Jesus am I tired of Tumblr's gatekeeping of solidarity movements. If you asked someone at an in-person cripplepunk meet-up to provide a list of their disabilities to you so you could validate if they're the right kind of cripple for you, you're the one who gets kicked out, not them. Hell, if you asked for a list at an online meet, I'd boot you, too.
The idea that there's some hard bright line which exists between all disabilities of all other organs and disabilities of this one organ is bizarre and unhelpful. It also perpetuates the "but mental disabilities are different" mindset which leads to "oh but mental health coverage is optional, different, and can be shunted off into its own little box."
I have a disability where one of my organs doesn't function properly bc it doesn't make enough of a certain kind of juice, which makes it difficult for me to do certain things which I need to do to function. I have to adapt my life, change what I eat and how I move my body, take medications and rely on others for assistance with my condition. If I don't do that, this condition has been known to kill people. Is that diabetes or post-traumatic stress disorder?
I have another disability in which my nervous system doesn't behave properly, and that causes me great difficulty in my life. I have had to change what I eat, the medications I take, how much coffee I drink, how I rest, and how I deal with the medical establishment. This disability and its diagnosis has profoundly affected how I live my life, and I require assists and accommodations to live my life as I choose. Is that disability ADHD or physical damage to my spine from the tumor which compressed my spinal cord & left scars behind when it was removed?
Do anxiety and paranoia and insomnia and depression count if they're symptoms of celiac disease? If not, why not? They're disabling effects of an autoimmune disorder. And regardless, it's because body not act right so... wtf? How about my memory issues that come from damage from a medication used to treat the pain in my legs?
Solidarity movements are reciprocal, y'all, and I'm exhausted of "you must be this queer/this trans/this disabled to come in." Maybe I'm just too fucking old and too fucking tired to listen to this week's Discourse ™️ about who trademarked what term when while actual problems exist.
I know it probably seems like you're doing something productive to you, but I assure you, you're not. If your issue is "these specific people are being dicks," deal with those people being dicks, and don't ascribe their dickishness to their disability. The problem is they're being a dick.
If your issue is instead "but this isn't as disabling as what I deal with" or "I have that disability and it's not as bad for me as my other disability" or "but it feels good for me to draw a line between disabilities of this one organ and every other organ," then it is you. You are being the dick.
Perpetuating the non-existent line between "physical" and "mental" disabilities helps absolutely no one. It places mental disabilities by default in a "not as bad" category and an "all in your head" one, which ... like, do I need to explain to y'all why functioning labels and categories aren't helpful in disability movements? Why are we resurrecting this shit and giving it new polish?
To be clear, I am not interested in debating this, so trying to tell me how your no-brain-problems-allowed approach is right and good, actually, is a waste of your time, because there is absolutely no way to convince me that trying to keep certain kinds of disabilities out of a general disability solidarity movement based on the organ that disability centers in has any use whatsoever. The line between "mental" and "physical" disabilities is blurry as fuck and trying to fence off all brain problems is not okay, especially since y'all don't mean that because a lot of things which are caused by the brain acting in a non-standard matter are considered "physical" disabilities.
Jesus, y'all make me tired. This bullshit is the least punk thing ever.
I'm not disagreeing but Tai, the creator of crippled punk, specifies its for it is for physically disabled people specifically here
Obviously mental illness is an issue in the brain which is a part of the body. I'm just stating what the founder of the movement intended. And they felt very strongly about following those tenants of it.
Tai sadly isn't here to tell us how they wanted this to play out though but I do know I want to honor their legacy the way they wanted it to be.
I am stating that the creator of the movement disagreed. They are not here to clarify so I can only use their old posts. It doesn't matter to me but it mattered greatly to Tai.
I've already addressed that many times, including in that post.
The way people have talked about this entire issue, including how it pertains to cpunk, really bothers me.
It's kind and compassionate to respect someone's memory. I don't fault anyone for that. We all have people whose legacy we wish to honor. But honoring that legacy shouldn't come at the cost of compassion for the living or excusing unethical behavior.
Here's what I mean:
The person who coined cpunk did say that it was meant for physically disabled people only and that was their clear intention.
That was a mistake.
It wasn't their place to draw a boundary like that around the term. That's literally just exclusion and clearly enough people felt emotionally invested in the coining of that term and the definition provided by Tai to engage in some really crap behavior as soon as that exclusion was threatened by the existence of other people.
