Open Society

creating access is a tool for collective action.

Over the years, I’ve learned that creating access is a critical way of showing up in solidarity. Accessibility work can be done from anywhere, and that’s particularly important for disabled people, as we can’t always be physically present.

Being physically present and visible is more highly valued by our capitalist society. We see this with the push to end remote work, school, events, and conferences. People who show up in person are regularly viewed as making more of an effort, and people who show up remotely are viewed as disengaged and lazy. Unfortunately, this attitude is present even in organizing spaces. Even more radical spaces often fail at accessibility, from using physically inaccessible spaces, to not offering hybrid options, to refusing to implement COVID safety protocols.

Laws like the ADA require only the bare minimum of care, and there is no enforcement. Compliance cannot be forced, even on people who do not see you as fully human or deserving of the right to access the same space.

Disabled people constantly navigate hostile environments, especially health care settings. Here people in positions of power can say whatever they want while patients have to give citations, articulate clearly and effectively, and have the presence of mind to push back during acute, potentially fast-moving situations. I have been advocating for my health with doctors since I was a child, but this latest experience shook me. They gaslit me about my valid concerns of mistreatment. Even with all my social capital and resources, I was reduced to nothing. I thought of all the patients on the same floor who were alone, scared, and suffering.

Disabled advocate Sarah Blahovec wrote that “creating access is a critical way of showing up in solidarity.” If we lived in a world that placed access above all, creating access would be a collective responsibility. In this world, cultures of care would ensure that carceral institutions like nursing homes are abolished; people, not profits, would be the priority; care would flow generously without restrictions from the state; and people like me would be secure knowing we are valued and wanted not for what we can produce but for who we are. This world—an accessible one centered on justice—would be ruled by a simple phrase always put into practice: “None of us are free until we all are free.”

What these men have in common is that they aren't scared of strong or successful females, and they don't shy away from their vulnerabilities. A staple of positive masculinity is being able to share power, which is for the best.

Education technology tends to dismiss embodiment. Even when folks tout "learning by doing," it's often reduced nowadays to "learning by clicking." You'd think that having just lived through several years of Zoom school, we'd be more willing to prioritize the importance of teaching and learning with our bodies in physical spaces with other bodies. (Or even have more nuanced conversations about the effect on bodies of teaching and learning in digital and non-digital spaces.) Alas.

“That’s what I like about being on the road. After you’ve seen enough, here and there, you get a better sense—nothing’s normal and nothing’s not. It’s all outside. You know?”

And when you’re on your guard all the time, it gets too easy to mix up curiosity and aggression.

“Sure. Just sure. Or used to special treatment on the coast. There’s probably special treatment for folks like you on the coast.” The choice of words is intentional. And at another time in my life, I would have joked or played it off. A time after that, I might have shoved him aside. But the only way to be with people like this is steady and unwavering, and I want my son to see that at this particular point. I smile and don’t say a word. “Special,” the man in the tall hat repeats, like he knows.

We’re so different from everybody, I feel like we’re in the wrong world sometimes.

Strategic and false claims that stories are fake news or deepfakes may benefit politicians by helping them maintain support after a scandal. We posit that this benefit, known as the “liar’s dividend,” may be achieved through two politician strategies: by invoking informational uncertainty or by encouraging oppositional rallying of core supporters.

Trans healthcare, in other words, has never been an honest endeavor. It places overwhelming, social manifestations of moral judgement and disapproval in front of the actual medical procedures and medications it offers, designed to pressure as many people as possible to wash out before getting what they want, and forcing the rest to “rehabilitate” themselves into productive, docile subjects of gender. This is because medicalization is premised on the idea that it is irrational and disgusting to transition, so no rational doctor would permit it except as a last resort.

There is a form of social and political control implemented by medicine, a way to sever an unpopular minority from their own bodies and then sell back limited access to their bodies if they will submit to a set of trials to prove they can be good people, or at least made better. The people opposed to that kind of medicalization simply think that trans people enjoy no right to their bodies at all, under any circumstances.