The cruel New Teacher Challenge is a viral prank making its way through TikTok that uses disabled faces like mine as the punchline. --- So far, TikTok hasn’t done much to combat this online hate. When people report accounts that have been using my photos in this challenge, they’ve received statements that TikTok has found no violation of the platform’s rules. It’s not just there. When I’ve reported Twitter accounts for posting photos of a blobfish to bully me, more often than not, Twitter says it doesn’t violate any rules either. I want to be clear: I am violated. Every single time. Each photo, taunt, and cruel word is a clear violation of my dignity and my worth as a human being. And every time these platforms fail to take action, they’re sending the message that this bullying is okay. So many disabled people have become inured to our appearance being mocked. That’s not something we should ever have to get used to.

Ableds, hi, hello, wish we could have met under better circumstances, but here we are. Generally speaking people don’t care about ableism until it affects them so you are probably panic-following myself and a bunch of other disabled people Here’s a crash course. Thread 1/? You’re probably experiencing a lot of different emotions based on how the government is treating the #COVIDー19 pandemic and watching in horror as people around you dismiss your fear as irrational. I would love to say I’m going to hold your hand through this thread, but 2/? We simply don’t have the time. What you’re experiencing is ableism on a national scale. Early on, many wrote off the #coronavirus as something “just elderly and disabled (sick) people die from.” People felt they didn’t have to take action because only the most disposable 3/? Would be harmed. People tend not to care bc restrictions based on illness/disability are usually “someone else’s” problem,” those affected just need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and “overcome.” This virus doesn’t give a fuck about the American Dream mythos. 4/? This is all our problem so undoing your unconscious bias towards disability and disabled people is critical. Here are some things you’ve probably noticed since the crisis hit: 5/? Disability Accommodations/accessibility are “special treatment” right up till nondisabled people need them. I wrote a thread about this a few days ago, but the gist of it is, all of the institutions that previously failed disabled people? Suddenly accessible. Shocking. 6/? Things are more expensive now that you need them to survive. Disabled people call this #CripTax. Not only are the things you need more expensive, but there’s now an added cost to get them delivered since your health depends on you staying home. 7/? People you thought were your friends are kind of assholes. People in your life don’t quite understand why you’re staying home and making a big deal out of nothing. If they’re not goading you into unhealthy behavior then they’re telling you it’s not a “big deal.” 8/? The government doesn’t know what to do with you. They have fumbled the response to the virus, so while it scrambles for approval ratings, you’ll have to rely on complete strangers for help and guidance opening you up to be taken advantage of. 9/? Why demand competence and accessibility from your elected officials when “There’s always someone to help.” 10/? Your environmental stewardship has been cut off at the knees. You saw the turtle and the straw, but have you ever seen the Clorox wipe and the fish. Your going to have to ask yourself: was your environmentalism performative morality now you need single-use plastics? 11/? Finally, a complete group of strangers on the internet are the only people who seem to validate how you feel about this experience and are sharing resources and knowledge simply to see you survive. because your previous life was previously accessible doesn’t mean anything. 12/? Disabled people have been dealing with your shaken new realities our entire lives. Things are more expensive, people around you change, and the world is completely inaccessible until it decides not to be. You should be listening to disabled people not only in a crisis but 13/? Every single day. No one does worse because people, places and things are MORE accessible. I hope this current crisis challenges all of you to do better. Fin 14/14

Johanna Hedva lives with chronic illness and their Sick Woman Theory is for those who were never meant to survive but did. Her fellow spoonies. --- If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street. […] There are two failures here, though. The first is her reliance on a “public” – which requires a private, a binary between visible and invisible space. This meant that whatever takes place in private is not political. So, you can beat your wife in private and it doesn’t matter, for instance. You can send private emails containing racial slurs, but since they weren’t “meant for the public,” you are somehow not racist. Arendt was worried that if everything can be considered political, then nothing will be, which is why she divided the space into one that is political and one that is not. But for the sake of this anxiety, she chose to sacrifice whole groups of people, to continue to banish them to invisibility and political irrelevance. She chose to keep them out of the public sphere. […] Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick. […] “Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. […] The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Language is not the be all end all. This isn't about policing language or censoring words, but about critically examining how language is part of total ableist hegemony. This is about being accountable when we learn about linguistic ableism, but it is also about being compassionate to ourselves and recognizing that to varying extents, we have all participated in ablesupremacy and ablenormativity. This is about understanding the connections between linguistic ableism and other forms of ableism, such as medical ableism, scientific ableism, legal ableism, and cultural ableism. [...] If you find yourself using this ableist language, please take a minute to re-examine how your perspective has been informed by ableism. This isn't an accusation or an insinuation that you are automatically an Evil Person. We have all participated in ableist structures, and are all continually learning and unlearning. But if you are truly committed to building more just and inclusive communities, then it is critical to unlearn how we have been conditioned into accepting ableism in all parts of our lives and societies, including in our language.

Ableism is not a list of bad words. Language is *one* tool of an oppressive system. Being aware of language -- for those of us who have the privilege of being able to change our language -- can help us understand how pervasive ableism is. Ableism is systematic, institutional devaluing of bodies and minds deemed deviant, abnormal, defective, subhuman, less than. Ableism is *violence.* This list has been compiled and changed over time with input from many different disabled people, people with disabilities, self-advocates, d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, people with chronic illnesses, sick people, mad people, neurodivergent people, etc. -- and I am always responsive to suggestions from folks who are directly impacted.

"Using that kind of language sends the message that it's OK to trivialize mental illness and lazily substitute real people's lived experiences for 'wild,' 'silly,' 'dangerous' or 'out of control,'" Lydia X. Z. Brown, an activist, writer and speaker focused on disability justice, said in an email. "For people able to change their everyday language, becoming conscious of how often they use ableist words like 'crazy' or 'insane' is one small way of reducing the stigmatizing effects of casually ableist expressions," Brown said.

Writer and musician Sean Gray discusses the experience of going to shows at venues without access for the disabled.

Cute video, good message.