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When “Small” Disabilities Add Up





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The Cost of Access

A Black person signing in front of a screen with CART captioning.Dear organizers, event planners, and company representatives:

Stop assuming that access is too expensive.

Build access into your budget from the start of planning, not as a reluctantly tacked-on afterthought. When you seek funding or set prices, determine the cost of your event with a range of access services included.

Ask actual people what they need if you don’t know, and be broad in your call for input. Many people aren’t attending your events because they assumed they wouldn’t be included. It takes a lot of energy to reach out and ask for a particular access need to be met when your lived experience has been constant rejection. And not everyone who would benefit knows to ask–plenty of folks who don’t identify as disabled will have a more pleasant event when you consider things like captioning, designated quiet rooms, and nutritional variety. That means that they’ll come back, recommend you to friends, and spend their money on your event. They may think of services as “luxuries” rather than accommodations, but the principles of universal access don’t require anyone to identify as disabled. The point is recognizing that keeping access in mind benefits everyone.

Oh, and if you say you’re going to provide a particular kind of access, but fall through because you didn’t take the cost into account? You look like a jerk.

If you belittle the person asking for services, make value judgements about their request, suggest that they pay for the service, or tell a Deaf person to find their own interpreter? You look like a jerk.

If you say you’ll provide access, but ignore the actual request and provide an alternative (cheaper) service that doesn’t fully meet an attendee’s needs? You look like a jerk.

If you’re a big company and refuse to provide types of access that plenty of small non-profits bend over backwards to provide, even digging into their own limited pockets, because it’s “too expensive?” You look like a really, really big jerk.

Access matters. Do the right thing.


How Can Universal Design Apply to Small Non-Profits?









Blogging Against Disablism Day: Rethinking Access








Intersex Athletes and the Intersection Between “Abnormal” Gender and Disability

A couple of weeks ago, I was somewhat perturbed by a discussion of intersex athletes competing in women’s sports.  The discussion took place on a National LGBT Bar Association call on intersex conditions and the law, generally, but it was the information on sports that I found most bothersome.  I’ve been thinking about the frameworks in which we approach trans identities and disability, finding interesting parallels, and the same is evident for intersex individuals.  In the context of women’s sports, athletes who live and identify as women can be disqualified for intersex conditions because they are thought to have an unfair advantage over men.  However, the line in the sand is far from clear.

A couple of months ago, in a dialogue with my friend Kyla on Girl w/ Pen around the classification of gender identity disorder, I mentioned the case of athletes with prosthetic legs being disqualified due to their “unnatural advantage.  In that post, I concluded that the distinction of “unnatural” vs. “natural” wasn’t as obvious as it might seem.  Other extreme body differences, for example being a very tall female basketball player or a very short gymnast, are not considered unnatural or unfair.  The basketball example was also mentioned on the intersex call, in explaining the use of androgen counts to determine who has an “unfair” advantage.

In women’s sports, chromosome tests are no longer used to determine gender, but androgen tests are.  The idea is that having more androgens does positively impact athletic performance, so it’s not fair to have athletes with “too many” androgens compete against women.  Of course, these athletes don’t compete against men, either.  At the same time, athletes with unusual height, lung capacity, or other advantages are seen as “fair” and “natural.”

This says a lot about the way we view gender, and the way we set norms.  We separate athletes by gender because, on average, male athletes and female athletes have certain differences.  But at the same time, there are huge variations within those two genders, so that a perfectly “even” or “fair” match would be difficult to find.  And really, why would we try?  If the point of high-level sports is to work to be the athlete with the most prowess, someone has to be better.  Many young people would love to play sports at that level, but their bodies don’t allow them.  We’re used to this idea.

What we say to intersex athletes when we do tests like this is that there is some line that divides the “normal” from the abnormal.  Folks with a certain number of androgens, like those who conform with their assumed gender, like those who have talents within a socially “acceptable range,” like those who run with legs made of muscle and bone rather than manufactured parts, are considered valid athletes and valid human beings.  Those who fall outside the range don’t get to compete.

It’s not just intersex athletes to whom this restriction applies, by the way.  My ears pricked when I heard that androgens were being used as the deciding factor, because I happen to have a hormonal condition that affects my own hormone levels and I do not have an intersex condition.  I asked whether women with PCOS, for example, who might have elevated androgen levels, but would not be considered to have an intersex condition, could be disqualified on that basis.  The answer is yes.  I’ll leave you to mull these thoughts over with me, and please do comment if you have anything to share on this topic!

Love Your Body Day: Complex Body Relationships



So what tips would I share on Love Your Body Day?






Mental Health, Stigma, and Activism





The fact is, normal is relative.





How to Be an Activist Through Eliminating Hurtful Language

As a writer, blogger, and activist, I think I have a certain responsibility to think about how I express myself.  Whether I’m writing a post or an article, having a casual conversation, or replying to a Tweet, it’s easy to use language without thinking about it.  We all talk in the feminist and queer communities about how harmful societal norms are–whether it’s the pervasive use of “crazy” as a negative term, the way rape culture is subconsciously taught and accepted, or the societal pressure on women to be thin and “pretty.”  A lot of us end up with increased awareness of certain types of language through activist communities, and I love how this happens and very much encourage everyone to blog or just talk about terms you notice people using that support the kyriarchy.

Today, I want to talk about a particular group of words that I find harmful and am working to eliminate from my own speech.  The words I’m thinking of are associated with the garbage–from words that describe what we take in (“junk food,” “trashy books”) to words that describe what we are (“trailer trash,” “sloppy seconds”).  These words, in my experience, tend to apply primarily or only to things that are associated with poverty or “low” culture.  When a middle or upper class person talks about things in the first category, it’s common to speak of guilty pleasures and indulgences–“I know I shouldn’t eat so much junk food; I’m putting trash in my body but it’s just so good.”  This kind of language implies that 1) we should be guilty about things that are labelled “trash” and 2) these are a temporary deviation for middle and upper class people, ultimately linked to individual responsibility.

I could go on for days about what’s wrong with the way we talk about individual responsibility in Western capitalist countries, but to stick to my main point, what sucks about this kind of language is that it implies that people who consume such things should be guilty, and further that they are bad people because of what they consume.  It’s not a big leap from “junk food” and “trashy magazines” to trailer trash, or from saying someone’s clothes are trashy to saying that she is trashy.

Elitism is easy not to notice when you’re raised to value education, health, etc. and to look down on “guilty” or “nasty” habits.  I know I tend to talk a lot about “guilty pleasures” or be embarrassed about certain books or music.  So here’s a challenge to those of us who were raised in that environment, or for whatever reason find ourselves boxing habits into “good” and “bad” categories.  Let’s try to think about these problems when we’re writing, and especially not to use words like “junk” or “trash” to describe habits or people. Also, let’s try to avoid the trap of talking about how people are “victims of their environments” or using the language of pity when talking about access to education and culture.  This kind of language assumes that culture has an innate value, that people who don’t have access to “high” music, literature, food, or clothing are stuck with “low” forms.  It ignores the inherent value of these things and ascribes unnecessary guilt to their consumption.  Taste is a matter of individual preference, so let’s all make an effort to stop demonizing others’ tastes and start questioning the origins of our own.

Roundup: First Blog Carnival on Privilege


And now, on with the carnival!

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