A Brief Intro to Disability

Language

Disabled people, not ‘the disabled’ or ‘the handicapped’ or ‘crippled’.

Deaf and Blind people often don’t consider themselves to be disabled, so if you’re specifically talking about disability, it can be worth referring to ‘disabled and sick people, and Deaf and Blind people’. But in general, ‘disabled people’ is a good broad term.

 

Some people, almost always the parents of disabled children rather than disabled people themselves, talk about ‘person-first language’. Disability activists hate this. It frames disability as a bad thing, even while trying to do something good. They talk about ‘you are not a disabled person, you are a person with a disability’. I am not ‘a person with womanhood’. I’m a woman. That isn’t shameful, and neither is being disabled.

 

Similarly, a good broad term is ‘condition’. A person has a condition. I am a disabled person who has a mental health condition. It’s a value-neutral term, unlike ‘illness’, ‘disease’, ‘dysfunction’, which often have negative connotations.

 

Individuals might choose to use this language when referring to themselves, as many disability activists reclaim the word ‘crip’ or ‘crazy’ or whatever, but it’s similar to other forms of reclaimed slurs where abled people don’t get to use them.

 

Abled people are abled, not ‘normal’.

Try, if you can, to avoid using these words (though some can be hard to weed out from language, so don’t get too caught up in it other than ‘crippled’). I’m including some alternatives.

 

Crippled                             –              broken, incomplete, weakened, undermined, shattered

Mad/insane/crazy           –              wild, ludicrous, chaotic, ridiculous, erratic, baffling, preposterous, unreasonable, irrational

Stupid/moron/etc           –              unthinking, irrational, nonsensical, illogical,

 

Basic Disability Politics

Disability politics is currently based around two different models of disability. Both are imperfect, and we’re moving towards are more complete, adaptable model, but we’re not there yet.

The Medical Model – Disability is something to be fixed, cured, an individual tragedy. Blind children should have multiple invasive surgeries with little chance of success to make them more like Seeing children. People with mental health conditions should be drugged until they are normal or hidden away if they can’t be.

The Social Model – created by disability activists. ‘Nothing about us without us’. We make our choices, we direct treatment and care. Crucially, we get to decide whether or not we are needing ‘fixed’. The Social Model states that people might have impairments because of their conditions, but it is society which disables us by being inaccessible. Blind children get access to learning various forms of input which allow them to be as independent and involved as possible. People with mental health conditions get treatment if they want it, but the onus is on society to be more accessible by adapting to different needs, accepting that behaviours can vary (though this doesn’t excuse abusive behaviour, because it is the responsibility of a disabled person to take appropriate steps to not harm other people, too). Non-verbal children get access to other forms of communication (technology, signing, etc) rather than tortured into ‘acting normal’. We build ramps and make assistive tech and allow people to choose how much they are involved with the medical profession because the medical field is still deeply harmful to many of us, even while we need it for so many things.

 

Essentially, it’s about individual vs collective responsibility. The Medical Model states that it’s up to the individual to be as like an abled person as possible in order to be accepted, while the Social Model says that it’s up to society to not exclude people based on different needs and abilities.

 

What Disabled People Need Within The Party

Representation, as always. Again, ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’. We are the people best placed to make decisions about how disabled people should be included in the party, we are the people who can offer solutions and insight, we just need resources, access and inclusion.

We want:

• NEC representation
• A decent web presence where we can host information for all disabled members of the party on how to access different aspects of party life, who to contact to talk about access needs, who to complain to, etc.
• A centralised access fund to cover all aspects of inclusion and access, so branches can hire BSL interpreters, pay for transport, pay for transcription, pay the extra money to have accessible venues (in many places it costs much more to get somewhere with lifts, etc)
• Genuine dedication to getting disabled people involved by actively reaching out to members to mentor them for elected office (and not just in unwinnable seats), splitting branch duties into different batches so people with varying abilities can do what they can, etc
• Equalities (for all equality strands) training to be mandatory for vetting procedures for elected office, including appropriate language, what to expect, etc

What Disabled People are Concerned About In General

The apocalypse. Disabled people are dying because of what the UK government is doing, and we genuinely refer to this as a ‘cull’. Between the horrors of the lethal Work Capability Assessment, the horror of the Rape Clause (disabled women are much more likely to be raped than abled women – women with mental health conditions more than four times as likely, poor disabled women even more, etc), and the oncoming freight train that is Universal Credit, we’re literally fighting for our lives. Many people feel that there is nothing more important than this, and think that every moment our representatives aren’t yelling from the rooftops that we’re being killed is a betrayal. These concerns, while not a reasonable reflection of how politics works, are entirely valid.

Similarly, people outside of the independence movement are afraid of independence because we rely on state support for survival, however harmful and dangerous that can be. It’s crucial that we get the message out that Scotland not only *can* do better, but that it already is doing better. We’re not waiting for independence to build a Scotland where people can be safe, even if we can’t protect them from the worst of the UK Government’s policies. We have restored the Independent Living Fund, restored the Access to Elected Office Fund, mitigated the Bedroom Tax. One criticism is that we delayed taking control of some social security powers even when we knew people were dying – the answer to that is that we delayed it specifically because we know that this is life or death. We couldn’t take it on by just replicating the UK’s lethal system, so the new Scottish Social Security team have been going the length and breadth of the country to speak to the people who actually use the system to find out what was done wrong, what could be improved, what we need to build from scratch, so that when we do take control the system is fair, respectful and (crucially) scalable – it will be able to take on any new powers we manage to claw back, and will be ready for when we get all of them.

 

Other than that, many people are concerned with the ways in which disability intersects with other oppressions. Disabled trans people find it really difficult to get access to gender services if they have a history of a mental health condition. Disabled people of colour are much more likely to have force used against them by police and prison staff, and are much more likely to be over-police – read as threatening when they’re just not neurotypical or have some trouble walking or hearing or whatever. Disabled women are much more likely to not have access to appropriate pain treatment because they’re just hysterical or melodramatic, and that’s compounded if you’re a fat disabled woman.

Disability is a massive umbrella, so even within the community there are huge disagreements on the best way to ensure inclusion. In the DMG, we are adamant that there is no hierarchy of disability – ie. You’re not ‘properly disabled’ if you have a physical impairment, but less disabled if you have an invisible condition. Most accessibility measures are exclusively focused on static, mechanical disabilities like paralysis, Deafness, etc. We really need to be also addressing accessibility for people with fluctuating energy levels, information processing disorders, etc.