I get that these things are complex, nuanced, and difficult, but the people who get the most abusive in situations like this aren't interested in nuance, they're interested in excluding and attacking people. Honoring someone's legacy doesn't make any of that okay.
Look you can disagree with a person's ideas. That's fine. Trying to change something that Tai set very defined rules and boundaries for, especially when the person is no longer with us is not okay.
If you don't like the rules they set out for cpunk, make your own movement! Just like they did. They got frustrated by the standards forced on them and went to do something about it to change. Make yours inclusive.
I am neurodivergent. Tai was mentally ill. I am not gatekeeping a movement nor involved with it anymore. It's hard to explain. I was just stating Tai's boundaries because they were very important to them. Honestly this whole thing is disrespectful to their memory. A lot of people still grieve them and the loss feels fresh. Dismissing cpunk tenants and warping the movement they created to fit your wants when they clearly stated their ideas on it, doesn't feel appropriate.
I want to be inclusive and will always support inclusive movements. I am not involved in cpunk now. I would not support kicking someone out of a gathering due to their disability and I doubt Tai would either. But cpunk was important to Tai and Tai was important to a lot of us. I am only reiterating their ideas for what they created. I don't feel appropriating the term is appropriate, bottom line. People are free to disagree with Tai's position on it.
@cock-dealer your expert opinion is requested here. You are better with words on this subject than I am, but even I know how wrong it is for an ablebodied to try and claim cripplepunk.
You people have no fucking shame, do you?
Absofuckinglutely not. I have repeatedly said that he is not welcome to speak to me at all or interact with my posts ever again after sending me suicide threats. He is blocked, and I'm blocking you, too, for that. What the fuck is wrong with you? Why would you tag in someone who has been blatantly lying about what I have said wrt his suicide attempts and ask them to talk to me?
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU? Do none of you have ANY FUCKING SHAME?
This whole thing is a fucking joke. Over and over and over again I have said "I am only discussing this part here" only to have people try to bait and distract me. I have had people sending me suicide bait and suicide threats, and I have been really fucking open about how triggering that is for me, and still been really fucking patient with this bullshit "mind and body are different and the brain is magically not part of the body, it's VERY DIFFERENT so clearly we have to exclude mentally ill people/NDs". I have said "I am not talking about this anymore, stop bringing this subject back up in my posts" over and over, only to have people do exactly that, or send me asks about exactly the same things I said I wasn't talking about anymore, and now you tag in someone who is claiming that I said he faked his previous suicide attempts and was lying about the bill when I have literally never spoken about that subject at all in my life and would never fucking accuse someone of faking a suicide attempt, and when I repeatedly set a boundary that I DO NOT EVER WANT TO TALK TO HIM AGAIN because he sent me a fucking guilt-trip suicide threat, one of multiple that he sent to people this week? You do this??
You all need to fuck right off. Imagine coming in to lecture someone about what it's "wrong" to do when you're here doing this shit.
"An ablebodied"
Exclusionists are literally using "able-bodied" like a slur in itself now, and I can't emphasize enough that people OUTSIDE the disabled community use "able-bodied" to mean "the opposite of disabled." Even the fucking GOVERNMENT does. EVEN THESE EXCLUSIONISTS DO!!!! I have seen exclusionists literally say "Able-bodied people need to amplify the voices of the disabled." How in the absolute hell can exclusionists pretend they're in the right when they are ***LITERALLY*** calling anyone not physically disabled "not disabled" and are now using "able-bodied" like a slur?? When they're calling upon known abusive, manipulative, horrid fellow exclusionists to back them up?
And I've gotta say, all of this "But this dead person's legacy means more than people who are still living today even if that person's ideas were wrong!" is a whole fucking lot like all of the conservatives who idolize the founding fathers and refuse to make positive, progressive, needed change because of "what the founding fathers intended." And I don't think it's a coincidence at all that conservatives happen to love exclusionism since it's both bigotry AND makes it easier for them to harm marginalized groups that have been splintered and no longer unite with solidarity.
Jesus am I tired of Tumblr's gatekeeping of solidarity movements. If you asked someone at an in-person cripplepunk meet-up to provide a list of their disabilities to you so you could validate if they're the right kind of cripple for you, you're the one who gets kicked out, not them. Hell, if you asked for a list at an online meet, I'd boot you, too.
