Disability hate crime: an unrecognised reality?

Today I was collaborating with a couple of other local disability activists on writing an introductory article about disability hate crime (taking as its main reference point the recent UKDPC Briefing on Hate Crime, but simplifying and distilling it with a local focus, and also addressing the non-recognition of disability-related hate crime as such by police and other official agencies). The debate got me thinking about the reasons for this non-recognition...

Hate crime against disabled people, however defined, is a HUGE problem - in the UK, the recent murder of Brent Martin is a recent example, and there are innumerable other horrific incidents - just look at FRIDA's archives of disability news items for examples. Yet, somehow, there seems to be a reluctance, not only within the police and the political establishment, but even within “left-wing” or generally anti-oppressive discourse, to acknowledge that hate crime against disabled people even exists...

Why is this? One reason, IMO, is that the prevailing paradigm of what “hate crime” is is based on a certain template of “typical” hate crime - in the UK at least, primarily racist and, probably to a slightly lesser extent, homophobic/transphobic hate crime.

These sorts of hate crime are characterised by the “hate” element being openly stated and explicit, and by the people or groups of people involved in such crimes generally having a consciously bigoted agenda - they believe their racist or homo/transphobic actions are justified by their own prejudiced value systems, and consciously see the minorities they attack as an enemy. Often they are part of more or less organised ideological groupings, such as fascists or religious fundamentalists.

This kind of hate crime is pretty easy to recognise - graffiti using insulting terms for the minority groups using targeted, often saying things like “[group X] out” or “kill all [group X]”, attacks by groups which are generally pre-planned, involving gangs of racists/homophobes/etc getting together with the deliberate intent of attacking either a specific individual(s) or members of their target group in general (eg, by going to an area where members of that group live, or a social venue where they tend to go with the intention to vandalise or attack people).

With disability hate crime, it tends not quite to work the same way. The thugs who beat Brent Martin to death (whose sentences were just reduced by an appeal judge) were not members of a fascist group, followers of any religion that believes disability is evidence of sin, or followers of the likes of Peter Singer (who believes disabled people should be killed at birth). They had not decided that day that they were going to find and beat up a disabled person, nor, probably, did they consciously perceive disabled people as their “enemies”. They did, however, kill him because they thought that it was socially acceptable to cause pain and/or harm to a disabled person simply for amusement - in other words, they did not see Brent Martin as a fellow human being, but as an object of scorn and ridicule.

From some viewpoints, this attitude is even worse than that of conscious, explicit hatred - I would certainly rather be perceived as an enemy (with the modicum of respect that contains in being seen as at least potentially dangerous, and therefore having some agency), the target of a tribal or holy war, than as a mere object, so far from an equal that hurting or killing “it” is no more than sport . But, in the minds of many, it simply isn't seen as “hatred” - or, as sexual violence was and is, is seen as “personal” rather than “political”, evidence of individual cruelty, but not of societal prejudice or larger underlying values.

Even further from recognition as “hate crime” is the abuse of disabled people - up to and including the killing of disabled children - within the family. Of course, the existing paradigm of hate crime finds it hard to recognise in an intra-family context, as members of families are generally of the same race as each other (and, if it's a mixed-race family, they're very unlikely to be racists) - homophobic and transphobic hate crime does occur within families, but I think it has some of the same problems of recognition there as disablist hate crime does.

This is even harder to see for what it is because torturous “treatments” - which in any other context would constitute assault or worse - see for example here - are often given to disabled children (and some adults, especially if they are learning disabled) supposedly “for their own good”, and even sometimes by or at the request of medical professionals. In some of these cases, such as the torture of autistic children by “chelation”, the violence is motivated by a desire to “cure” the impairment or difference - which, while not consciously perceived as such, certainly implies a desire for a category of people not to exist, which I think “hate” is definitely a reasonable definition for...

In the most extreme cases of all - those of the killing of children by their parents or “carers”, such as the cases of Tracy Latimer or Katie McCarron - the murderers actually assert that their act of killing is motivated not by hate, but by love - in that they believe it is a “loving” and “merciful” act to kill their child rather than let them live as a disabled person. In this case, the underlying hate of disabled people is so deep that it's almost impossible to get through to people that it is hate - but what other than hate of disabled people could underlie the belief that a person's existence is, purely because of their impairment, “worse than death”, and what other than total disregard for their autonomy, and thus status as a human being, could underlie the belief that their own opinion on whether their life is worth living can be totally disregarded?

This is part of why I am wary of “one-size-fits-all” approaches to oppression - while there certainly are many ways in which disablism is analogous to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc, it isn't perfectly analogous, and shouldn't be treated as if it is. In particular, the whole “pity”, “care”, hate-masquerading-as-love paradigm is, I think, if not peculiar to disablism then certainly far more characteristic of it than of the other prejudices/oppressions it's most frequently compared to, while disablism tends to manifest itself as open enmity much less than the others do. (If anything, in terms of racism, the kind of disablist bigotry that is prevalent now is less like most contemporary racism than it is like the kind of “white man's burden”, “children of a larger growth” paternalistic racism that was the paradigmatic form in Empire times.)

