Reagan Didn't Do That

 

One of the main problems with the “Reagan closed the institutions” narrative, besides straight-out historical inaccuracy, is that it erases the decades of efforts of disabled people themselves, as well as allies, to abolish institutionalization. Ronald Reagan does not deserve more credit for deinstitutionalization than disabled activists on the ground. 

 

Politics is the art of the possible, and disability rights advocates were able to have some limited political success appealing to fiscal conservatives like Reagan. Locking up disabled people, after all, is not only cruel and inhumane (not issues Ronald Reagan was known for caring about), but is also wildly expensive and a massive waste of taxpayer money.

 

Of course, Reagan was no particular ally to disabled people, either as governor of California (where he oversaw deinstitutionalization initiative) or as U.S. president, and deinstitutionalization did not result in the complete liberation of all disabled people. For one thing, deinstitutionalization coincided with the rise of for-profit prisons and mass incarceration. Disabled people can be freed from institutionalization, then arrested for ableist and classist crimes like “vagrancy” and locked in for-profit prisons. Deinstitutionalization also coincided with the rise of outpatient chemical restraint as a form of forced “treatment” of Mad/neurodivergent people -- the government can save money if, instead of locking Mad/neurodivergent people in institutions, it can simply require them to submit to forced drugging. (Any attempt to derail this point about forced drugging and chemical restraint to something about voluntary medication will result in instant blocking. “Meds help some people” could not be less relevant to a point about people being forcibly drugged against their will.)

 

For these reasons, in the 21st century, disability rights activists can no longer appeal to fiscal conservatism as an argument against institutionalization. Furthermore, as we’ve seen with the “defund the police” movement, nominal fiscal conservatives are, in fact, all to willing to waste massive amounts of taxpayer money as long it goes towards oppression of marginalized people. 

 

As I’ve said many times before, disability rights are a nonpartisan issue, because every part of the political spectrum hates us. The U.S. is dominated by two major parties who want to see disabled people locked up and controlled, with one party advocating punitive incarceration and the other advocating “therapeutic” incarceration, and the entire rest of the political spectrum, from communists to libertarians, broadly accepting the premise that Mad/neurodivergent people need to be controlled, either “for our own good” or for the “safety” of others. Even anarchists generally make an exception in support of state biopower, as long as the coercion is framed as “trauma-informed” and “relationship-centered.” No political party, large or small, is an ally to disability liberation (especially not neurodivergent/Mad liberation). 

 

Disability liberation won’t happen until we have the complete abolition of all forms of medical control and biopower, from institutionalization to conservatorship to involuntary commitment to mass incarceration, AND the complete reallocation of public resources to ensure that every individual, disabled or otherwise, has access to the resources xe needs and chooses to fully manifest xyr individual self-actualization.

Fertility Treatment and Eugenics

 

Fertility treatment not being covered by health insurance is eugenics.

 

Insurance providers, of course, don't want to cover fertility treatments because they don't want to cover anything. But the lack of public support for making fertility treatments accessible is directly rooted in eugenicist mentality. If you're not independently wealthy enough to pay for fertility treatments out of pocket, society really doesn't think you should have children at all.

Progressives tend not to support access to fertility treatment, both because many progressives are anti-natalist and/or eugenicist (functionally the same thing), and because fertility treatment has a reputation of being "a luxury for the rich" -- which is a direct result of its exclusion from health insurance coverage. 

 

People across the political spectrum also view fertility treatment as "selfish," because they believe that middle-class couples who want to be parents but cannot conceive naturally should instead become adoptive parents. Someone will inevitably mention "So many children waiting for homes." But, at least in the U.S., adoption is even more exorbitantly expensive than fertility treatments -- and while there are indeed so many children waiting for homes, most of them are not legally eligible to be adopted. There are far more aspiring adoptive parents than there are children legally eligible to be adopted in the U.S. Indeed, it is this very disparity between "demand" and "supply" of "adoptable" children that has led to commodifying, eugenicist family law policies which pressure or coerce disabled, marginalized, and low-income parents to surrender their children to abled, middle-class adoptive parents. 