The idea that there's some hard bright line which exists between all disabilities of all other organs and disabilities of this one organ is bizarre and unhelpful. It also perpetuates the "but mental disabilities are different" mindset which leads to "oh but mental health coverage is optional, different, and can be shunted off into its own little box."
I have a disability where one of my organs doesn't function properly bc it doesn't make enough of a certain kind of juice, which makes it difficult for me to do certain things which I need to do to function. I have to adapt my life, change what I eat and how I move my body, take medications and rely on others for assistance with my condition. If I don't do that, this condition has been known to kill people. Is that diabetes or post-traumatic stress disorder?
I have another disability in which my nervous system doesn't behave properly, and that causes me great difficulty in my life. I have had to change what I eat, the medications I take, how much coffee I drink, how I rest, and how I deal with the medical establishment. This disability and its diagnosis has profoundly affected how I live my life, and I require assists and accommodations to live my life as I choose. Is that disability ADHD or physical damage to my spine from the tumor which compressed my spinal cord & left scars behind when it was removed?
Do anxiety and paranoia and insomnia and depression count if they're symptoms of celiac disease? If not, why not? They're disabling effects of an autoimmune disorder. And regardless, it's because body not act right so... wtf? How about my memory issues that come from damage from a medication used to treat the pain in my legs?
Solidarity movements are reciprocal, y'all, and I'm exhausted of "you must be this queer/this trans/this disabled to come in." Maybe I'm just too fucking old and too fucking tired to listen to this week's Discourse ™️ about who trademarked what term when while actual problems exist.
I know it probably seems like you're doing something productive to you, but I assure you, you're not. If your issue is "these specific people are being dicks," deal with those people being dicks, and don't ascribe their dickishness to their disability. The problem is they're being a dick.
If your issue is instead "but this isn't as disabling as what I deal with" or "I have that disability and it's not as bad for me as my other disability" or "but it feels good for me to draw a line between disabilities of this one organ and every other organ," then it is you. You are being the dick.
Perpetuating the non-existent line between "physical" and "mental" disabilities helps absolutely no one. It places mental disabilities by default in a "not as bad" category and an "all in your head" one, which ... like, do I need to explain to y'all why functioning labels and categories aren't helpful in disability movements? Why are we resurrecting this shit and giving it new polish?
To be clear, I am not interested in debating this, so trying to tell me how your no-brain-problems-allowed approach is right and good, actually, is a waste of your time, because there is absolutely no way to convince me that trying to keep certain kinds of disabilities out of a general disability solidarity movement based on the organ that disability centers in has any use whatsoever. The line between "mental" and "physical" disabilities is blurry as fuck and trying to fence off all brain problems is not okay, especially since y'all don't mean that because a lot of things which are caused by the brain acting in a non-standard matter are considered "physical" disabilities.
Jesus, y'all make me tired. This bullshit is the least punk thing ever.
I'm not disagreeing but Tai, the creator of crippled punk, specifies its for it is for physically disabled people specifically here
Obviously mental illness is an issue in the brain which is a part of the body. I'm just stating what the founder of the movement intended. And they felt very strongly about following those tenants of it.
Tai sadly isn't here to tell us how they wanted this to play out though but I do know I want to honor their legacy the way they wanted it to be.
I am stating that the creator of the movement disagreed. They are not here to clarify so I can only use their old posts. It doesn't matter to me but it mattered greatly to Tai.
The issue here is that 😬 mentally ill ppl with no mobility restrictions cannot reclaim cripple. It’s not the same as disabled. I have a physical disability and I would default to the opinions of someone with less mobility than I have on the term cripple. If the full time wheelchair users told me not to use it, I would say we can’t. Its not just a movement, it’s a slur. It’s a reclaimed slur.
No. You are wrong.
I am out of patience for having to say this over and over again so I'm gonna say it real big and real loud so hopefully I don't have to say it AGAIN:
Cripple is a term which historically has been aimed at all disabled people. It was never confined just one kind of disabled person, even if it was more commonly used for one type of disability than another. Expert witnesses in court cases called people with personality disorders "mental cripples." Epileptics like my father were called cripples and confined to "madhouses." The phrase "mental cripple" appears in censuses, medical journals, patient files advocating for lobotomies, New York Times articles, and many other "professional" medical and legal settings. The 1981 "cripple tribunal" in Dortmund, Germany, was a protest against poor living conditions in long-term care facilities and psychiatric hospitals!
