […]
I saw the film adapation of The Hunger Games over the weekend, and like everyone else on the Internet it seems, I have a lot of Thoughts. So many that I cannot even confine them to one website. The flowering of discussion over The Hunger Games is kind of awesome, because people are really engaging […]
The ongoing war on reproductive rights in the United States is so sweeping that I’m constantly uncovering a new facet of it, appalling in its grossness and determination to strip pregnant people of all individual freedom and autonomy. Odd, coming from conservatives who claim to want smaller government; evidently tight governmental controls are perfectly acceptable […]
In Oregon, disabled workers have recently filed suit against officials who support sheltered workshops, arguing that they are Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) violations and officials have an obligation to promote supported employment over sheltered workshops. For those not familiar with the intersections between labour and disability, the case is a fascinating glimpse of a […]
Monday, December 26, 2011
A recent legal decision has important implications for disabled immigration detainees.