 

Reproduction is a biological process. Fertility treatment is healthcare. It should be available to anyone who wants it, regardless of income, disability, gender, sexuality, or any other factors. 

 

This is also why I say that, no matter how much people may claim otherwise, there is functionally no way to be anti-natalist without also being eugenicist. You may say that you are opposed to anyone, rich or poor, having children, but in reality, rich people will always be free to have as many children as they want. Anti-natalist policies only hinder poor, disabled, and otherwise marginalized people from having children -- i.e., the same desired result as eugenics.

Collective Individualism

 

A thing that frustrates me about political and philosophical frameworks that contrast "individualism" with "collectivism" is that disability liberation isn't compatible with what people mean by either. 

 

I actually do believe that the rights of the individual are more important than the good of the collective. I am absolutely a diehard liberal individualist. 

 

The thing is that I believe that should apply to EVERY individual, equally.

And in practice, valuing the rights of every individual equally can look a lot like collectivism, but with a very different philosophical basis. As usual, disabled people bring out the underlying philosophical differences. 

 

When people frame, for example, a conflict between more services for poor people vs. higher taxes for rich people as a matter of "collective vs. individual," they're framing the rich person who doesn't want to pay taxes as "the individual." But if you believe that every individual matters equally, then the issue is the individual poor person's right to access the resources xe needs for self-actualization. 

 

A disabled person's right to expensive medical care needed to stay alive should outweigh the collective, actually. A disabled person's right to bodily autonomy should outweigh society's discomfort with xyr choices. A disabled student's right to an equal education should outweigh abled students' "having less" because they have to share resources with a disabled classmate. 

 

Not universal healthcare as in "Mandatory involuntary drugging and forced diets and care rationing because the good of society outweighs the individual," but universal healthcare as in "Every individual disabled person has the right to access care on xyr own terms."

"Elderly and Disabled"

 A lot of people, myself among them, have written about how disabled adults are treated as children. Another pernicious phenomenon around the intersection of ageism and ableism is that middle-aged disabled people are framed as elderly.

 

While a disabled 30 year old is a “special needs kid,” a disabled 40 year old will be discussed as though xe were 90. This is especially true of visibly physically disabled people.

 

Partly this is because certain forms of visible disability or adaptive equipment are used as symbols of age. Wheelchairs, canes, and hearing aids are used as shorthand for “elderly person,” even though people of any age can use this equipment. This allows younger abled people to distance themselves from disability and frame access issues as “someone else’s problem.” Because culture in the U.S. is ever-increasingly age segregated by ever-increasingly fragmented “micro generations,” and because of the prevailing sentiment that no one has anything in common with someone of a different fragmented micro-generation, the association of disability with age allows young abled people to assume that they “have nothing in common” with someone who uses accessibility equipment.

There are a few even more insidious aspects, too.

In our society, middle-aged adults are by far the most age-privileged demographic (Elders and young adults fluctuate around the middle of the privilege spectrum depending on context, and minors, of course, are always at the bottom). Middle-aged adults are the presumed heads of household. They are presumed to be in charge of their own lives, as well as “in charge” of their elderly parents and their minor and young adult offspring. Conceptualizing disabled people as going directly from “children” to “elderly people” ensures that they are never conceptualized as having the stage of life in which even the most stringent ageists accept that people ought to have autonomy.

Even more insidious is that framing disabled adults as elderly positions them as “approaching the natural end of their lifespan,” which makes their preventable, premature deaths seem less preventable and premature. This became especially glaring during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone who died from COVID was framed as so very old, that surely they were on their deathbeds already. Disabled people’s deaths, caused by medical neglect, poverty, abuse, or other manifestations of systemic ableism and kyriarchy, can be normalized with the assumption that all disabled people are perpetually on their deathbeds, and their deaths are always “their time.”

People are the ages they are. There’s no “mental age,” “adjusted age,” “developmental level,” or any other variation of the idea that people are not the ages they are. Disabled adults aren’t children, and disabled middle-aged people aren’t elderly.