Please do even ONE CURSORY GOOGLE on Bedlam, the term "mental cripple," Rosemary Kennedy, Nellie Bly, and the modern-day protests against "warehousing," and then fuck off and stop putting this very incorrect shit in my notes.
You are wrong, and I am tired of saying this nicely.
The idea that there's some historical "split" between mental and physical disabilities is wrong wrong wrong. We were all referred to as "incurables" and "cripples," and sometimes the fashion was to use "cripples" for all other disabilities and "lame" for movement disabled people, as in contemporary translations of Victor Hugo's writing.
Those articles, by contrast, are not from the 1800s! Nope! One of them is from before my birth, most of the others are from within my lifetime, and the definition of cripple is current!
Now please fucking stop. You are right, this ISN'T acceptable. It's not acceptable to lecture someone on something you could REALLY REALLY EASILY VERIFY to be wrong if you just did ONE Google search.
You are wrong. This is not a debate. This term has been used for all varieties of disabled people and may be reclaimed by any disabled person.
Goodbye.
Every time I beg and plead and ask for mentally disabled people to be included in the disabled community as a whole (not cripplepunk, just the DISABLED COMMUNITY ITSELF) I get physically disabled exclusionists screaming at me for "wanting to take over cripplepunk." And again, this is when I ask to even be included in the word "disabled" and viewed as part of the overall disabled community, NOT. CRIPPLEPUNK. But phrasing my begging to not be excluded from disability activism and solidarity as "wanting to join cripplepunk and crying that I can't call myself a slur" makes physically disabled exclusionists sound like the victim and gives them good optics.
So you know what? If they're going to phrase it as me "trying to join cripplepunk" anyway, then I might as fucking well! When you point at someone over and over and say they're doing something they're not when they're fucking marginalized within their own goddamn marginalized group, it's much easier for me to just do what every exclusionist accuses me of than to constantly re-explain what I've already said.
I also want to point out that what's said in this post also applies to the exclusionism and gatekeeping of the neurodivergent community. Every brand and flavor of exclusionist can fuck the hell right off of my blog.
Not only have I seen far fucking more horror movies based on demonizing mental disorders, not only do a ton of the "horror monsters" this exclusionist mentions also have a mental disability that is used to make them into a "scary unpredictable killer," but me criticizing a post for only giving a shit about physical disabilities when the post was supposed to be about horror movie ableism in general IS ME FUCKING BEGGING FOR MENTALLY DISABLED PEOPLE TO BE INCLUDED IN THE DISABLED COMMUNITY, NOT ME SAYING ONE GROUP "HAS IT WORSE!" WHAT THE ABSOLUTE GODDAMN FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!??! And it makes me especially furious since that fucker DID EXACTLY WHAT THEY CLAIMED by trying to pretend that "visibly disabled" people have it worse! Exclusionists can't even follow their own fucking logic! All they fucking care about is excluding people from the disabled community with whatever rhetoric they can manipulate in their favor. And the whole "visibly disabled people have it worse" shit is EXACTLY like the exclusionism I face as a bisexual person who gets told I "have it easier" since I'm not "visibly queer." Both forms of that rhetoric have the exact same bigoted problems. I don't tolerate people dismissing my oppression for being bisexual, and I sure as fuck am not going to tolerate the same bigoted rhetoric about my other identities.
I still can't believe the person yesterday who wrote an exclusionary post saying mental illness isn't neurodivergence and when I replied to their post, their excuse was I was the only person in their thousands of notes who had "complained."
Yeah, I'm usually the only person who speaks up.
I was the only person who spoke up against the radfem in my class. I'm one of the only people who cares about fatphobia. I'm the only person I ever hear actually point out that ableist language is wrong.
I don't see how me being the only person to actually give a shit about what's right proves that you weren't a fucking exclusionist asshole.
The op of this screenshotted post and all of the commenters only care about and mention the intersection of ableism and fatphobia in regards to physical disabilities, but please don’t let the exclusionism of neurodivergence in the disabled community cause us all to forget the mental side of that intersection.
