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.