Warning: Offsite links are not safe spaces. Articles and comments in the links may contain ableist, sexist, and other -ist language of varying intensity. Opinions expressed in the articles may not reflect the opinions held by the compiler of the post. I attempt to provide extra warnings for material like extreme violence/rape; however, your triggers/issues may vary, so please read with care.

Assiya at For A Fairer Today: little-big disabling things

It’s funny how all these little things, that so many people never think about, can be so important. Can basically trap me in my room–and even hurt me in my room. Sometimes I flip off the florescent lights-curse them out with my hands and voice.

Marta Russell at SOA Watch: The Social Movement Left Out [via Niall’s new blog, Not Gagged]

Baynton shows that the suffragists arguments to refute such associations took three forms: women were not disabled therefore deserved the vote; women were being erroneously and slanderously classed with disabled people, with those who were legitimately denied suffrage; and women were not naturally or inherently disabled but were made disabled by inequality. “… suffrage would ameliorate or cure these disabilities.” […]

What this history tells us is that these groups (or at least advocates for these groups) believed that being labeled with a disability was the worst fate imaginable. No one wanted to be associated with “disabled.”

Historically, labor associations similarly found it shameful to be injured or impaired and “equated manhood with independence (bodily and financial).”

Tom Shakespeare at BBC’s Ouch!: Haiti, disabled people and disasters

Disabled people are among the most vulnerable when disaster strikes. They may be left behind in the evacuation of buildings. Environmental barriers – such as destroyed roads and pavements – are a greater obstacle to those with mobility issues. People who require regular medication or treatment are likely to lose out. For those disabled people living in emergency shelters, latrine arrangements may be inaccessible. And where food aid is distributed in refugee camps, disabled people are often at the back of the queue and so may go hungry.

Reuters: Researchers see pattern in PTSD brain activity

Using a brain imaging device called magnetoencephalography, which measures how the brain processes information, a team at the University of Minnesota and the Minneapolis VA Medical Center found differences in brain activity between people with PTSD and healthy people.

Having a test for PTSD could speed treatment and simplify insurance coverage, said Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos of the University of Minnesota, whose study appears in the Journal of Neural Engineering.

SMH: Disabled woman may settle with Jetstar

Sheila King booked her flight over the internet in August 2008 but was contacted the next day and told she would not be able to fly on that day because there were already two passengers requiring wheelchair assistance booked on the flight. She was told Jetstar had a policy of only allowing a maximum of two wheelchair-reliant passengers on any flight. […]

Ms King claims that in denying her the right to fly, Jetstar breached the Disability Discrimination Act.

Ms King has had post-polio syndrome since childhood and has been in a wheelchair since 2008 after a car accident that resulted in three crushed vertebrae and three broken ribs, a statement released by her lawyers and the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Centre says. But she is more than capable of looking after herself when she travels, she says.

New York Times: Using Humor in a Campaign Supporting Disabled People

To that end, the campaign takes a light-hearted tack rather than a sober or earnest tone. The ads try to challenge conventional wisdom about workers with disabilities by offering humorous examples of people with “differences” already employed.

For instance, in a television commercial, a worker in a wheelchair points out her colleagues who “you could label as ‘different.’ ” Among them are a woman dressed in a nightmare wardrobe of clashing patterns, who is “fashion deficient”; a klutzy young man at the copier, who is “copy incapable”; and a shouting man who suffers from “volume control syndrome.”

The punch line of the commercial is that the worker in the wheelchair is different, too: Her skills at a basic office function are so bad that she is labeled “coffee-making impaired.”