One of if not THE most common example of the intersection between fatphobia and ableism? Fat people with eating disorders.
Fat people are
- Believed to not be able to have any sort of eating disorder commonly understood as restrictive (The DSM-5 doesn’t even ALLOW fat people to be considered anorexic no matter how many traits of anorexia a fat person has. We are forced into the category of “atypical anorexia” because only thin people with eating disorders are viewed as having any worth or enduring starvation that should be cared about and stopped)
- Told we are liars when we say we have those types of restrictive eating disorders because how could a Fatty POSSIBLY starve when every fat person in the world eats twenty cakes a day?
- Encouraged by friends, family, media, even doctors to have eating disorders that make us starve
- Called a success story when an eating disorder or any other mental condition causes us to lose weight
- Viewed as having eating disorders that are “less severe” when someone does actually believe us (I’ve literally seen a post that was trying to be fat positive but compared fat people with eating disorders to having a lower stage of cancer while thin people with eating disorders were “a stage 4″)
- Kept out of recovery by ways such as not including fat people in recovery content, not allowing fat people in recovery spaces like support groups because our fat bodies are “triggering,” and just straight up being denied recovery services in the first place because, again, we’re viewed as either not having “real” eating disorders or not having “severe enough” eating disorders to “warrant recovery services”
- Portrayed in every single form of media as having a binge eating disorder, which ends up not even accurately depicted and is then tied to the fat character’s “weight problem.” This is then used to take away all compassion from the audience for the fat character because fat people with binge eating disorders are viewed as gross, gluttonous, and not worth an ounce of kindness or care
- Even outside of media, general society believes every single fat person on this planet has a binge eating disorder and therefore should not be fat, should be abused into thinness, and should not be given compassion
- Fat people with other mental disorders are also viewed as worse and less sympathetic. Characters and real life people with mental illnesses, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, mental conditions like autism or ADHD, and other types of neurodivergence are designed as fat in order to portray neurodivergence as scary, gross, ugly, creepy, or infantilize us
- When mental disabilities affect a fat person’s hygiene, like when a fat person with a mental condition has difficulty showering, brushing their teeth, doing laundry so they can wear clean clothes, etc., we are viewed as even grosser and uglier than thin people in the same situation
And all of this is just off the top of my head. There are so many other ways that ableism and fatphobia meet that only mentally disabled people experience or that physically AND mentally disabled people experience at the same time.
You want to know what people call me when I say fat people are oppressed and that fat people deserve to be treated with humanity and respect?
“Cr*zy.” “Ins*ne.” “Ret*rded.” “Idi*tic.” Plus a myriad of other slurs against mentally disabled people. They don’t call me “l*me” or “cr*ppled” when I dare to say that fat people shouldn’t be abused.
That Fullmetal Alchemist villain who represents gluttony and was designed as fat? They portray him as so mentally ill and unstable that he eats people. Not once do they portray him as physically disabled. They tie his fatness and implied mental disability together in order to make the audience fear him.
Can we please stop pretending that ableism for mental disabilities doesn’t exist or matter? Can we please stop excluding mentally disabled people from the DISABLED community and discussions about general ableism??? If you believe only “visibly disabled” people experience ableism (or believe mentally disabled people are never visibly disabled), that the intersection between ableism and fatphobia is only physical, or that only physically disabled people matter, then please block me and make sure to tell me when you do so I can happily block you back.
It’s really sad that they made a DSM-5/mental illness joke in the My Little Pony comics (Yeah, I can’t believe it either).
The context of this picture is that in issue 65 of the MLP: FIM comic, Princess Celestia disguised herself as a regular pony to listen to her subjects’ honest opinions of her and her work (with good intentions). She used an amulet that had a magical ability to disguise its wearer. Someone steals the amulet in the comic and she goes to Twilight Sparkle for help while still not looking like her normal self. Twilight doesn’t believe her at first and the comic makes a joke about her and Starlight Glimmer believing she’s neurodivergent. The book titled “DSM” is a reference to the DSM-5, which is used to diagnose mental disorders. Starlight asking about a “delusion of grandeur” is a reference to psychosis, particularly people who experience delusions.