Of course, I have fairly major problems with the whole concept of “hate crime” in itself - not least because I have major problems with its component concept of “crime” as a whole (which concept, IMO, brackets together at least 3 extremely different categories of acts, purely by the almost completely arbitrary fact that, in the current political system, they are codified as “illegal”... but that's a topic for another post), but also because, even when the acts described above are recognised as “hate crime”, it fails even to touch the institutionalised social oppression of disabled people - in residential homes, “special” schools, hospitals, and the “social care” system as a whole - which constitutes a “crime”, in terms of abuses of disabled people's human rights, far bigger than that of any individual (just as, for example, the institutionally racist oppression of asylum seekers in immigration detention centres (which closely resemble “care homes”, possibly even more so than they do prisons, in the way that they are run and administered) is a far greater “crime” than the actions of any small-scale gang of racist thugs).

However, the point of this post is really that I think disablism is, often if not always, more difficult to recognise for what it is than most other prejudices and oppressive systems - and not just because it has been recognised for less time, or because the disabled people's liberation movement is “behind” other liberation movements (in chronological or progressivist terms), but because the forms that it takes are actually substantially different, and, in some ways, IMO harder to recognise precisely because they are more deeply ingrained in the unconscious foundations of “Western culture” - in assumptions so deep that they aren't even consciously noticed.

What this means for the disabled people's liberation movement, I'm not quite certain (apart from that, possibly, too-direct analogies to the experiences of other oppressed peoples may, in some circumstances, be counterproductive) - but one thing that strikes me is that that implies the disabled people's liberation movement has the potential for a deeper and more radical undermining of currently-hegemonic cultural values than perhaps any other movement. That, however, is definitely a topic that needs another post...

Monsters and the Monstrous: Call for Papers 2008

Found via Cryptomundo:

6th Global Conference - Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 22nd September - Thursday 25th September 2008
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

This inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary conference seeks to investigate and explore the enduring influence and imagery of monsters and the monstrous on human culture throughout history. In particular, the project will have a dual focus with the intention of examining specific ‘monsters’ as well as assessing the role, function and consequences of persons, actions or events identified as ‘monstrous’. The history and contemporary cultural influences of monsters and monstrous metaphors will also be examined.

Perspectives are sought from those engaged in the fields of literature, media studies, cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, health and theology. Ideas are welcomed from those involved in academic study, fictional explorations, and applied areas (e.g. youth work, criminology and medicine).

Papers, reports, work-in-progress and workshops are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

- The “monster” through history
- Civilization, monsters and the monstrous
- Children, childhood, stories and monsters; monsters and parents
- Comedy: funny monsters and/or making fun of monsters (e.g. Monsters Inc, the Addams Family)
- Making monsters; monstrous births
- Mutants and mutations
- Technologies of the monstrous
- Horror, fear and scare
- Do monsters kill because they are monstrous or are they monstrous because they kill?
- How critical to the definition of “monster” is death or the threat of death?
- Human ‘monsters’ and ‘monstrous’ acts? e.g, perverts, paedophiles and serial killers
- The monstrous and gender
- Revolution and monsters; the monstrous and politics; enemies (political/social/military) and monsters
- Iconography of the monstrous
- The popularity of the modern monsters; the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein, Vampires
- The monster in literature
- The monstrous in popular culture: film, television, theatre, radio, print, internet. The monstrous and journalism
- Religious depictions of the monstrous; the monstrous and the supernatural
- Metaphors and the monstrous
- The monstrous and war, war reportage/propaganda
- Monsters, the monstrous and the internet; monstrous virtualities
- Monsters, gaming and on-line communities

Papers will be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. We also welcome proposals for pre-formed panels which specifically explore the themes of hybridity or themes of monstrous parents and families. In addition, papers which examine the theme of hope in relations to monsters (for joint sessions with the Hope project running at the same time) are wlecome.

Papers will be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 9th May 2008. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 8th August 2008.

300 word abstracts should be submitted to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats, following this order: author(s), affiliation, email address, title of abstract, body of abstract.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Project Co-Leader
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
mailto: iheartvampires@gmail.com

Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
mailto: m6@inter-disciplinary.net

Stephen Morris
Project Co-Leader
Independent Scholar
New York, USA
mailto: smmorris58@yahoo.com

The conference is part of the ‘At the Interface’ series of programmes organised by ID.Net. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers will be developed for publication in a themed hard copy volume.

[end quote]

I think this whole conference sounds awesome, and with the potential to bring all kinds of things together. I have bolded the topics in the list that i think sound particularly exciting...

It would be utterly awesome if some Disability Studies people submitted papers for this. I know i'm not up to it at the moment (and not (yet) being within the hallowed halls of academia, probably wouldn't be eligible), but there have to be some people who would be well into this out there...

A few topics that i can think of offhand that could potentially fit into this from a disability studies perspective: changelings, freak shows in fiction and reality, representations of disabled people as monsters or villains in horror films (see this post at Sweet Perdition, discovered through the latest Disability Blog Carnival... another one i need to add to my blogroll), the Neanderthal hybrid theory of neurodiversity, the use of disabled actors to play monsters or non-human characters (eg in Doctor Who)... shit, there's fucking loads of stuff...

