If you participated in any one of the mass protests across the US today… Thank you for rising up & fighting back.
Please also make sure you’re including disabled people. Wear masks, make events accessible, provide bathrooms & transportation. Plan for accessibility and inclusion.
There can be no social justice without disability justice.
#handsoff #teslatakedown #501010 #uspoli #fascism #disability #disabilityjustice #eugenics
“When you’re chronically ill, you become incredibly skilled at hiding the pain. You learn to deliver a convincing “I’m fine” and smile through things that would make a non-disabled person crumble to the floor.
You learn to push your body and your mind way past any reasonable limits.”
https://www.disabledginger.com/p/why-are-chronically-ill-people-forced
Panda Express becomes the latest business to ban masks for employees, insisting that being able to see facial expressions is necessary for team building.
This is ableist & discriminatory. Employees have to apply to be allowed to mask, putting an undue burden on disabled staff.
Not to mention these are minimum wage paying jobs and many staff may not be able to afford a doctors note or whatever arbitrary “proof” the company will require to allow staff to mask.
Dr Oz: “It is the patriotic duty of all Americans to take care of themselves. It’s important for serving in the military, but it’s also important because healthy people don’t consume healthcare resources.”
They’re all eugenicists. They only care about if you can pay taxes & serve in military.
If you “consume resources”? You’re expendable. Unwanted. Useless eater.
Eugenics and fascism always go hand in hand.
https://deadline.com/2025/04/dr-oz-trump-oval-office-1236371948/
I'm searching for groups that advocate for the mobility challenged – for neighborhood infrastructure improvements.
A friend and I have been discussing neighborhood sidewalks and the challenges some face in places in our city.
Are there organizations that advocate for the mobility challenged so that they can receive neighborhood improvements? Maybe they can give us advice as to legal precedents, tell us about positive trends of municipal action that led to improving things in older neighborhoods that tend to have poorer sidewalks?
Our neighborhood group can engage with City Hall and elected officials better if we have more knowledge and advice.
Are there organizations that offer matching grants for municipalities if they make infrastructure improvements? Are there organizations that conduct surveys and studies to identify recommended actions?
Thanks in advance, and greetings from southern New Mexico.
Tom
#Disability
#DisabilityRights
#Accessibility
#Ableism
#DisabilityJustice
I wrote my Disability Manifesto by thinking of all the Disabled people who have shaped my life. All the brilliant books I've read by Disabled people. All the art we've done, all the organizing we've done. Where we found ways to pace, work with our limitations, and where we won battles not despite our disability but of our Disabled selves.
https://reshapingreality.org/2025/04/15/birds-disabled-manifesto/
Bird’s Disabled Manifesto
I write this truth so all may understand the reality of Disability.
Disability is the one category, the one group, the one community that anyone can join at any time in their life for any reason. Disability is defined by people.
People can be born disabled. People may become disabled due to an infinite set of possible factors: Illness, injuries, accidents, disasters, work, play, and so on.
Disability is inclusive by default. People are of any skin color, any gender, any sexuality, any class, any nationality, any ethnicity, any religion, any disease, any illness.
Because anyone can enter into disability, it is inherently intersectional. All Disabled people have multiple identities that describe them and inform how they navigate the world. Thus we have to be intersectional so we can understand the multitude of oppressive systems that overlap and attack from multiple sides.
Disability is creative. Our survival in a world hellbent on making our lives miserable, impoverished, and painful requires us to create our own forms of joy and resistance. We build up mutual aids, underground communities, and organizing using the tools we have and create.
Disability intertwines with technology in that many of us must use the Internet, our phones, our computers to interact with others. Where we may need devices to breath, to sleep, to eat. Where we may need mobility aids to navigate the physical realm. Where we must use what we have and transform it into what we need. Many of us become cyborgs through our leverage of technology to ease our symptoms, pain, and to help foster our independence and connections. We require collective access, cross-movement solidarity, and a recognition of our wholeness outside of productivity or other measures.
Our needs are diverse, unique to each of us, and thus we burst forth with imaginative and creative ways to exist in spite of the world’s ableism. We lead with the most impacted, we pace ourselves, we balance our symptoms with our healthcare with our other work.
Celebrating Disabled means I am recognizing that Disability, the group in which I exist currently, the truth that I am Disabled does not mean I am less-than, but that I am whole even if society refuses to recognize that. My limitations may make navigating our society harder, but it pushes me to declare and demand a more equitable, just, sustainable, accessible society. The creativity of Disabled activists, our ways of surviving despite our limitations, our talents and skills, our personhood is all to be celebrated.
