Excerpted
even after death
they stuff our bodies into boxes …
(Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Click through for a short summary of those dead whose stories are known.)
I don’t know how you have a conversation with people for whom “because it’s right” is not enough of a reason to do something. I really don’t.
– commenter Isabel
… arguing with a doctor about weight is like arguing with a priest about whether you should be a Christian.
– commenter Eve
They’re waiting for the self-disclosure that explains why someone who seems so “normal” would identify with the disability community. They’re waiting to find out exactly why the friend who spoke up isn’t just like everyone else after all: The excuse that allows them to continue ignoring disability identity and culture. They’re waiting to be able to explain to each other, later, that:
“I don’t know anyone with Down’s. How was I supposed to know her sister had it?” [...]
The reason an able-bodied or able-looking person needs a reason to be a disability advocate is simple: So everybody else has a reason not to be. It’s “not their dog.” [...]
Disability culture (Deaf-Side debate notwithstanding) doesn’t require that you show your crip card, or your sister’s, mother’s, or brother’s, to be in favor of that which is right.
I write from San Francisco, where, in the months leading up the election, I saw a massive mobilization within the queer spaces in which I spend time to get people to vote no on 8, but I saw little or no public discourse among LGBT people about very important state propositions: 5, 6, and 9—all of which potentially impacted things like funding for prisons, drug crime sentencing, or the trying of minors as adults in this state….
Just take the other day. I was exiting a building in a stream of white people who had been able to afford the ticket to the show we had just seen. I was pushed off the path by two couples and a what looked like a father with his arm around his daughter. Wizard righted me. No one else came to help. They were too busy talking about the awesome Obama victory. Then, father ran down, literally, a poor black homeless woman who was trying to walk upstream. She kept saying “excuse me, excuse me.” Father pushed her aside; the white people on either side flooded around her. She was entirely invisible. I looked her in the eye and exchanged words with her. No one else seemed to see her. The Obama victory, you know.

















Amanda





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