Next time, we can talk about how actually elderly people ALSO shouldn’t be controlled, oppressed, denied resources, or subjected to preventable deaths.

Poor Parents

 It’s not a coincidence that the word “poor” means both “lacking in money” and “lacking in skill/talent/ability.” In the dominant classist, eugenicist worldview, they’re the same thing. 

 

I notice this comes up often with “poor students”. I’ve read entire articles that shifted multiple times within the article from using “poor students” to mean “students without money” and “students not doing well academically.” This is not sloppy writing. This is intentional. 

 

I’m seeing “poor parents” used ambiguously this way more now, and I expect to see it even more as the eugenicist movement continues to unmask and openly state its position that people without money are bad at being parents.

Checkout Luddites

 I want to talk about two arguments that get made, often by the same people, against the use of automated self-service machines, e.g. grocery store self-checkouts, and why I think they’re misguided.

One is the basic Luddite argument “They’re taking away jobs.”

Yes. Mechanization and automation has, does, and will continue to take away from the labor market’s demand for manual laborers to do those now-automated or mechanized jobs. In most cases, those jobs did not pay a living wage in the first place. This is not an argument against mechanization or automation; it’s an argument for radical restructuring of economic systems. There is no reason that a person should have to spend 8 or more hours a day doing a task that a machine could do in exchange for barely enough resources to survive on, simply because we have decided that people need “a job” to access any resources (but not enough). Seize the means of production and demand a universal guaranteed income for everyone.

But okay, that’s boring. Lots of people are talking about that. I want to talk about the other argument people make: that people shouldn’t be expected to scan their own groceries, pump their own gas, pour their own drinks, or otherwise do tasks that they’re accustomed to having employees do for them, because “I don’t work here and it’s not my job.”

This one is often spun as progressive and “sticking it to corporations,” even though the underlying sentiment is “I deserve to have an underpaid servant wait on me.”

If we are ever going to build an economically just society that doesn’t involve desperately poor people forming an overworked, underpaid service class, people have got to give up this idea that they deserve to be waited on. The revolution will have to involve a lot more of people doing basic things for themselves and a lot fewer service industry employees.

Of course, there is still a need for service employees. Many machines and interfaces are not universally accessible, so disabled people and others may need human assistance, while we continue to push for full universal design and accessibility of all technology. And of course, machines break down, need maintenance, etc. But people have got to get rid of their desire to be waited on, and they have got to stop hiding behind “What about the ELDERLY and the DISABLED” to make their desire to be waited on sound progressive.

“Elderly” is doing a lot of work here, because what it’s meant to imply is ambiguous. Do you mean that elderly people may have age-related disabilities that may impede their ability to do physical tasks like bag their own groceries (setting aside my previously established objections to equating “elderly” and “disabled”), or do you mean that elderly people are set in their ways of doing things and shouldn’t be expected to change, or do you mean that elderly people’s social status should entitle them to be waited on? If the latter is what you mean, the problem is that many of the overworked, underpaid service workers are themselves elderly. Abled 50 year olds demanding to be waited on by 70 year old cashiers because “I’m elderly” are clearly referring to something other than actual age.

Two Mental Healths

One of the most common criticisms of "housing first" initiatives (programs to provide housing for unhoused people unconditionally without gatekeeping) is that housing first "does not improve mental health." 

Now, let's set aside for the moment that this criticism is irrelevant -- the purpose of housing is to provide shelter, not to "improve mental health" -- what definition of "mental health" could possibly make this true? As much as I try to critique and deconstruct the social construction of "mental health," how could it possibly be true that having a safe, assured place to live would not result in greater happiness, greater inner peace, less depression, less anxiety, less negative emotions, than living on the street? 

What possible definition of "mental health" would not be improved by being housed rather than unhoused?

Answering this requires unpacking the wildly different, almost completely unrelated, definitions of "mental health," one applied to relatively privileged people, and one applied to oppressed people.

For relatively privileged people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on emotional well-being, introspection and self-awareness, and the mitigation or management of negative emotions like pain, depression, anxiety, and anger.

