Eyes on whose prize

I want to speak my own truth, and honor the words of others when they speak theirs. I want to be an ally, but I don't want to get in the way. I want to make the connections between my experiences and other people's in ways that broaden my understanding and avoid the narrowing of concerns into little camps of people struggling for recognition. I want to interject disability issues into conversations where they seem unspoken or invisible, and I don't want to feel selfish for doing it. And I want other people to do the same, so I can see where I've centered my own concerns and marginalized someone else's. I want to see how the whole big mess fits together.

Wanting so much usually keeps me rather quiet, outside of the small community of disability blogs that have become a comfort zone for me. And the comfort has been needed lately when the Ashley Treatment -- a story so fundamentally about attitudes on bodily and mental difference and disability -- continues to be debated everywhere. Only on sites dedicated to bodily and mental difference specifically, have I seen any real re-centering of that debate away from ableist tendencies to make allowances for behavior or words that dehumanize the less than normal body. I've felt myself turning in protectively to my dis or dis-cool friends: Penny, Connie and Steve, WCD, Amanda, I'mFunnyToo, David. . . .

It's no coincidence I feel safest among those who also have an obvious stake in whether or not physical or mental ability is used to determine how we treat people. It's no coincidence that our widely disparate experiences of disability arrive at the same political sympathies. And I suppose it's no coincidence that when we're discounted as irrelevant or fanatical about the topic at hand, we're all discounted together.

And today, Kevin at Slant Truth reminds me that this is how the system of oppressions works, and that it's happening elsewhere and isolation isn't the right response:

I will come out proud and say that I am supportive of the Trans community and will work from here on out for their full personhood. The hate I have seen lately is beyond my comprehension. I reject it all. Fuck you if you aren’t down.

Oh, I've more to say on this, now that I've resolved to begin. But I wanted to get this much out there now.