Saturday 5 March 2016

On Being Disabled and Angry

(A bit of history/context, I initially published this in the 'Fans for Accessible Conventions' FB group after seeing a few people being criticised for being angry. Not for being angry at someone, just for being angry. It proved very controversial, with a lot of people liking it and a lot attacking it. I've changed one sentence so that it isn't specific to con-going and corrected one grammatical error. I stand by it as a necessary reasonable adjustment/accommodation to disabled people's access needs)

I think I have to say this, because it seems to be coming as a surprise to some of the people here.

Many of us are angry.

We're angry because we run into access barriers every day that exclude us from living an equal life.

 Some of us have faced massive, career-destroying, life-destroying discrimination. We have little tolerance left for discrimination in any form, even inadvertent or passive.

Maybe you only think about access when you see someone visibly disabled having a problem getting somewhere, but for us it's a 7 days a week, 366 days a year issue. It never goes away.

When you tell us not to be angry, that's tone policing. It says we are not entitled to be angry.

You don't get to judge whether we should be angry, only we do.

So don't.

Thank you for listening.