Today I got directed at this LiveJournal post by a Disabled person pointing out that just because you happen to have one disability that doesn’t mean that you are totally helpless and of no use to your fellow humans. He also tries to draw a distinction between the medical issues that he has and his identity as a person. It is a useful distinction to make. If someone has ‘flu we don’t regard them as a “‘flu person” and make all of our judgments about them on that basis, but if some has a more serious (and generally that means incurable) condition then they become a “sick person”, with all of the negative connotations that carries.
When the email with that link came in I happened to be reading this superb post on Daily Kos about the currently ongoing employment case of Diane Schroer. Colonel Schroer is a former US Special Forces officer with a wealth of experience in both battle zones and security. The case is about her being denied a job at the Library of Congress because she is transgender. The Washington Post coverage of the case notes that Schroer was denied the job because Charlotte Preece, a manager at the Library, was:
concerned that Schroer “might be unable to maintain high-level contacts in the military intelligence community” and “might not be viewed as credible” by members of Congress
Unfortunately for the Library’s case, Colonel Schroer is so well regarded in military intelligence that she has had no trouble setting up her own business and winning contracts. The Library, however, preferred to judge her on appearances, and even more so on the fact that it assumed other people would do so as well. The Daily Kos post has this to say about the case:
In the America of the past, we’d likely have said that Charlotte Preece’s assumptions were enough to justify taking away the job. In the past, failing to live up to society’s expectations about who men are and who women are, would surely have been taken as a sign of instability. But in the America we aspire to be, we won’t be willing to accept stereotypes as shorthand for capacity. Knowing how wrong that kind of shorthand has been, and how much people have been hurt by it, we’ll insist on keeping our eyes on what really counts: ability.
And that, I think, applies equally to people who have many useful skills but also happen to have a specific disability that sometimes means they can’t do everything that “able bodied” people can do.
First, thank you for linking to my post. I am thrilled that my little rant has garnered such attention.
Second, I want to lend my enthusiastic support to the idea that the challenges faced by the Disabled community are much the same as those faced by the Transgendered community. As I stated in a comment on my post, the Disabled community is a community that is held together not so much because of a common trait (indeed, we are an amazingly diverse group), but because of a shared experience of systematic oppression. Our common experiences are mostly around the reactions of those who are not us.
I also have a lot of ties to the Trans community: my ex-lover is a trans man, and I have an “Adopted kid” who is also trans (nothing official here, this is the family we have created). My community, the people with whom I share my life, are a varied and diverse group, but we all share this experience of oppression. I hate to define a community based on such negative criteria, but the impetus of our connection is merely a beginning. It is what we make of these beginnings that matters.
When we share our stories of marginalization, when we value the collection of our individual histories over the academic value of consensus and hegemony, I find that my community becomes much larger and less isolating.
My identity wears many hats: Queer, Disabled, Feminist, Interpreter, Persian… The list goes on and on, and the priority of one hat over another changes from moment to moment. That links between marginalized communities are spelled out, as you do here, makes me feel so lucky to live in the communities I do. Thank you.
Certainly. My business partner is legally blind. She is also one of the best in the world in her IT area of expertise and gets paid vast sums for what she does. She is virtually never discriminated against in the workplace because she is judged on her results. However, when she goes elsewhere, she constantly runs up against a set of assumptions that because she is blind, she is also stupid, unable to speak for herself and lacking in financial resources. She cannot escape being judged as if her disability is the single salient thing about her.
In addition, the thing I find highly bemusing is that if we go out to (say) lunch, despite the fact that we look nothing alike people INVARIABLY assume we are sisters. There are a bunch of attitudes towards the disabled to unpack here: they don’t work (so we couldn’t be colleagues), they are asexual (so we couldn’t be lovers), and they’re so undesirable as companions that we couldn’t be friends: only a family member would voluntarily spend time with them, probably as an act of charity.
Ability/disability is a continuum. I know nobody who doesn’t have some problem limiting them in some way, whether that be a chronic illness, a bad back, a trick knee from an old sporting injury, poor eyesight, a reading difficulty: the list is endless. Those labelled “the disabled” are closer to one end of the continuum than most of us, but we’re all placed along it somewhere. Lumping “the disabled” in a discrete group and pretending they’re nothing like the able-bodied – and then judging them solely by their label – may relieve the able-bodied’s anxieties about disability, but it makes the disabled’s life a magnitude of times more difficult – and impoverishes all of us.
Thanks for sending the link for dodgingwndshlds blog.
Hmm, I think I’ll point the folks over at Ouch at this . . .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch
If you haven’t listened its definitely worth doing so. Has its ups and downs, but always interesting.