(I think i'm going to have to spam about a couple of dozen blogs with this...)

oh, and a couple of classic blog posts which i think are relevant to this:

Little Light: the seam of skin and scales
Boots (of Makezine): Monster Trans
Ballastexistenz: I'm the monster you met on the Internet

edit: archives of the previous 5 conferences in this project can be found here...

Changelings

Ettina at Abnormaldiversity recently posted a link to an archive of changeling stories, including British, German and Scandinavian folk stories. The accompanying essay, by retired academic D.L. Ashliman, makes it clear that the changeling legends derive directly from the reality of disabled children:

We all want explanations for happenings that fall outside of our control, especially those that have a direct bearing on our welfare. It is only natural that our forebears wanted to know why some children fail to develop normally, and what our responsibilities are toward these handicapped individuals. The two stories quoted above are part of a vast network of legends and superstitions that give primitive but satisfying answers to these questions. These accounts -- which, unlike most fantasy tales, were actually widely believed -- suggest that a physically or mentally abnormal child is very likely not the human parents' offspring at all, but rather a changeling -- a creature begotten by some supernatural being and then secretly exchanged for the rightful child.

I've been interested in these and similar legends for a long time, partly because of my general interest in the weird, obscure or unexplained, and partly because of the disability connection; I think the first place I encountered the concept of "changelings" was in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream", which I studied at school when I was about 14. The original form of the changeling legend seems to be that of fairies, trolls or similar supernatural beings abducting a human child and replacing it with an "impostor" (which might be a fairy/troll child, a child-sized adult fairy, or an inanimate object enchanted to look like a child); these are obviously pre-Christian legends. In more strongly Christianised countries, particularly Germany, the fairies/trolls were often replaced by Satan or demons, and the alternative story of a woman being impregnated by a demon often introduced (which links the mythos to the sort of witch-persecution stuff discussed by Thomas Szasz in The Manufacture of Madness... posts on this book will be forthcoming, at some point). In some of the Celtic stories there is an attempt to reconcile the Christian and non-Christian aspects with the idea of Faerie owing a debt to Hell, which it had to pay with human sacrifices.

It's really obvious from quite a lot of the texts in the archive that the changeling legends originate from disabled children, to the extent that from some of them it's even possible to make a reasonable guess at the impairment, for example:

I [Scott's source] was prevailed upon myself to go and see a child, who, they told me, was one of these changelings, and, indeed, must own, was not a little surprised, as well as shocked, at the sight. Nothing under heaven could have a more beautiful face; but, though between five and six years old, and seemingly healthy, he was so far from being able to walk or stand, that he could not so much as move any one joint; his limbs were vastly long for his age, but smaller than any infant's of six months; his complexion was perfectly delicate, and he had the finest hair in the world. He never spoke nor cried, ate scarce anything, and was very seldom seen to smile; but if anyone called him a fairy-elf, he would frown, and fix his eyes so earnestly on those who said it, as if he would look them through.

This definitely sounds like a child with a congenital physical impairment - in fact, it reminds me of far too many news or "human interest" stories I've read of physically impaired kids, presumed to have no communication and therefore no understanding, being talked about right in front of them as "better off dead" and similar. If I was that kid, I'd have frowned too...

In the year 1565 in the village of Cüstrinichen in the New Mark Brandenburg, the wife of a peasant named of Andreas Prawitz gave birth to a child who was baptized with the name Matthias. The child originally appeared to be perfectly normal, but by the time it had reached the age of twenty it still lacked all reason, and had developed a repulsive appearance. And even though it reached the legal age of majority and had a beard upon its chin, it never learned to stand or to walk or even to speak. When it was hungry it just whimpered or bellowed. It could not move from one place to the next, and did nothing but eat and drink. Many people thought that it must be a killcrop or a changeling, of the kind that Luther discusses in his works.

This story contains no supernatural elements whatsoever, but quite clearly describes a person with a quite mundane impairment, perhaps either cerebral palsy or a "generalised" mental impairment.

Lots of the stories talk about a child suddenly losing the ability to speak, or crying incessantly, or eating huge amounts of food and never putting on weight, all of which point very plausibly to real-life impairments. The idea of children suddenly becoming "old" in appearance suggests conditions like progeria (although, IIRC, that's pretty rare, but theoretically it only takes one case to start a legend). Withered limbs suggest muscular dystrophy or one of many similar impairments. Failure to grow could indicate various hormonal conditions. Continual hunger and eating of non-food items suggests hyperphagia, typical of impairments such as Prader-Willi syndrome. Several of the German stories describe "changeling" children as having large, swollen heads, which suggests hydrocephalus. (The idea of a whole race of dwarf-like beings with huge heads reminds me of the modern US urban legend of the Melon Heads.)

