Patronising me to Death

The bus is a dangerous place for me. It's not unusual for me to be the recipient of a great deal of inappropriate behaviour aimed my direction because I'm disabled/transgender/a woman. I've had everything from people blatantly mocking my disability to asking me about my sex life out of the blue, to yelling slurs, to trying to buy sex, to following me off of the bus with intent to rape me. The list goes on. I'm not here to talk about any of those things today. Today I want to talk about what happens when people want to be "nice" to me and end up putting me in jeopardy.

I'll give you an example: Tonight somebody, after watching me convulse for a few minutes, caught my eye and winked at me.

Here's the thing: when someone pays attention to me in that way, when someone is unusually friendly towards me, when someone is patronising, I don't know what their intentions are. I don't know if they've just had a good day and are feeling like being very friendly to people around them. I don't know if they think I'm cute and just want to innocently let me know they find me attractive. More troubling, I don't know if they're interpreting my disability as cognitive disability, insanity, generalised "speshulness," or other some such category of people whom they like to look down on and feel that it would be a good idea to patronise me to make me feel good about myself.

More importantly: I don't know if they're a predator looking at me as a vulnerable person to take advantage of and potentially rape. It has happened, I have had people follow me off the bus, or try to follow me off the bus several times. Another time, I was almost raped by a predator who picked me up while riding the bus and followed me off. This is a very serious issue for myself and people like myself.

It doesn't matter if you're a good guy, I have no way of knowing you're a decent person. So yes, this does apply to you, too.

When someone winks at me, or pays excess attention to me, or keeps smiling at me, whatever: they make it more difficult for me to protect myself. I don't know when it's safe for me to get off the bus. I don't know if I need to feign an earlier bus stop and transfer buses or double back in order to keep a predator from knowing where I live. I don't know if someone wants to rape me or just thinks I'm oh so adorable. Add on to al of this the fact that I'm autistic. It makes it hard for me to spot the actual predators, the actual people who want to do me harm (and people do want to do me harm). It overwhelms me and forces me to overlook real danger just to be able to get though my day.

Patronisation removes my ability to assess me social environment and in doing so it removes my ability look out for my own safety and defend myself. This hurts me and causes me real harm.

STOP IT!

ps: it's condescending and insulting as well.

On Safe Space and Accessibility

This post was originally a comment that I made over at a FWD/Forward thread asking about accessibility. I thought that it deserved its own spot:

For me, in many ways the idea of “accessibility” is a lot like the idea of “safe space.” Someone asked me the other day what it means to be in a “safe space.” I told them that, for me, the concept of safe space isn’t necessarily a place where people understand me or are even necessarily friendly to me. A safe space is a place where I’m accommodated, by which I mean I’m in a place where I feel empowered to stand up for myself as a full and equal human being and assert who I am and what I need.

To describe what I meant, I made the analogy of being on a playground full of bullies who are hitting you: for me, an accessible place is a place where I’m empowered to do something about it, not necessarily a place where things like this don’t happen.

In this way, I feel, accessibility or safety is more than just accommodations or opinions which make it easier to be in society but an overarching, holistic attitude which fosters empowerment.

"Hard of Hearing" in a Deaf World

I thought I should mention this because it's such a great illustration of the social model of disability: the idea that the structures and methods created by the dominant majority, abled people, create the handicap experienced by disabled people and that disability exists in the intersection rather than in the individual.

For those who don't know, I have a movement disorder which causes me to experience tics and spasms including in my eyes, eyelids, and neck. This makes looking at things at length difficult.

This week is my first week of instruction and yesterday I had my first introductory ASL class. Our teacher is Deaf and, in order to go over the course material and green sheet in a way that we would be able to understand, she was speaking though an interpreter. I have a little bit of knowledge about sign language so I was focusing on her pretty intensely, seeing how much of what she was saying I could understand without the terp.

Turns out, my difficulty regarding my eyes caused me to miss a tremendous amount of what she was saying in terms of me not seeing her signs due to either compulsively looking elsewhere or though having my eyes clamped shut/fluttering.

So I thought to myself: In a Deaf world, I'm handicapped.

This is all very basic and rather 101 in terms of disability rights. Nonetheless, the illustration is pretty cool.

For those who are wondering: Yes, I'm still following though with trying to learn ASL, it's a language that I've wanted to learn for quite some time. The professor is being very accommodating so I think I'll do just fine. Once I start to get a grasp on the use of ASL I'm hoping that my predictive language abilities will help me fill in the gaps for the words I miss.

Participation on the Basis of Sanity

Prejudice based on mental illness is disgustingly insidious in our culture. Scratch that, prejudice based on mental illness is insidious in almost every cultural tradition that I can think of. In society's eyes, if you have mental illness, you're less than human. At best you're incapable of truly reasoned thought, your feelings and observations dismissed as the ravings of lunacy. At worst, your a menace to society, a ticking timebomb who can at any moment loose their grip on reality and explode.

I am labelled insane and because of this I am deemed unfit for participation in society.

For me, maybe you could call me lucky in this regard, but I have some privilege. I have the privilege of not actually having what society considers a mental illness. My neurological problems are not what society deems insanity. [1] I am considered sane. When people get to know me, my perceived sanity becomes an explicitly stated fact of my social existence.

I am labelled sane again and because of this I am deemed safe and fit for civilized life.

I can't describe how this hurts me. You have to understand that some of the closest people in my life have serious mental illness. These are people I love, people I would lay down my life to protect. These are the people who have to truly shoulder the burden of hatred. These are people, according to society, unlike me.

These are people who society feels a need to explicitly differentiate me from.

This needs to stop. Every time someone says "she's not crazy" it hurts. It hurts people I love and it hurts me.

[1] I have Tourette Syndrome.