For oppressed people, the concept of "mental health" is centered on compliance, obedience, and productivity.

Like most privilege disparities, this isn't binary. For most people who are privileged in some ways and marginalized in other ways, "mental health support" will include some degree of the emotional support given to privileged people, and some degree of the compliance and productivity training given to oppressed people, with the proportions varying on where exactly each person falls on various privilege axes.  All children are oppressed by ageism, so all children's "mental health" has some elements promoting compliance, obedience, and productivity. But relatively privileged children may also receive some emotional support mixed in, while children of color, children in poverty, and children with existing neurodivergence labels will receive a much higher ratio of compliance training to emotional support.

One of the clearest illustrations of this disparity is the contrast between the "self-care" recommended to privileged people, and the "meaningful days" imposed on oppressed people.

Relatively privileged people are often told, by therapists, doctors, mental health culture, and self-help books, that they are working too hard and need to rest more. They're told that for the sake of their mental health, they need work-life balance, self-care, walks in the woods, baths with scented candles. Implicit in these recommendations is that the reason these people are working too hard is because of internal factors, like guilt or emotional drive, rather than external factors, like needing to pay the bills and not being able to afford a day off.

By contrast, unhoused people, institutionalized people, people labeled with "severe" or "serious" or "low-functioning" mental disabilities, are literally prescribed labor. Publicly funded "mental health initiatives" require the most marginalized members of society to work tedious jobs for little or no pay, under the premise that loading boxes at a warehouse will make their days "meaningful" and thus improve their "mental health." And unlike the self-care advice given to relatively privileged people, the forced-labor-for-your-own-good approach is not optional. People are either forced into it directly by guardians or institutions, or coerced into it as a precondition to access material needs like housing and food.

The form of "mental health" applied to relatively privileged people has some genuinely useful and beneficial elements. We could all stand to introspect and examine our own feelings more, manage our negative emotions without being overwhelmed by them, have self-confidence. We all need rest and self-care.

Still, privileged mental health culture, even at its best, is deeply flawed. At best, it tends to encourage a degree of self-centeredness and condescension. It's obsessed with classifying experiences as "trauma" or "toxic." It's one of the worst culprits in feeding the "long adolescence" phenomenon and generally perpetuating the idea that treating people as incompetent is doing them a kindness. Even the best therapists serving the most privileged clients have a strong tendency towards gaslighting and "correcting" people about their own feelings and desires.

But perhaps the worst consequence of privileged mental health culture is that it gives cover to the dehumanizing, abusive, compliance-oriented "mental health care" forced upon the most marginalized people. Privileged people are encouraged to universalize their experiences with sentiments like "We all deal with mental health" or assume that the mild, relatively benign "mental health care" they experienced are the norm, so what are those silly mad liberation people complaining about?

Tonight, I listened to a leader from an agency serving unhoused people talk about how "Everyone struggled with mental health during the pandemic"... and then later mention that their shelter categorically excludes people with paranoid schizophrenia diagnoses.
So perhaps "everyone struggles with mental health," but only certain people are categorically excluded from services, from shelter, from autonomy, from basic human rights, because of how their brains happen to work.

As always, it seems like so much effort in the mad liberation/ neurodiversity/ antipsychiatry movement is spent holding the hands of relatively privileged people receiving relatively privileged "mental health care" and reassuring them that we're not trying to take it away from them. Fine, it's great that you like your antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication and your nice therapist who listens to you and your support group. Great. Go live your best life. But that has nothing to do with our fight against forced drugging, forced labor, forced institutionalization, forced poverty. It's not even close to the same "mental health."

Human rights on a case-by-case basis

 

People really, really need to stop discussing autonomy (especially for young people, poor people, or disabled people) with concepts like "it depends on the individuals" or "on a case-by-case basis."

"It depends on the individuals" or "on a case-by-case basis" are valid concepts for assessing whether an individual choice is a good idea, or the right choice for the circumstances. Whether something is a good idea is almost always context-dependent. Sure.