The belief that a changeling would only live for a certain number (variously 7, 9, 18 or 20) years also suggests progressive impairments. The fact that many of the myths imply or outright state that being replaced by a changeling is something that only happens to boys (to the extent that dressing boys under a certain age in girls' clothing to "fool the fairies" was recommended as a preventative measure) is also interesting due to the number of impairments which only, or much more commonly, affect boys due to being X-chromosome linked (one of the best known being Duchenne muscular dystrophy - as an aside, X-linked disorders, including those fatal before birth, are the main reason for females usually making up slightly more and males slightly less than 50% of the population) - although, as Ashliman notes, patriarchal bias resulting in the idea that only male children would be "desirable" to a supernatural being could also play a role.

The heavy emphasis in several of the German stories in particular on the changeling eating huge amounts of food, and by doing so economically destroying the family and community, is particularly chilling considering the Nazi rhetoric of disabled people being "useless eaters". Martin Luther's account puts this link in particularly stark focus:

Eight years ago [in the year 1532] at Dessau, I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy; but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said to the Princes of Anhalt: "If I were the prince or the ruler here, I would throw this child into the water--into the Molda that flows by Dessau. I would dare commit homicidium on him!" But the Elector of Saxony, who was with me at Dessau, and the Princes of Anhalt did not want to follow my advice. Therefore, I said: "Then you should have all Christians repeat the Lord's Prayer in church that God may exorcise the devil." They did this daily at Dessau, and the changeling child died in the following year.... Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.

400 years later the same thinking led directly to Action T4, the extermination of disabled people that was the prototype for the Holocaust - an uncomfortable fact for those who portray the Nazi regime as a unique, singular horror rather than as part of a long tradition of European (and very often Christian) bigotry and dehumanisation of all those considered "Other", which is still alive and well today. Luther's massa carnis is the direct ancestor of the Nazis' Ballastexistenz (which, of course is the origin of the name of Amanda's blog) and leeren Menschenhülsen (empty human-shaped shells/husks).

This poem, from 1904, is also particularly disturbing to me in its depiction of a child supposedly replaced by a changeling as "dead", with her "replacement" as something entirely inhuman and impossible for a parent to love (without any reason given in the poem for this, except that "it" "smiles as she never smiled") - see Jim Sinclair's article "Don't Mourn For Us".

When "changeling" children aren't physically abnormal, the difference from the child they "replaced" is mental - a child who previously was intelligent, outgoing and talkative (in many versions, more so than average, to the point of being regarded with particular pride for it) stops talking altogether, "forgets" learnt skills, or becomes emotionally "disturbed", for example stopping smiling or starting to cry constantly. This is irresistibly reminiscent of the so-called "regression" supposedly experienced by autistic children, in which skills can appear to be "lost", children who were "verbal" become "non-verbal", etc (there are several good deconstructions of the concept of "regression" by autistic people online, although i can't find any of them right now... edit: here's one). (Luther's mention that "whenever someone touched it, it cried" is particularly strongly reminiscent of the sensory defensiveness and overload of many autistic people, including myself as a child).

This apparent sudden change in abilities and behaviour in many autistics at a particular age is the source of more modern equivalents to the changeling myth, such as the (totally unverified, and unlikely to ever be verified) claims that autism is "caused" by vaccines, metal poisoning, bad diet, etc. MMR and mercury have become the modern "fairies" or "demons" to blame for "taking away" a child in this updated, but depressingly similar, form of age-old quackery.

Autism Demonized (which seemingly hasn't been updated in almost a year, hence its non-inclusion in my blogroll) has quite a bit of stuff about this subject, and Amanda Baggs has posted about the falseness of the idea of "regression" and its similarity to changeling stereotypes here.

The methods advocated in the legends for "restoring" the "original" child also bear a remarkable, and scary, resemblance to the kinds of methods advocated by various present-day quacks to parents of autistic children to "cure autism" (and doubtless similar for other impairments); they fall into the categories either of threatened or actual violence towards the child, or of tricking the child into revealing its "true nature" by demonstrating physical and/or cognitive abilities which it has been supposedly hiding from its parents. The method of actual return is usually left rather vague and unconvincing, often seemingly taking the form of an instantaneous re-appearance of the "normal" child. As the tales often take the form of "how-to" instructions, there's a strong resemblance to the unproven claims made by various practitioners of supposedly "cured" children, which are about as far from reality as fairy stories.

Even in a modern retelling of the myth by Selma Lagerlöf (also linked to by Ettina), in which it is the mother's kindness which results in the restoration of the human child, there are disturbing implications - the mother's conflicted feelings including a desire to kill the child are validated, and the "troll" changes from a demonic antagonist to an outcast, "inferior" creature who "naturally", on seeing a human child, regards it as much more beautiful and desirable than her own - and, of course, the restoration of the "original" child is the reward, the happy ending. Although this version seems to be less consciously disability-related than the original myths, it still has parallels with disablist narratives such as the "refrigerator mother" theory of autism.

This depiction of "trolls" as a flesh-and-blood race living alongside humans reminds me of one piece of anthropological speculation about fairy, brownie, pixie etc legends that particularly intrigues me - the idea that legends of nonhuman but roughly humanoid sentient races could originate from different-looking groups of humans or closely related hominids encountering each other in the past. In particular, Celtic legends of the "Fair Folk" are often argued to be derived from memories of a pre-Celtic indigenous ethnic group (which would presumably have been either exterminated or assimilated at some point) - but a "fringe" theory is that stories of "brownies", "pixies" etc come from actual survivals of small, relict populations of such people into mediaeval or even early modern times (the word "pixie" is possibly derived from the Picts, a pre-Celtic British ethnic group).