To become disabled is to enter into a world of diversity and creativity.
To become disabled is to enter into the resistance against oppressive systems that harm and disable and kill.
To become disabled requires us to reckon with society’s health supremacy lies. To realize bodies are diverse and unique in needs; to realize that everyone is deserving of love, of care, of support; to understand how everyone deserves to have their needs met. Holding onto bigotry harms and potentially kills us, and so that must be exorcised.
To become disabled is to enter into a journey of realization, of truth, of rediscovering who we truly are. We can’t hide from the limitations of our bodies and minds anymore. We must bravely face those limitations and find a balance so we can live another day.
Our body/minds are rich and brilliant as they are. As the Disabled, we discover how body and mind are interdependent. How we cannot separate them. We are our bodies, we are our minds, we are both/and.
Disability isn’t a cure. It cannot erase bigotry from our minds and bodies. It only redirects our gaze, intensifies the truth of our relations with one another, and whether we walk through that fire more compassionate and loving depends on our willingness to accept the uniqueness of one another, to let go of what no longer serves us. To grieve that former self, to exorcise the harmful socializations society instilled in us, and to open up one’s mind and body to one another’s truths.
Disabled and newly disabled and formerly disabled all have this chance to explore an alternate view of our reality. To see what has lain hidden under the oppressive systems that alienate, isolate, and exploit us. Some may bunker down within the bigotry society instilled in us, but others break free from that cage and be reborn into a fiery phoenix of relentless hope and compassion.
Our world is changeable. Nothing is set in impervious stone. It all can be broken down and repurposed.
Capitalism, cisgender-hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism — these are all disabling systems. They eat up people and spit them out, and only a privileged few escape the jaws of exploitation. Those privileged few fall prey to the greed and power that turns them into monstrous beasts that devour yet more of us in their quest for more wealth, more power, more prestige. They can no longer see us and them as human beings equal in body and mind, and instead see themselves as beyond-human.
They cannot be reasoned with. They can only be stopped. Violence and fear is their language.
For the Disabled, it is not fear and violence by which we live. It is not our suffering that defines all that we are. Our suffering is but one piece of our stories.
Disability is defined by our rich history, our unique stories, our creative will to live, to find a way to survive, to help one another survive, to speak our truths no matter how vicious others become. To call out the harm perpetuated against us, to demand the healthcare we need to live, to speak truth to our pain and our small joys.
We have persisted throughout history. It is our community, our compassion, our love, our fierce struggle to live that gives us a power the oligarchs and capitalists will never have.
We can defeat the monstrous beasts that exploit, devour, destroy, disable, kill. We can win through the bonds of our diversity, through the truth of our body/minds, through our interdependence on each other, through our support and our demand for justice.
We have won before: won rights, laws, building of technology that aids us.
We can win again.
Not in spite of our disability but because of our Disabled selves.
I write this truth so all may understand the reality of Disability.
Disability is the one category, the one group, the one community that anyone can join at any time in their life for any reason. Disability is defined by people.
People can be born disabled. People may become disabled due to an infinite set of possible factors: Illness, injuries, accidents, disasters, work, play, and so on.
Disability is inclusive by default. People are of any skin color, any gender, any sexuality, any class, any nationality, any ethnicity, any religion, any disease, any illness.
Because anyone can enter into disability, it is inherently intersectional. All Disabled people have multiple identities that describe them and inform how they navigate the world. Thus we have to be intersectional so we can understand the multitude of oppressive systems that overlap and attack from multiple sides.
Disability is creative. Our survival in a world hellbent on making our lives miserable, impoverished, and painful requires us to create our own forms of joy and resistance. We build up mutual aids, underground communities, and organizing using the tools we have.
Disability intertwines with technology in that many of us must use the Internet, our phones, our computers to interact with others. Where we may need devices to breath, to sleep, to eat. Where we may need mobility aids to navigate the physical realm. Where we must use what we have and transform it into what we need. Many of us become cyborgs through our leverage of technology to ease our symptoms, pain, and to help foster our independence and connections. We require collective access, cross-movement solidarity, and a recognition of our wholeness outside of productivity or other measures.
Our needs are diverse, unique to each of us, and thus we burst forth with imaginative and creative ways to exist in spite of the world's ableism. We lead with the most impacted, we pace ourselves, we balance our symptoms with our healthcare with our other work.
Celebrating Disabled means I am recognizing that Disability, the group in which I exist currently, the truth that I am Disabled does not mean I am less-than, but that I am whole even if society refuses to recognize that. My limitations may make navigating our society harder, but it pushes me to declare and demand a more equitable, just, sustainable, accessible society. The creativity of Disabled activists, our ways of surviving despite our limitations, our talents and skills, our personhood is all to be celebrated.
