This one is going to get a little bit political and a lot personal. I have a lot of tests this week and a new specialist team appointment next week and am feeling very raw, and a lot of this has been on my mind for a while.
There is this tendency that I am an anti-fan of. To use a specific example, the trending hashtag on Twitter a little while ago, “Diaper Don”. The photoshopped pictures floating around of said Don in Depends. All of the “clapback” about how he needed someone to change said Depends on some talk show or other. All of this is framed as something that he should be ashamed of.
And so many people don’t understand why this is a problem. Look. Even if you’re going to frame it as “he thinks it’s shameful to be disabled, so accusing him of it is shaming him”, you’re feeding into the narrative that it’s shameful to be disabled. And he’s not going to see it. The disabled people you know are.
There is so much shame floating around you when you’re disabled. It’s not something you should have to feel ashamed of, but you do anyway, a lot of the time. Because you make the lives of the people around you less convenient. Because you need things that people look down on, like mobility devices or incontinence products or, you know, any of the products in those infomercials that people love to make fun of. Those products? All designed for disabled people. They’re just not marketed to us, for two reasons. We’re not a big enough market to be seen as profitable to market to, and if they were specifically marketed as disability products, able-bodied people wouldn’t buy them and they’d be even more prohibitively expensive than they already are.
Being disabled is expensive. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars in the last few months alone just trying to find ways to make it easier and less painful to take a goddamn shower properly. You often already feel ashamed for not being able to do something as simple as bathe properly, or put on your own socks, or brush your hair. And then you get onto your social media and see people who were furious at the US President mocking a disabled reporter – as they should have been – yukking it up over the idea that he might need incontinence aids. Because being unable to control your bowels makes you a bad person.
Do you have any idea how hard that is, on top of everything we already have to deal with, living with disability? The reality that people who no doubt think they’re open-minded, supportive, disabled-friendly people think of one of the things we struggle with as a sign of being a bad person, or something worth mocking, or a punishment? Because that’s what you’re saying when you perpetuate that sort of thing. The bad man poops himself. That’s so funny. People losing control of their bowels is funny, not, I don’t know, a medical problem that they struggle with because it’s still taboo to talk about.
(I have similar problems with the ScoMo at Engadine Maccas thing. Soiling yourself in public stopped being funny for me a long time ago.)
There’s still so much ableism rife in social justice circles. It’s one of the ways intersectionality fails so spectacularly. Whether it’s the implication that there are certain physical disabilities that are mock-worthy – usually centred around bodily fluids – or the constant association of mental illness with being a bad person, otherwise-progressive people are constantly supporting the societal narrative that disability is Bad and that Bad People must have some “reason” for why they are the way they are, which is obviously disability.
Being mentally ill doesn’t make you racist. Being racist makes you racist. Being a mentally ill racist makes you manifest that racism in certain ways, but mental illness doesn’t manifest racism, or classism, or sexism, out of whole cloth. There are very few mental illnesses that actually involve delusions like that, and they’re a lot more complicated than “these people have bad opinions and do things that, while extreme, are still within the realms of sanity”. Dismissing bad actors as “well, they’re mentally ill” is both a disservice to mentally ill people, the vast majority of whom will never hurt anyone in their lives and are at greater risk of harm themselves, and dangerous, because it lets people believe that “normal” people couldn’t possibly do the sort of things we saw over the last week. And that’s one of the reasons things get so bad in the first place, because of the belief that “normal” people, “reasonable” people, couldn’t possibly do something like storm the Capital because of the result in a fair election.
Being a bad person makes you a bad person. Being a bad person who has incontinence issues makes you… well, a bad person who has incontinence issues. The latter has absolutely nothing to do with the former. And as someone with the latter, it’s been really, really hard watching so many people make the “lol Trump shits himself” jokes.
This is a hard post. I don’t want to make this last week all about me, because it’s not. This post isn’t even really about that; it’s just come to a head, because every time he does something, those jokes crop up. Every time his supporters do something reprehensible, the “excuses” about how they must be mentally ill crop up, the same way they do every time some asshole kills his wife. And I’m just tired. Right now, when I can’t even stand up without my heart rate skyrocketing, when I’m trying to deal with the fact that assistive clothing for fat people doesn’t exist and certainly doesn’t exist in nice colours and being paranoid that I smell bad because of how much trouble I’m having with bathroom matters of all kinds, my tolerance for society’s ableism has gone completely down the drain.
The Medical Snowflake Diaries 