So they made a joke out of mentally disabled people and a book of diagnostic criteria that has major problems with contributing to oppression and medicalization, and keep in mind that this is a comic based on a KID’S CARTOON about colorful, happy ponies. This is so messed up, and it’s disappointing to see mentally disabled people made into nothing but a disrespectful “joke” yet again.
Absolutely fucking disgusting that apparently some people have been reblogging my old post about neurodivergence with an addition by an asshat exclusionist. One of the exclusionists even blocked me because they were so angry that I dared to say people other than them are neurodivergent. It doesn't matter to them that the very creator of the term has stated over and over again that everyone with a mental condition not viewed as "normal" qualifies as neurodivergent. They don't care that the person purposefully created the term to be able to talk about both their autism and all of their other mental conditions, including mental illness. Exclusionists do not give a fucking shit about anyone except themselves.
If you think only people with autism and ADHD "count" as neurodivergent, fuck you
Stay the fuck away from the neurodivergent community
Other people with mental conditions are not a throne for you to sit on so you can feel superior to the rest of us
So often I'll hear even in progressive/activist circles that every "bad person," every person who commits violence, every abusive person, every whoever must be mentally ill. Every abusive parent must secretly have a stigmatized mental disability. Every mass shooter "must have something wrong with their brain." Every politician who denies reality must experience delusions.
But we need to start acknowledging that disabled people, specifically mentally disabled people (mentally ill, neurodivergent, whatever term you want to use), are not responsible for all of the bad in this world.
People with narcissistic personality disorder are estimated to make up anywhere between 5% to as little as 0.5% of the American population. Is it really possible for 0.5 to 5% of the population to be responsible for ALL abuse in this country??
Does every single bigoted politician have a mental illness? Is every single Trump supporter neurodivergent? Did the over 70 million people who voted for Trump in 2020 all have a mental condition? (I would be surprised if they did considering how much ableism leads to mentally ill people disproportionately represented in prisons and thus unable to vote when they finally get to go home.)
Does every single person who goes to Trump rallies like in this video have a mental disorder? A rally of thousands of people all happen to be disabled? Every single person in that crowd?
Can we please stop with this nonsense of blaming everything wrong in the world on disabled people? I'm so fucking tired of it. Neurodivergent people are not the source of all evil. Mentally ill people are not the only people capable of harm and violence, and neurodivergent activists have explained over and over again that a lot of people with mental disorders are more likely to be the victims of abuse than the perpetrators of such in the first place.
I don't want to hear anymore what conservative politicians you think are "psychopaths" or "delusional" or "narcissists." I don't care whether or not Trump legitimately does have a personality disorder because not only is someone capable of doing harm without one, but I have personally seen the immense amount of harm that people AGAINST Trump have done to neurodivergent people by trying to diagnose him with a mental illness and use him as the poster boy for all people with personality disorders. He's even used as the poster boy for neurodivergent people in general since people who claim to care about ableism will constantly point out his lack of empathy for why he's a horrible person even though inability to feel other people's emotions is a trait of a multitude of different mental conditions outside of just personality disorders (plus the fact that empathy is not a synonym for compassion).
Stop calling bigoted people and politicians "cr*zy." And while you're at it, stop using that word in general. You all are so obsessed with equating bigotry and abuse to neurodivergence because you don't want to accept that ANYONE is capable of committing harm. You don't want to acknowledge that the "monsters" in this world sometimes look and act like puppies, and that they can even look and act no different than you.
We love to portray "bad people" as looking and being nothing like us, as if there is a literal gene for "evilness," so that we can fool ourselves into thinking that the people around us and even ourselves are not capable of doing harm. But that isn't true. It's time to face the fact that there isn't some condition that separates any one of us from people who do or can commit harm. And I can tell you right now that there are plenty of people who identify as progressive, leftist, an activist, etc. but have still harmed other people, even irreparable harm, and have done so without having a mental illness.
This song is really nice for people with mental disorders about fear/anxiety. The disorders focus so much on "what if" situations. And since they're disorders, they're not usually based in reality, like OCD telling someone "What if saying something specific could cause something completely unrelated and bad to happen?" The fear and anxiety takes over and suddenly your entire life is about "What ifs" made up by a brain that doesn't function properly. So hearing the "what ifs" in this song be obviously silly ideas that aren't even that bad and are 100% possible to deal with helps remind the disordered brain that maybe the danger signals it's sending aren't accurate. Maybe there's actually no danger at all.
