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.

Here.

Look, I have a much longer post about this which I'll make at some point when I'm not on deadline for paid writing about trans healthcare, but:

I identified as a cripple and lame long before I identified as a cripplepunk, and frankly, I'm embarrassed by watching people try so hard to undermine a movement of historical solidarity in the name of ONLY THIS ONE KIND OF CRIP ALLOWED. I know Tumblr really loves to cut things up into little pieces and say "this is only for this group, you outside invaders," but that's the opposite of useful. No one should talk over others about their own disabilities and their experiences and what that means to them, fucking obviously. So why is that okay when it comes to brain disabilities?

Now I've gotta go back to fighting with Medicaid about whether or not I can have reconstructive surgery on my ankles and knees due to my EDS, so I'll write my long post later. But seriously. This isn't useful, it isn't cute. It's harmful and only undermines our ability to do useful shit.

There are so many things where you can't draw the line easily.

I do think that a lot of psychiatrically disabled people would probably prefer movements made for them like mad pride and rabiespunk (just because you're more likely to find stuff that helps you) but like... if you have been called a cripple and you want to reclaim that then great?? The differences are arbitrary anyway??

I mean maybe they would? But yeah, that should be a choice made by the person as to whether or not to identify a certain way. It's no different than telling someone what sexuality or gender terms they must use for themselves, no less intrusive, no less presumptive, no less wrong.

I am personally not ever gonna identify as mad punk or rabiespunk, bc ... no. Even if I were only psychiatrically disabled, and even if those disabilities were only discretely party of my brain.

Anyways uuuuuuhhhhh as someone who is both physically disabled, developmentally disabled, has a learning disability and am otherwise neurodivergent in ways unrelated to the above…. able bodied NDs need to stop trying to make 1:1 comparisons with physical disabilities and listen to us when we say you doing this is dismissive. There is solidarity, and then there is not listening to people’s lived experiences in the name of “radical” inclusion that is ultimately performative.  AND ALSO if you’re able bodied don’t call yourself a fucking cripple. You’re not. Until people have treated you the way I have been treated while in a wheelchair for your adhd/ptsd/whatever you have, and until you have experienced the sort of dehumanizing medical treatment and abuse physically disabled people have, until you have gone through the mind shattering physical pain we have have been through, don’t sit there pulling this “you wouldn’t say this about a wheelchair user but you say it’s in my head?” when it’s like… they do dismiss us that way! That exact way! I WAS TOLD I “JUST HAD ANXIETY” FOR YEARS UPON YEARS, OKAY THE PAST DECADE OF MY LIFE HAS BEEN PAIN WITH NO ANSWERS AND HAVING MY LEGITIMATELY PHYSICAL ILLNESS DISMISSED AS A MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEM SO SORRY NOT SORRY BUT FUCK YOU IF YOURE ND AND ABLE BODIED DON’T CALL YOURSELF A CRIP AND IF YOU DO, UN FUCKING FOLLOW ME 

Okay it’s not about being exclusionary anymore it’s that y’all dismiss us in favour of boosting your voices and and your “calls for unity” ignore what we are saying in the first place, which is that being physically disabled and neurodivergent cannot be compared. We get it, there is overlap in places. We know, most of us who are talking about this are disabled in multiple ways and each with our own problems but like….

the experiences are fundamentally different. Nobody has left you in a room, naked and crying and shaking in agonizing white hot pain for 6 hours while completely dismissing every attempt to ask for a doctor, pain killers, ANYTHING… all because you’re a “frequent flyer” and have admitted to smoking weed in the past. Like…. it’s fucking different when you go to the hospital hoping and praying someone will relieve your pain, so you go and you wait and you do the tests and you grit your teeth as nurses manhandle you, you cry and apologize as a nurse grabs you so hard she bruises your arm and then scoops with the needle looking for a vein to take blood, you ask her to be gentle and she tells you that she “knows how to do her job, thank you” it doesn’t matter that you told her you have a genetic condition that makes you easier to hurt than the average person. You go home without any pain meds, having wasted your time, exhausted, beat down, covered in bruises and with a single, 7 by 3 inch black bruise on the inside of your elbow. You wonder is she blew your vein, but you’re to tired, afraid, and in pain to even consider going to the clinic about it unless it gets worse.

