Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Once home to Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII’s unfortunate second wife, Hever Castle is a Tudor manor of exquisite beauty surrounded by some of Britain’s finest gardens. Try and stay dry in the unique water maze, walk among the flowers in the walled rose garden, then experience Tudor life in the rooms of the castle itself. You can even stay the night!
post apoc media is always banging on about the necessity of macho survival skills but frankly it’s the gardeners/farmers who know 150 preservation techniques for winter beets and who understand the art of good pH balance in compost who will survive on our non energy dependent farms while you all butcher each other with katanas in burnt out shopping centres
autistic girls, especially black autistic girls, are misdiagnosed and underdiagnosed because of the focus on white cis boys and how they present as autistic
disabled girls and women often have their consent violated, both in medical procedures and otherwise, our bodies and minds are often not considered are own and we are dismissed as not having the capacity to make our own decisions
on top of that many disabled girls are seen as delusional and their speaking out about the abuse they have face, by whatever communication method, is often seen as them making things up and over reacting
many disabled women are fetishised and seen as an outrageous ‘thing’ to fuck, but are not seen as human
disabled girls, especially physically disabled girls, do not live up to ideas of beauty in our society and often have extreme self esteem issues
disabled women and girls face more shit than you could ever know and I need you to understand
Ableism. Is. A. Feminist. Issue.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Deaf people, especially deaf women, are seen as “hysterical” when communicating in sign language if they are upset or angry. Some deaf people cannot hear their own voices, so they might make sounds with their throats while communicating in sign language and some hearing people think that the said deaf people are “crazy.”
Deaf people of color–especially deaf black people (and deaf black women)–have been assaulted or even killed for communicating in sign language because some idiots thought they were flashing “gang signs.”
Many deaf girls and women also face high rates of domestic violence and abuse at the hands of others (deaf or hearing), and have no one to turn to, because there are little or NO accessibility services for deaf survivors of domestic violence.
Able-bodied and hearing feminists SHOULD support deaf girls and deaf women.
Thanks.
Okay, I’m going to sound like a broken record to my followers, but I feel like this is really important to reiterate because even a lot of disabled people don’t notice it. But even so, more disabled people figure this out than nondisabled people ever do, for whatever reason.
First for anyone who doesn’t know me, I face lots of different oppressions and I’m not trying to rank them by saying what I’m about to say. This is not about which oppression is worse than others or more unique than others or anything like that. It’s about a specific kind of relationship between different kinds of oppression.
Most people when they talk about many oppressions at once, they’re talking about something I’d call sideways relationships between oppressions: Talking about what happens when a single person faces multiple oppressions. So, they talk about the experiences of disabled women in sexist, ableist societies, and that’s all most people are going to describe when they say “Ableism is a feminist issue.”
But there’s another kind of relationship, one I’d call deep relationships or vertical relationships or embedded relationships or something else of that sort. This is where one kind of oppression is a part of another kind of oppression. Not because there are people who face both kinds of oppression at once. But because there are ideas central to one kind of oppression, that couldn’t exist without another kind of oppression.
An example that a lot of people understand pretty readily is the relationship between sexism and homophobia. Homophobia would look fundamentally different without sexism. There are aspects of homophobia – central aspects – that exist entirely because women are considered inferior to men. So sexism is embedded deeply within homophobia. They’re intertwined in a way that you can’t remove homophobia without also removing sexism.
All oppressions have horizontal relationships with each other, because there are always people who face every possible combination of oppressions at the same time. Not all oppressions have vertical/embedded/deep relationships with each other, because not all oppressions have central aspects of themselves that utterly depend on the existence of some other kind of oppression.
Every kind of oppression has a deep/embedded/vertical relationship with ableism. Every kind of oppression has ableism embedded deeply within at least some of its core traits. I don’t know why this is the case. But it’s absolutely the case. Meaning you literally can’t address any other kind of oppression without addressing ableism. Can’t. Not possible. Even oppression that is against nondisabled people always contains at least some ableist ideas at its core.
What does this mean with sexism?
It means that women are considered inferior to men based on both real and perceived differences in ability and body type. It means that women’s abilities are sometimes medicalized and pathologized in ways that pretty much exactly resemble the way disabled people’s abilities are sometimes medicalized and pathologized. That’s basically what the ableist aspects of sexism boil down to.
And in vertical relationships of this nature, people have a choice, and they usually seem to choose wrong unless they know what they’re doing. With sexism, that choice is that they can either dismantle the ableism that underlies the way women are considered inferior, pathologized, and medicalized based on body type and abilities. Or they can distance themselves from the entire idea of being disabled, hoping that will make everything go away. Most oppressed groups, faced with this choice, have a tendency to just distance themselves from disabled people. It’s far easier in the short run, and far worse for both women and disabled people in the long run. Especially because the distancing usually serves to reinforce the exact ableism that they’re trying to get away from.
So what sorts of ableist ideas are there about women?
The idea that women are physically weaker and therefore inferior.
The entire idea behind the concept of hysteria in every form it’s ever taken.
The idea that women aren’t as smart as men, and the idea of what that means about women’s worth.
The idea that women are highly emotional and therefore not reliable at understanding themselves or the world around them.
The idea that the male body is the default and the female body is a defective variant on it, and an afterthought.
The idea that men have all the abilities that lead them to be accomplished people who go down in history, and women don’t and that’s why we never hear about as many women’s accomplishments.
The way that ordinary women’s issues become medicalized and pathologized in ways that most men’s issues don’t.
I once heard an MRA refer to the women’s Olympics as the “Special Olympics” as.a way of making it sound like women aren’t the real athletes, and if that isn’t an example of a vertical relationship between ableism and sexism in a very specific context I don’t know what is..
And I’m sure there are tons more examples, those are just some of the obvious broad ones that come to mind the fastest. These are ways that you can’t get rid of sexism without also getting rid of ableism. Not because there are disabled women. These are aspects of sexism that are ableist and yet affect nondisabled women just as much. So you can’t get rid of the way sexism and ableism combine even by ignoring the existence of disabled women. Because you don’t just have a horizontal relationship between the two, you also have a vertical one. And vertical ones mean that one kind of oppression is embedded too deeply within another, too deeply intertwined, for it to be possible to separate them out without addressing both.
So that’s the other side, the one you won’t hear as often, as to why ableism is a feminist issue. And ableism is just as deeply embedded in every other kind of oppression. I don’t know why it’s done that so thoroughly in a way that most oppressions haven’t, but it has. Not all oppressions have vertical relationships with each other, but ableism has vertical relationships with everything else, sometimes one-way, sometimes both ways, but always there. And sexism is no exception.
This is why ableism is so important to anyone fighting any kind of oppression, and why I’m so weirded out that it often gets treated as either a minor form of oppression or as not really a form of oppression at all, by people who ought to know better. Like people who claim to be about fighting oppression are always trivializing ableism even though it’s the key to a deeper understanding of their own oppression and it’s necessary to fix it in order to fix any other kind of oppression because of those vertical relationships that exist. I don’t think I’ll ever get why this happens.