To become disabled is to enter into a world of diversity and creativity.
To become disabled is to enter into the resistance against oppressive systems that harm and disable and kill.
To become disabled requires us to reckon with society's health supremacy lies. To realize bodies are diverse and unique in needs; to realize that everyone is deserving of love, of care, of support; to understand how everyone deserves to have their needs met. Holding onto bigotry harms and potentially kills us, and so that must be exorcised.
To become disabled is to enter into a journey of realization, of truth, of rediscovering who we truly are. We can't hide from the limitations of our bodies and minds anymore. We must bravely face those limitations and find a balance so we can live another day.
Our body/minds are rich and brilliant as they are. As the Disabled, we discover how body and mind are interdependent. How we cannot separate them. We are our bodies, we are our minds, we are both/and.
Disability isn't a cure. It cannot erase bigotry from our minds and bodies. It only redirects our gaze, intensifies the truth of our relations with one another, and whether we walk through that fire more compassionate and loving depends on our willingness to accept the uniqueness of one another, to let go of what no longer serves us. To grieve that former self, to exorcise the harmful socializations society instilled in us, and to open up one's mind and body to one another's truths.
Disabled and newly disabled and formerly disabled all have this chance to explore an alternate view of our reality. To see what has lain hidden under the oppressive systems that alienate, isolate, and exploit us. Some may bunker down within the bigotry society instilled in us, but others break free from that cage and be reborn into a fiery phoenix of relentless hope and compassion.
Our world is changeable. Nothing is set in impervious stone. It all can be broken down and repurposed.
Capitalism, cisgender-hetero-patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism -- these are all disabling systems. They eat up people and spit them out, and only a privileged few escape the jaws of exploitation. Those privileged few fall prey to the greed and power that turns them into monstrous beasts that devour yet more of us in their quest for more wealth, more power, more prestige. They can no longer see us and them as human beings equal in body and mind, and instead see themselves as beyond-human.
They cannot be reasoned with. They can only be stopped. Violence and fear is their language.
For the Disabled, it is not fear and violence by which we live. It is not our suffering that defines all that we are. Our suffering is but one piece of our stories.
Disability is defined by our rich history, our unique stories, our creative will to live, to find a way to survive, to help one another survive, to speak our truths no matter how vicious others become. To call out the harm perpetuated against us, to demand the healthcare we need to live, to speak truth to our pain and our small joys.
We have persisted throughout history. It is our community, our compassion, our love, our fierce struggle to live that gives us a power the oligarchs and capitalists will never have.
We can defeat the monstrous beasts that exploit, devour, destroy, disable, kill. We can win through the bonds of our diversity, through the truth of our body/minds, through our interdependence on each other, through our support and our demand for justice.
We have won before: won rights, laws, building of technology that aids us.
We can win again.
Not in spite of our disability but because of our Disabled selves.
Another autistic child shot by police. We are heartbroken and angry. We know this situation ALL TOO WELL!! Our hearts go out to the teen’s family. This is why awareness isn’t enough - we need accountability and real change! Neurodivergent lives matter. #TheNeuroDuo #justiceforvictor #actuallyautistic #idaho #autismawareness #disabilityjustice #policeviolence #autisticlivesmatter #idahonews #saytheirnames #pocatello
Have you seen the documentary Crip Camp about the summer camp that gave rise to a generation of US disability rights activists?
It includes disability activist-led protest footage that reframes the concept of what protests can be & how they can work. It's a good resource for those who may not know how to answer what access in a protest can look like.
It's more relevant than ever. We warmly recommend it.
https://journeysinfilm.org/product/crip-camp-guides/
#Disability #DisabilityJustice #DisabilityRights #DisabilityAdvocacy #Education #Homschooling @disability @disabilityjustice @disabilityhistory @education @edutooters
United in Port Moody–Coquitlam, we can stop Pierre Poilievre’s cruel clawbacks. Since 2021, we’ve pushed for real change—forcing action on the Canada Disability Benefit and introducing Bill C-422 to end clawbacks hurting people with disabilities. Let’s keep fighting for dignity and justice. #cdnpoli #DisabilityJustice #StopTheCuts #election2025 #election
$100 down, only $4,900 to go! Thank you so much! What a great start! 
ko-fi.com/amyjean/goal... #KoFi #MutualAid #Solidarity #RelocationFund #DisabilityJustice #TransRights
Support Amy Jean Nobles 
Race Matters in the Fight for Social Security
The present crisis in Social Security can only be understood as part of a larger narrative: the halting, uneven progress toward a multiracial democracy, and the current, accelerating efforts to erase that progress completely.
by Andrew Moss in the LAProgressive
"As millions of retirees, persons with disabilities, and other beneficiaries try to cope with DOGE cuts to Social Security (website outages, inordinate wait times on the phone or in person, complete non-service for many), one group stands particularly vulnerable.