But when the question is whether someone should have the right to make a choice, or when the question is whose choice it should be, the context doesn't matter. The individual doesn't matter. The circumstances don't matter. Autonomy is a human right. Cognitive liberty is a human right. Our rights should not be determined on a case-by-case basis. Our rights should be universal and absolute.

This comes up a lot in medical contexts, especially as mad pride and anti-psychiatry spaces place more emphasis on "medication is bad" than on "coercion is bad," and the vague rebuttal is that medication can be good or bad "depending on the individual" " on a case-by-case basis." This still bypasses the central issue of autonomy and coercion.

Is taking prescribed medication a good idea? Maybe. It depends on the individual. Decide on a case-by-case basis.

Should an individual have the right to choose whether to take prescribed medication? Yes. Unequivocally. In every case. In every circumstance. It does not depend on the individual, because every individually is equally deserving of human rights. In this context, pro-coercion people are hiding behind the ambiguity of "it depends on the individual" to convey that some individuals should not have the basic human right to control their own bodies.

I've gotten into a lot of arguments recently about the brain maturity myth and young adults as "still children," specifically about young adults' freedom to enter romantic relationships of their choice, or have children if they choose to. But the strongest defense I regularly see of youth rights in these contexts is "it depends on the individuals."

Whether or not a given romantic relationship or family situation is a good idea, whether a relationship will lead to a mutually satisfying lasting partnership, whether it will lead to long-term happiness -- these things depend on the individuals. They are context-dependent, and different for everyone. The correct answer to "Should an 18 year old get married or have children?" is "It depends on the individual."

But the correct answer to "Should xe have the right to choose to get married or have children?" is always yes. It does not depend on the individual. It does not depend on whether this choice is a good idea or likely to lead to long-term success. Relationship autonomy and reproductive rights do not depend on whether something is a "good idea." They are simply human rights.

Arguments about institutionalization and adult guardianship also always devolve into "You don't know the individual" or "You don't know the whole situation" -- as though the right to control of one's own body and mind is situational. We don't have to know every individual or every situation, because the situation doesn't matter. The individual characteristics of the person being subjected to a human rights abuse aren't relevant.

In general, anything that shifts conversation to the specifics of a decision someone wants to make, when the issue at hand is their right to make the decision in the first place, is a harmful derailing. It's fine to be judgmental of someone else's life choice, or to think they're making a mistake, but that's not what's relevant. Your support for people's right to freedom of speech shouldn't depend on your agreement with what they're saying, and your support for bodily and cognitive autonomy shouldn't depend on whether you think someone is making "good choices."

In fact, consider taking the Signal Boost Someone Fighting For The Right To Do Something You Disagree With, WITHOUT Mentioning That You Disagree With It Challenge. Really. Try it. Denounce that group home not letting its inmates drink soda WITHOUT adding your opinion that soda is bad. Support that religious freedom case WITHOUT tacking on that you think the person's religion is wrong. Argue for that disabled young adult's right to move in with a partner against xyr parents' wishes WITHOUT weighing in on xyr partner or their relationship. Defend that pregnant person's right to give birth as xe chooses WITHOUT adding that xe's making the wrong choice. You might find that your opinion of other people's autonomy is less important than you think it is!

Functioning, pt 2

 The problem with "functioning" as a concept is not the indisputable fact that people have differing abilities, talents, and skills to differing degrees.

The problem is that some abilities, talents, and skills are classified as "functioning," and real or perceived deficiency in them is grounds for pathologization and denial of autonomy.

I can't play the trumpet, run a marathon, or dance on my toes. These are abilities that some other people have, but I don't. Yet no one is going to call me "low-functioning" or take away my rights because of this.

Okay, but those are hobbies, not necessary for survival. If you don't have abilities necessary for survival, surely that's low-functioning.

Except I also can't hunt or clean an animal for meat, forage for plants, or spin wool into warm clothing. I would be completely unable to survive without the structures of the society I live in. Yet I still do not face the legal consequences of being classified as "low-functioning." I am not denied human rights for this. Primitivists and fascists insult me for this (I don't care), but they have no legal power over me (yet).