I know it’s hard when your disability isn’t visible, when it’s literally your brain. And I do understand your brain can cause somatic symptoms, it’s actually how much of my physical pain has begun to present - in anxiety, depression, feeling sick to my stomach, brain fog.  But it’s not the same as being in a wheelchair and having people ignore you, avoid your gaze, speak to your partner about you as if you weren’t right there beside him, literally call you EVIL for telling her child it was rude to touch someone’s wheelchair without permission, be asked by a manager how “crippling your…. thing… is?” in regards to your genetic disorder and in fact, this sort of treatment RUNS IN MY FAMILY. My grandfather had polio, it resulted in one leg growing shorter than the other (among many other health complications) and so when he was a teenager he chose to have it amputated. My mom grew up in the foster care system because he was deemed an unfit parent for being disabled, before it because against the law to do so here in Canada. Growing up with him before being stolen, she remembers him saying he wouldn’t mind explaining his disability when kids had questions if parents just didn’t treat him like he was dirty and shush their children when they asked “what happened to that man’s leg?” before hurrying them away.

I also remember one moment in particular from shortly after my mom got diagnosed with MS. She was walking with a cane and we were getting off the bus, I had been walking ahead of her and she fell. I’m HoH and I didn’t hear her fall, so I turn around wondering where her shadow was and I saw her on the ground, with a bus full of people STEPPING OVER HER, not a single one offering help. They all just stared and walked away as fast as they could. It turned my stomach to think about and still does, I mean I was only 14 when this happened. When you try to say that our conditions are taken more seriously, or that we are treated better, you ignore these really traumatizing things we have gone through. Being disabled isn’t comparable to race or being fucking trans or asexual or whatever just stop. Just stop. I saw one person say this and no, fuck you, that is ableist.

You can name me, you know.

It's okay. I'm the one who explicitly compared the behavior of PHYSICAL DISABILITY ONLY gatekeepers to the attempts to exclude bi-- no sorry I mean pan-- whoops, I meant non-binary-- oh, I mean ace!-- but what about-- from the queer community.

Because it's EXACTLY the same behavior.

Lemme let you kids - bc y'all are fucking young - in on a little secret:

Ten years ago it was "you're not really disabled if you've just got a chronic illness." It was "you haven't been disabled since birth so you're not really disabled like us." And while that remains a fringe opinion, you don't really see that very much anymore, because that's how these things tend to work. The people who genuinely mean well and are really reaching for the betterment of all of us listen, we come to understand our points of commonality, and then people who have to gatekeep for power's sake move on to the next group they want to keep out so they can feel some sort of power over their environments or whatever.

Telling ND people they've never been subjected to extreme inhumane medical treatment is really fucked up, actually. I think it's pretty well-established that ND people actually have been subjected to exactly the kind of medicalized torture that you laid out. ND people are tortured by the medical establishment, abused by caregivers, and fucking murdered for being ND, just like "physically disabled" people have been. (I'm coming to resent that term bc all of my disabilities come from the function of my body.)

My sister quit being a forensic anthropologist after she had to work a case where a mentally disabled woman was murdered by her family, her body then burned on a burn pile and scattered across her family's property. They spent weeks looking for parts of her.

I live in Portland, and we have a lot of unhoused people here. Mental illness is a known issue in that part of the population. How many mentally ill people do you think I see abled people walking past or stepping every day? Like... why does this not make you feel solidarity between yourself and ND people? That doesn't need an answer - and I don't care to hear you justify yourself on that one. I don't doubt that's a very traumatic memory for you - you certainly speak about it that way. But ... that trauma does not excuse insisting that ND people are not subject to medical, physical, social, emotional and all other kinds of abuse and neglect, or if they are, it's just not like yours or not as bad as yours.

I do kind of wonder, since this is all pretty much a direct response to my post, why you didn't just respond to it. Of course, that would mean you'd have to grapple with the actual questions I posed, such as: which of my physical and mental illnesses and their overlaps must I discard? I guess it's a lot easier if you can just frame this as "abled NDs" rather than admitting you are responding at least in part to someone with a permanently fucked up spinal cord, movement issues, chronic pain, celiac disease, EDS, diabetes, PTSD from medical abuse, memory issues from medications, ADHD, anxiety and autism, and that's just what I disclose.

Crip theory has always included mental illnesses. The brain is part of the body and my non-brain illnesses affect my brain illnesses and vice versa. An artificial division only serves people's need to gatekeep. It serves no purpose. ND people can be cripplepunk and trying to gatekeep a -punk movement based on... this garbage... is not punk at all. This kind of shit destroys punk movements.

And by the way? Putting a vivid description of medical abuse up untagged like that in a post about disability rights while calling me ableist for making an explicit connection between shitty behavior in the queer community and shitty behavior in the disability community is both ironic as fuck and a real fucking asshole move.

Thanks for that big ol' trigger. I'm sure you feel very proud of yourself.