"Because of long-standing wealth gaps stemming from discrimination in housing, mortgage lending, and employment, many retired African Americans rely on Social Security as their principal source of income. Their access to other assets in retirement (workplace retirement plans, job-based pensions, home ownership, inheritance) is significantly more limited than that of white Americans. As a result, hindrances to continuous coverage can have serious consequences for people struggling to meet basic needs in nutrition, housing, and health."
read it all at
https://www.laprogressive.com/racism/fight-for-social-security
take action via https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/hands-off-social-security
The Critical Role of Elders in the Fight Against Authoritarianism
by Scot Nakagawa
"The fight against authoritarianism is often framed as a battle for the future, with young people leading the charge. But the elderly, of which I am one at 64 years of age—particularly those who rely on Social Security, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), and Medicare—are not only among those most at risk but also among the most strategically powerful constituencies in the resistance."
one caveat: Nakagawa mentions AARP as part of organizing capacity of elders, but AARP shills for the insurance industry and promotes medicare DisAdvantage, so watch out for them. Otherwise, many good points here. Read it all at
https://antiauthoritarianplaybook.substack.com/p/the-critical-role-of-elders-in-the
see also Social Security Works:
https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/hands-off-social-security
What is DOGE doing to Social Security?
From the Economic Policy Institute:
Social Security faces a long-term shortfall that would be easy to fix if Republican lawmakers listened to voters. Republican and Democratic voters alike support addressing the shortfall through revenue increases, not benefit cuts. Options for raising revenue include eliminating the cap on taxable earnings, so billionaires like Musk no longer contribute the same amount to Social Security as doctors and lawyers. Claims that Social Security is in crisis—and attempts to manufacture a crisis—serve to distract from this popular option.
The alleged rationale for putting an unelected billionaire and his team in charge of SSA and other government functions is rooting out waste. But Social Security’s administrative costs are tiny—less than 1% of spending—and improper payments are similarly inconsequential. Meanwhile, a top priority of the Trump Administration is extending tax cuts that overwhelmingly flow to wealthy people like Musk.
If it ain’t broke, DOGE will break it. As former Commissioner Martin O’Malley warned, “When they can break it, they can say, ‘Aha! We told you! This program never worked, and we were just ripping the band aid off.’” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren told Frank Bisignano, the self-described “DOGE person” who Trump has nominated to run the agency, that the only way to significantly reduce Social Security spending without Congress instituting unpopular benefit cuts is to make it very hard for people to access them. If this makes people frustrated with the agency, that’s a plus for an administration that wants you to believe that government is broken.
https://www.epi.org/blog/what-is-doge-doing-to-social-security/
take action: https://actionnetwork.org/event_campaigns/hands-off-social-security
Ableism Is the Go-To Disguise for White Supremacy. Too Many People Are Falling for It.
Agents of white supremacy count on society’s existing behaviors toward the mentally ill—and all disabled people—to aid and abet their agenda without anyone taking a closer look.
By Imani Barbarin
Living with chronic illness is hard enough without letting guilt stop us from accessing what we need.
Capitalism & ableism have conditioned us to see rest as a failure. To feel bad for needing accommodations.
Accessibility IS resistance. Survival is a way of fighting back.
Rest. Get that mobility aid. Ask for help.
Sharing for a friend of a classmate
> Hi, my name is Arthur. I'm doing a fundraiser to help me get a car that I can install hand controls in due to my spinal cord injury in 2014, which left me with no leg use.
> I'll be using this car so I can drive myself to work, medical appointments, college, and to feel independent and not rely on people to drive me anywhere. I'm currently in college majoring in photography and possibly training to be a 911 operator.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/arthur-needs-your-help-for-mobility-freedom
Check out my latest article:
Lets get disability on the agenda this federal election.
Hello! I'm a disabled, neurodivergent writer based in Tiverton, Devon.
I write about disability, identity, education, democracy, and the stories that systems overlook.
Exploring liminality, unmasking, and the quiet power of reflection.
Blog: dispatchesfromthethreshold.substack.com
Inoculating the Odd in AuDHD 