This has been used plenty of times in fiction, one particularly gripping horror version being John Buchan's "No Man's Land", in which the "Picts" have become a troglodyte race who abduct women to breed with, depicted as a classic horror "Other". If something like this was true (which is baseless speculation, of course), then one possible origin for changeling "myths" could be such a relict group having a high incidence of congenital impairments due to inbreeding, and actually swapping their disabled children for "healthy" children from the mainstream culture... well, it's unlikely, but when i came up with the idea in a drunken late-night conversation one friend actually thought it was plausible...

(I could write a post much longer than this one on "Diversity as Horror"... but not right now. I've also written about the similarities between the ways disabled people and indigenous peoples seen as "primitive" have been treated here... and probably will return to that subject fairly soon...)

I'm sure there was other stuff i was going to work into this post when i started it 4 hours ago, but as it's somehow already got well over 2000 words, I'll stop. I'd love to know if there's any more research about this sort of stuff out there, tho...

Trans liberation and disability liberation: a necessary alliance

Today is (or, technically, yesterday was, as it's now about 4am here in the UK) Transgender Day of Remembrance, "set aside to memorialise those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice". Several bloggers I read wrote moving and powerful posts about this, which inspired me to write about what I believe to be both a natural and necessary alliance between disability and transgender issues...

One of my closest friends is a trans woman. It was her coming out as trans (at which point in fact we were not particularly close friends), and the ensuing conversations between us about identity (both gender and otherwise), disability (she also has a physical impairment), the psychiatric/mental health system, childhood experiences and other stuff, that led me to seek diagnosis for Asperger's at the age of 22, and ultimately to embrace "disabled" as an identity.

While I would never claim to appropriate her experience, there were levels of, particularly childhood, experience on which I connected more with her than with anyone I had ever known before - conversations which lasted from early afternoon until sunrise the next morning, and which felt like the deepest I had ever had in my life. Essentially, the experience that we both shared was that of having been brought up by (suburban, working-class-but-educated) parents under the assumption that each of us was a "normal boy", when in fact both of us were something else - an experience which is difficult to explain in many ways, because it is just as harmful and destructive as the experience of deliberate abuse, yet those responsible for it were acting not from any kind of malice but from a completely genuine desire to do good.

In fact, this is a defining characteristic of many if not most disabled people's lives (although particularly, specifically so for those whose impairment or other physical or mental "difference" is not diagnosed until adulthood) - false assumptions about who and what we are, resulting in well-meaning treatment that is as harmful as, or even more harmful than, malicious treatment would be. It is an experience that can be survived, even triumphed over, but not without scars - in some cases physically as a result of either "self-harm" or unnecessary and therefore harmful medical treatments, in pretty much all cases metaphorically in the form of reactive depression and PTSD. (Show me either a congenitally disabled person or a trans person who doesn't have PTSD, and I'll show you someone who must have been brought up in Utopia.)

I have seen my friend grow into a beautiful woman, while she has had to see me (in many ways) "regress" or "deteriorate". I have seen her grow into herself, while I am still not sure if I truly have a "self" to grow into. I have seen her dysphoria turned, quite literally, into euphoria by a simple little pill (the only medical-model solution for depression I have ever seen that actually worked, which makes a mockery of some so-called feminists' ideas about transitioning as a form of "self-hate" or "self-mutilation"), while there has been no such easy solution for me. This cannot have been easy for her: yet, through all of it, she has treated me continuously and consistently as a friend and an equal. There is no better definition of a friend, comrade, ally.

I believe that the disability rights/liberation movement and the trans* rights/liberation movement are natural allies, even if many within both of them have never considered that alliance. Both are about acceptance rather than elimination of physical and mental difference. Both are about freedom of choice, the inalienable right of the individual to have self-determination over, and to be regarded as the person with the best knowledge of, hir own brain and body. Both are about the depathologisation of that which the establishment persists in considering pathological. Both intersect with feminism in incredibly exciting ways which can enable feminism (if feminism lets them) to get beyond problems and dichotomies which it has struggled with for generations (see FRIDA and The Transfeminist Manifesto (PDF), and also, for intersections of both movements, the very awesome Emi Koyama). Both are about resistance against a patronising, patriarchal, paternalistic medical establishment which claims to know our bodies and minds better than we know them ourselves. Both are about human biodiversity.

There is considerable overlap, also, in the area of intersex conditions, which can be regarded both as physical impairment (and are often accompanied by, or "comorbid" with, other physical or mental impairments) and as a gender identity issue; Emi Koyama has written (although I haven't read it) a lecture with the awesome title of "Intersex at the Intersection of Queerness & Disability Theories". There is strong evidence that many people labelled "transsexual" may actually have one or more undiagnosed intersex conditions. The routine mutilation, often without their parents' either consent or knowledge, of intersex babies to make them "conform" to one binary gender or the other (which, of course, if the doctors get it wrong, leads to gender dysphoria and thus transsexualism) closely parallels the non-consensual sterilisation and other surgical mutilations of physically and/or mentally disabled children.