Okay, but those skills aren't necessary for survival in my social context, a post-industrial capitalist society. Lacking abilities that are necessary life skills in my social context, that would definitely get me classified as "low-functioning", right?

Except, no, I'm not very good at post-industrial capitalism, either. I can't file my taxes without assistance. I'm hazy on what the stock market is. The complex interconnected computers I use to manage my life might as well be run by tiny elves in hamster wheels for all I understand them. People might make fun of me or look down on me for this. But they don't classify me as "low-functioning." They don't take away my right to make my own decisions about my own body.

But I have trouble filtering out different sounds, speech, and background noise. If I'm in a meeting or a crowded room, and people are have multiple conversations at once, I have no idea what's going on. I sometimes get a look on my face that others read as "confused."

This is what makes people question my "functioning." Because I "look confused," and they don't think I can think.

"Functioning" is not about what skills people have or how well they can survive. It's about how well they can perform normative behavior in their society, and about the assumption that people who do not perform normative behavior are less capable of thinking or decision-making.

"But what about people who can't take care of themselves?" Irrelevant. You can't take care of yourself either. You live in a building you didn't construct, powered by electricity you didn't install and probably don't understand, travel in a metal box powered by a combustion engine to get food you didn't grow and products you didn't build in exchange for tokens with no intrinsic value and spend most of your waking hours doing meaningless tasks in exchange for such tokens. You can't conceptualize what it would mean to "take care of yourself" -- no, not even if you have a small garden or a few animals you like to imagine constitutes "self-sufficiency" (it doesn't). Which is fine! Humans are an interdependent species who shouldn't have to "take care of themselves."

But the concept of "functioning" is not based on skill level. It is not based on "how much support someone needs" (which would be meaningless in the first place -- all humans need roughly the same amount of support; the differences arise in who has the social privilege to access it and whose human needs are framed as "special" or "extra").

The concept of "functioning" is based on the unchallenged cultural assumption that people with non-normative traits are less human, less reasonable, less thinking, less capable of decision-making.

As I wrote in this previous post, humans do not "function." Humans are not machines. Humans are thinking, feeling, decision-making beings. They do not need to fulfill any "function" in order to justify their existence or prove their ability to think, feel, make decisions. The right to exist, the right to communicate, the right to self-determination, do not depend on anyone's possession of any particular skill set.

These are your fault

 Attn: all "progressives" and "feminists"

 If you have perpetuated the idea that "brain maturity" is a thing, these transphobic bills are your fault. 

If you have ever said that young adults are not real adults, referred to 18+ year olds as "boys/girls/kids/children," or invoked "their parents, these transphobic bills are your fault. 

If you have ever called other people "brainwashed," "delusional," or said that they "need therapy" because of choices they've made or experiences they've had, these transphobic bills are your fault. 

If you have ever said or implied, or failed to dispute, that disabled, Mad, or neurodivergent people should be "helped" against their will, these transphobic bills are your fault. 

 Your ableist, ageist, neurobigoted rhetoric laid the groundwork for these bills. 

YOU perpetuated the idea that young adults aren't competent to make their own decisions until they're 26. 

YOU perpetuated the idea that disabled, Mad, neurodivergent adults are mentally children.

 YOU perpetuated the idea that people who make choices you don't like are "brainwashed" and "need therapy" to fix them. 

 THIS. IS. YOUR. FAULT.

 You wanted to judge college students and people with weird eating habits and people dating adults with age differences between them, so you rationalized your judgment with neurobigoted and ageist rhetoric, and now it's blown back on the most vulnerable, most despised segments of the population -- like anyone could have predicted it would. This is your fault. Stop before you get more people killed.

Paying For It

 I've decided to put you in jail, and I'm paying for it. I'll pay to build the cell, hire the guards, purchase your prison food, and install the locks. What do you mean, I shouldn't be allowed to do that? But I'm PAYING for it! You don't like that?

Then you agree that "They're paying for it" isn't sufficient justification for families to control their disabled or student family members.