Upfront: Please do not think all OCD is just about contamination or even that the OCD that is about contamination means the person has a spotless house and washes their hands five times in a row. OCD is far more complex and debilitating than the stereotypes, and my OCD isn't just about contamination alone.
Sometimes I try to think of how to explain my contamination fear with OCD because my fear has absolutely nothing to do with germs or whatnot.
The best way I've ever been able to explain it is that there are certain parts of and objects in this world that are covered in a sticky, purple paint. If I touch that object, the purple paint sticks to and coats my hand. I can't wipe off the paint from my fingers. When the object covered in purple paint touches another object, it covers that object in the purple paint too. And this continues on and on. If I let my textbook covered in purple paint touch my bed, then my blanket becomes covered in purple paint, and then I become covered in that paint after using the blanket, and then wherever I sit next becomes covered in that paint. And then even when I shower, the next time I sit there without cleaning the spot will cause me to become covered in the sticky purple paint yet again.
The purple paint is everywhere, and I'm just desperately trying to keep everything from being consumed by the paint. It's a forever futile endeavor because even the shower has a coating of the paint all over the bathtub, the shower walls, the faucet, the bottle of conditioner.
And no one else sees or cares about the paint. They don't understand that putting their laptop on top of my notebook in class has now coated my notebook in purple sludge. They don't understand that the last game I ever played of "The floor is lava" as a kid never actually ended and that I'm the only person still avoiding letting anything touch the floor nearly 15 years later. I'm still playing this game that never was a game for me in the first place. It was just real life.
"Clean" for a person with OCD is as logical as not showering, brushing one's teeth, leaving their apartment, or doing laundry because the paint is always there.
And I've realized over the years that the only way I will ever be able to escape this paint is the day that I finally allow everything to be covered in it. But how do I finally let myself live in a world caked in purple mud and sticky slime? Everyone knows how hard it would be to let someone walk into their house after jumping in a mud puddle and not cleaning up the mess. How do I do that for every surface in my apartment and the entire world? How do I allow myself and everything else to be contaminated and continue to just...live?
~~
People like this use so much strawmanning to pretend mentally disabled people are screaming at them for talking about physical disabilities at all or having cpunk just for themselves or whatever bullshit they like to pretend mentally disabled people complain about in order to make us seem absurd and whiny.
They have no problem with the majority of "disability blogs" (aka blogs that just use the general term "disabled" and say they're for "the disabled community") and "disability advocacy" and organizations and support groups and representation and symbols for the disabed community only being for physically disabled people.
They have no problem with the fact that the word "disabled" ALWAYS includes them but 75% of the time the person using the term does not consider mentally disabled people to also be disabled and part of the disabled community. Mentally disabled people have to look at an OP's tags to figure out whether any post about "disabled people" actually includes mentally disabled people in their own damn community.
They believe physical disabilities are inherently worse than mental ones. They believe there's nothing wrong about how mentally disabled people have to literally ask if a support group for "disabled people" allows mentally disabled people to join, and then if they do graciously allow us fellow disabled people to join a group about disabilities then the support group is still almost entirely just about supporting physically disabled people with the occasional meeting about "mental health" (aka mental health for everyone including physically disabled people who have no mental disabilities since the group will explode if there's a meeting not about them).
They get angry when mentally disabled people reblog a post they relate to from a physical disability blog. They write banners on all of their posts to make sure disgusting abled-bodied people don't touch them, even when it's a post about something anyone regardless of being physically disabled can experience (I recently had to see one of these blogs make a post saying that a fat body is not the cause of a person's ill health and then add a banner saying only physically disabled people are allowed to reblog the post despite the post being about FAT PEOPLE who ALL EXPERIENCE THIS FATPHOBIA REGARDLESS OF DISABILITY and didn't even mention something specific to the intersection between fatphobia and physical disabilities!)
They will literally use the term "able-bodied" to mean "the opposite of disabled" instead of the term "abled" that ACTUALLY means that since they genuinely believe that mental conditions do not count as disabilities. I have to constantly see posts that pretend "able-bodied" is the opposite of disabled. I had to see a post that literally said "Able-bodied people must lift the voices of the disabled" that cannot be logically taken in any other way than phrasing the two terms as opposites. And then physically disabled people hounded me for posting about it and having a problem with my disabilities not being considered "real disabilities." I had to deal with a hoard of people having a hissy fit over me pointing out ableist phrasing. You know, the type of hissy fit that blog I screenshot claims mentally disabled people do.