The long and sad history of trans* people murdered because of transphobia, and the horrifyingly widespread belief that those murders were justified because of those people's gender identity, is paralleled by the equally long and sad history of disabled people murdered (often under the guise of "mercy killing") by family members, "carers", medical professionals and institutions, and the similarly horrifyingly widespread belief that those killings were justified because of the victims' impairment or disability. Both groups were among the first to be killed (before Jews or any other ethnic minority) in the Holocaust.

This is why I think that it's absolutely awesome that disability bloggers such as Elizabeth McClung and Trinity have blogged about Transgender Day of Remembrance, and that Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia has posted a link to this video by Amanda Baggs. I would absolutely love to see a movement which actively brings together the disability and trans* movements (along with all kinds of other diversity-related movements), as "the human biodiversity movement", but in this lifetime, the disability movement and the trans* movement recognising and appreciating one another as allies is enough. Well, in trying to change the world, there's never really such a thing as "enough", but you know what I mean...

Transfeminist blogger Little Light wrote a truly awesome piece called "the seam of skin and scales", in which she declared "It is time for a feminism of the monstrous". While on an immediate level it's about her own identity and experience as a transsexual feminist, there is a hell of a lot in it that disabled people can equally well relate to. Disabled people too have been treated or regarded as monsters, freaks, subhumans, deviants, abominations, angels, demons, changelings, witches. Her writing sparked off a blog war with certain dogmatic "radical feminist" (IMO, their position is neither) bloggers who accused her of plagiarism (with no realistic case whatsoever).

What this is rooted in is the refusal of certain strands of feminism to accept trans* people's realities, in the same way that some of the "straw man" style critiques of disability rights are based on a refusal to accept disabled people's realities. In both cases, the issue is complicated by some well-meaning defenders of inclusion (consciously or unconsciously) embracing in reality the irrational positions that their respective movements have been stereotyped as holding.

Transphobic "feminists" tend to advance the position that transitioning is a "choice", and one which is harmful to the cause of feminism by "reinforcing feminine stereotypes" and/or "men invading women's spaces" in the case of trans women, or by "deserting womanhood to get male privilege" in the case of trans men. This - apart from having no relationship at all to reality except in the minds of people who have almost certainly never even knowingly spoken to a trans* person - completely ignores trans people's lived realities, of, for example, having known they were girls/boys from as early as they were capable of coherent thought (despite physical "evidence" of the opposite), or of having been continuously depressed to a suicidal extent (without anything other than gender dysphoria for that to be reactive to), along with other symptoms including physical pain, to be near-instantly "cured" on starting gender reassignment treatment. Trans*-ness is attributed solely to socio-political factors and even the possibility of its being the way a person was born is excluded without consideration. (For an example, see Sheila Jeffreys' claims here.)

(This is, of course, like all identity issues a complex and contested area - I have encountered (albeit only online and not in "real life") trans* people who claim that they did "choose" to transition, and did not "always" experience gender dysphoria, and I certainly don't wish to deny their realities. Ultimately, I don't think it matters if someone did choose their gender identity - I wrote about the same issue with regard to sexual orientation here... however, no one has the right to, or honestly can, deny the existence of those whose gender identity is, to them, innate.)

I see similarities here to a "straw man" version of the social model of disability, which is often advanced in order to deny it or reduce it to absurdity - i.e., that the social model supposedly states that impairment does not exist, or does not matter at all, and thus denies the reality of people whose impairments cannot be (fully) compensated for by social change. The earliest originators of the social model, such as Mike Oliver and Vic Finkelstein, shared with Marxists (from whom their critique was largely derived, albeit IMO going beyond Marxism in several crucial ways) and second wave feminists a focus on the sociological sphere and how it, rather than nature, was the source of many forms of oppression and injustice, patriarchy and disablism among them. Thus the early social model theorists did not write much about impairment, because the point of their writing was to take the focus away from impairment; however, there is nowhere that I know of, even in Finkelstein, that they deny its reality. However, this "straw man" causes many people, including disabled people, to reject the social model of disability altogether - much as the transphobia of much second-wave/radical feminism causes many trans* people to reject feminism altogether.

(On a more impairment -specific level, I see something kind of similar in some autism advocates who refuse to see autism as a "disability", or even as an "impairment".)

Disabled feminist writers (eg. Jenny Morris, Carol Thomas, Micheline Mason) have sought to redress this balance by "bringing impairment back in" to the social model, influenced by third-weave* feminist and ecofeminist writing about embodiment - arguing that diversity and difference need to be embraced, not denied, and that impairment as a lived reality inevitably informs our understanding of the world as disabled people, just as disablist oppression does, but that this can be seen as a positive thing, allowing as it does for plurality of experience...