They are obsessed with making sure there is a separation between the brain and the rest of the body so that they can freely exclude mentally disabled people whenever they want and claim we experience nothing despite mental disabilities affecting people physically, being physically visible, and the brain being a part of the physical fucking body. The brain is a physical bodily organ that physically changes when disabled and affects what I physically do and is not something I carry in my fucking purse separate from my body! People like that person in the screenshot will talk about how the world can't be separated into two rigid boxes like with sex and gender because nature does not exist in black or white. And then they'll get angry if someone steps a toe out of the two rigid, ever-shrinking boxes they created to represent all disabilities.
They'll say things like "Yeah, maybe you also experience a lot of the same things as me, including physical things, but it's not the same because you CHOOSE that" as if pretending disability is a choice isn't the fucking definition of ableism and as if there aren't physically disabled people who CAN do things just with more difficulty. And I'm pretty sure that if everything mentally disabled people experience was just a matter of choice and so easy to change, then people with depression and eating disorders would recover rather than commit suicide or die from malnutrition. The person with bipolar disorder who was included in my reading about mentally disabled people and incarceration would have just chosen to not gouge out his eyes and blind himself when he had an auditory hallucination that told him to do so.
There are countless hardships that mentally disabled people experience that physically disabled people don't face, but people like the person in the screenshot never acknowledge that because that would ruin the illusion they spread that physical disabilities are inherently worse.
And they are so obsessed with excluding people in the disabled community that they even support the exclusionist practice of separating autism and ADHD from every other mental condition despite the creator of the term "neurodivergent" LITERALLY saying it's for all mental conditions and fighting those exclusionists themself.
They cannot stand the idea of mental disabilities mattering just as much as theirs. They will use slurs against mentally disabled people constantly, even put them in their fucking URLs, and see no hypocrisy in that at all.
"Sometimes things aren't about you" doesn't apply when that "thing" is the ENTIRE DISABLED COMMUNITY! And I love how that person acknowledged that mental disabilities are underrepresented in the community but sees no problem with that themself and believes the responsibility of making the disabled community inclusive of ALL disabled people rests solely on the shoulders of the disabled people who are currently shunned and excluded.
Physically disabled people have the luxury of being included in the community by term alone (physically disabled). Meanwhile the terms mental illness, mental disorder, and mental condition are purposefully phrased in order to make sure they don't include the word "disabled" because apparently it would be wild to consider people with debilitating conditions that affect everything about their life and will even kill them without intervention as disabled too.
Phrasing like "disabled or mentally ill" and "disabilities and neurodivergence" are the NORM even within the disabled community itself, and yet people who have a problem with phrasing like that are who you deem cr*zy? I guess that's fitting since only us cr*zies give a damn about being always excluded! We even had to create the term sanism instead of just using the word ableism because we're so excluded!
Fuck people like the person who runs that blog in the screenshot. Fuck exclusionists. Fuck oppression gatekeepers and people who support the oppression Olympics. No one is saying you can't have a blog. No one is saying you can't have cpunk. No one is saying you can't talk about your experiences. Stop making strawman arguments that phrase you as a victim when you are actively supporting the exclusion of mentally disabled people from this community.
And "I mean this in the nicest way possible" of course.
Reading this made me burst out sobbing because it's my life too and no one ever seems to understand OCD isn't just "the organization and cleaning disease" or that it affects my every waking moment of the day and makes so much as touching a book as hard as walking on glass while everyone stares in confusion about why I can't do something so easy as standing on piercing glass shards and often even feeling anger and frustration at me because I make things harder for them than they need to be. That 300 daily compulsions is my every day experience. And even organization and contamination aren't "Everything needs to be color-coded and spotless" but instead "These shoes need to be placed at a 45 degree angle, this TV remote needs to stay on top of the washing machine, and the first paper towel in the roll can't be used because something could have touched it, so now I need to wash my hands after using two fingers to carefully pull that paper towel off the roll and afterwards I can use a clean paper towel to keep my bowl I store in the fridge for the least contamination possible from touching the contaminated counter."