*typo, but so appropriate I decided to leave it in ;)

Just as transphobia does not define transsexualism, so disablism cannot (wholly) define disability-as-identity. Just as even in a world completely free from disablism, impairment would continue to exist, and to affect some people negatively through factors such as pain, communication difficulties which cannot wholly be solved by technology, or shortened lifespan, and some impaired people would need medical interventions (whether drugs, surgery or both) in order to stay alive or have a decent quality of life, even in a feminist utopia where the shape of one's genitals has literally no significance socially, politically, economically or culturally (which would be (one aspect of) my utopia), there would still be people who would need hormone treatments and/or genital surgery to have a bearable life because of the physical condition (presently called gender dysphoria, in a gender-free utopia probably called something else) in which their "brain sex" and physical/hormonal sex do not match. Transsexualism is (like) impairment; transphobia is (like) disability.

Sadly, I am almost certain that there are transphobic disabled people and disablist trans* people, just as there are racist disabled people, homophobic black people, classist feminists, sexist working class people, etc, etc, etc. However, I can't help but dream of a banner of diversity under which all oppressed people can unite as allies in one another's struggles. For this to ever become anything like a reality, seeking out of parallels and interrogation of assumptions held about one group or movement by another is a permanent, ongoing necessity... and, just maybe, an alliance between the trans* liberation movement and the disability liberation movement could be the start of such a reality...

Human zoo exhibits, crips and cryptids

Loren Coleman at Cryptomundo has written this article about indigenous African people, of the physically small ethnic groups often called "pygmies", being exhibited in a zoo. He then takes the article into speculation about what would happen if cryptid hominid species such as "Bigfoot" were discovered. I'm not sure quite what to think of the linkage there, but from a human biodiversity point of view this says a lot about the prevalent mentality to me...

quote: "Why do humans in power treat other humans who happen to physically appear to be different than them, so inhumanely?"

if that question isn't fundamental to disability, i don't know what is...

For quite a few years i didn't believe that there actually were such people as "pygmies" - i thought they were a racist fiction invented by imperialist explorers. It wasn't until i read a music review of a collaboration between some electronic music composer and a group from one "pygmy" tribe that i realised they were actually real ethnic groups, who have of course been "othered" and described in almost certainly distorted and exaggerated ways from their "discovery" right up to the present. I'm not sure how much to believe of the claims about them - my cynical bullshit-detector side strongly suspects they are nowhere near as utterly removed from the rest of humanity as they are portrayed to be, and are probably just as much caught up in urbanisation and proletarianisation as any other Majority World people... in fact, given how multicultural Britain is, i reckon there must be some people from these ethnic groups living in some shitty inner-city housing somewhere in Britain (some might even be posting on the internet)...

This made me think, if they did come to live here, would they, in fact, be regarded as disabled people? Their short stature would probably qualify them as Persons of Restricted Growth, but unlike most people in that category, their size isn't an "impairment", but the "norm" for their ethnicity... there are other ethnic groups in which particular impairments are particularly prevalent, such as the people with the "ostrich feet" syndrome, and in which people with those conditions are not particularly regarded as impaired or disabled (i think Mike Oliver writes a bit about this in The Politics of Disablement), but this seems a bit different... would such people, in our society where most things are routinely geared towards people of "normal" (ie tall by global standards) height, would these people be "disabled"? is there a real dividing line, in biological terms, between genetic impairments and "normal" natural genetic variation?

(If anyone from a "pygmy" ethnic group is posting on the internet, then i'd absolutely love to hear their perspective on this...)

Also someone at the Cryptomundo blog posted the perceptive comment: "Did anyone ask the pygmies how they felt about it? Maybe they would have preferred staying at the zoo rather than being shuffled of to “accommodations at a local school,” which I read as folding cots in the gym. Want to treat them with due respect? Give them the choice. Don’t dictate what’s best for them.", which made me consider the perspective of a people whose culture emphasises respect for non-human nature - they might consider being treated like animals less degrading than being treated like children... but, instinctively, to me both those options - both of which are routinely done to disabled people of many types of impairments - are inherently degrading...

Cryptid hominids (stuff like Bigfoot/Sasquatch, Orang Pendek, Almas, etc) are one of my sillier perseverations. Or maybe not so silly, actually, given that it does seem that quite a few autistic people are into that sort of stuff, and there is even a theory, popular among certain segments of the Aspie community, that autism itself comes from the intermixing of modern humans with Neanderthal or other non-modern-human hominid species. (This sometimes gets linked in with speculation about mythological archetypes such as elves, faeries, trolls, etc, and the "changeling" myths - another area i'm interested in, and that absolutely fascinates me from a speculative-fiction kind of viewpoint, but that seems just that bit of speculation too far for me to accept as "real life"... the idea that a Sasquatch might have been captured and put in a mental hospital tho... whoa. Shivers down my spine, even tho i know it's highly unlikely... but that is just what the US establishment would do to one...)

Speculative stuff aside, i do believe there is a real, relevant link between this kind of stuff and disability politics. Disabled people, gender variant people, indigenous peoples of colonised areas, and "mystery" animals have all been exhibited in circuses, theatres, etc as "freaks", have all been the subjects (or possibly objects) of all kinds of pseudoscientific and mytho-religous speculation, have all been described by science in deeply "othering" terms (and then their descriptions used to add "validity" to all kinds of extremely dodgy pseudoscientific politics), and all represent biodiversity in forms that establishments, past and present, have wished to exclude, denigrate, refuse to recognise, or suppress... no wonder, then, if crips identify with cryptids ;)

I didn't actually mean to delve quite so far into the realms of such oddness so early in this blog. Oh well, organic development, i guess...

Biodiversity: an introduction

Right. I've been having trouble writing any actual blog content without feeling like there ought to be something here that's kind of... introductory. (I need to find out how other bloggers started their blogs, i guess.) So i'm now going to attempt to write an introduction to the concept of "biodiversity", and how i see that as relating to disability and the other stuff i'm interested in. Please forgive me for the clunky writing and tendency to waver between the painfully tentative and the pompously would-be-messianic in this post... it's become obvious while writing it that my writing style needs some serious work, which this blog will hopefully provide...

A year or so ago, i was thinking about how strange and disparate my various (online and offline) interests are: disability (including both impairments and social aspects of disability), anarchism, (trans)gender and sexuality issues, ecology, animals/wildlife/zoology, music, literature (each of the latter categories itself subdividing into several different and arguably very disparate subcategories), new social movements, forteana/unexplained phenomena, etc... in an attempt at self-analysis, i pondered how and whether these things were all connected, and whether there was in fact a single, potentially cohesive identity* that i could bring out of all of them.

After pondering this question "What am I?", or perhaps more accurately "What would someone add my various online and offline "identities" up to?", the phrase came to me "I am a lover of biodiversity in all its forms" - that the thread that tied together most, if not quite all, of my interests/obsessions/perseverations was some fundamental love of the diversity of life - both human and nonhuman - a desire for life to be diverse, and to be accepted as such - a love of the unlimited possible forms and processes of life. This concept stayed brewing in the back of my head for quite some time, gradually forming a framework to tentatively hang other thoughts on, until i eventually had it formulated enough to bring up in a conversation with another disability rights activist, not long after i had managed to finally come into contact with other people within that movement.

Until then i had pretty much thought of the "biodiversity as overarching concept" idea as just one of my wild flights of fancy, something on a level with my little personal hybrid theologies/mythologies that in geeky, and often stoned or drunken, conversations with friends more knowledgeable than myself i had made up out of existing belief systems - but his very positive reaction to the concept made me realise that i might actually be on to something here...

The context in which biodiversity is usually understood is a biological and ecological one. Wikipedia says that the term was coined in 1985 and defined as "variation of life at all levels of biological organization"; of course, this is generally applied to the non-human world. My use of "biodiversity" as an umbrella concept, which could potentially cover just about all equality and identity issues, is in taking that and applying it to the human world (which parallels my personal desire to apply concepts and methods of activism and social movement organisation learned from the environmentalist movement to the disability movement): bringing together biology and ecology with sociology. Disability, gender identity, sexuality, race/ethnicity, etc can all be seen as elements of the biodiversity of the human species...

One of the key claims of social ecology is that the same systems and ideologies which lead to the domination, exploitation and oppression of humans by other humans also lead to the domination, exploitation and degradation by humans of nature. Ecofeminism, the product of feminists bringing social ecology together with feminism, is based on the idea that the oppression of women is linked to the domination of nature by linguistic and cultural equation of women with non-human nature: this is also true of the historical and current treatment of disabled people, sexually diverse people, people of minority ethnicities and all other groups of people who are seen to differ from a culturally defined "fully human" norm. The same systems of domination - the triple alliance of capitalist monopoly, statist centralisation and patriarchal social segregation - that threaten ecosystems and natural biodiversity through monoculture farming, exploitation of non-renewable resources and unsustainable economic growth also threaten human biodiversity by oppressing, exploiting, discriminating against and attempting, by methods ranging from enforced proletarianisation of peasant cultures to institutionalisation and eugenic abortion or sterilisation of disabled people in developed countries, to eliminate "abnormal" human beings.

The ecological, anti-war, anti-nuclear etc movements, the feminist movement, the various anarchist or libertarian socialist movements (including co-operatives, social centres, etc), the postcolonial liberation movements and the rights/freedom movements of disabled people, queer people, trans people, and any other minorities, can thus be seen as (although it has to be said they don't all necessarily see themselves or each other as) part of an overall movement in defence of biodiversity (in all its contextually overlapping definitions) against monoculture (in all its contextually overlapping definitions). In this blog, my aim is to draw together and make connections between all these movements, and in doing so demonstrate, in my own small way (as all the people i link to here do in their own large or small ways) biodiverse resistance...

(*I understand that many people will strongly dispute that one's interests either are the source of, or add up to produce, one's identity. The concept of "identity" for me is a complex one, and there are ways in which i believe that, for me (and possibly other autistic people) it actually is significantly different than for most people - that it's possible i/we actually lack some kind of "core" identity that many/most other people have, and thus need to piece together a (no less "real", just differently constructed) "identity" from other things. I'm probably going to blog about this at some point in more detail...)