Thread by @JillianWeise

My email this morning to HR. I am sharing this an activist practice & in peace & love.

"Dear HR, Your employees have:

1) threatened me
2) sexually harassed me
3) discriminated against my identities
in front of all my colleagues and all my students on listserv

4) disregarded my consent
5) kissed me on the mouth as if I ever wanted that
in front of another colleague, & wife of the colleague who committed battery against me

So I am going to need your Office to change your tone.

I am going to need you to learn about and embrace disability justice principles [link].

And then I am going to need you to begin practicing disability justice principles.

Towards me.

In the very mechanisms that your office uses regularly.

sinsinvalid.org/blog/10-princi…

I don't know why you practice what you practice, in your tone and correspondence, towards your colleagues.

But the practice of threat (you have to do this by this date or else you will receive a policy violation, etc) and intimidation does not work for me.

I am going to need a radical shift in your tone towards me, personally, regardless of whether you adopt this shift more broadly towards the rest of your colleagues.

This will not happen overnight, as you are going to need time to learn about disability justice principles,

and then adopt those principles towards me.

So the intake interview on [NAME] will, necessarily, move to next week, or a later week. I will wait for you to learn about disability justice principles and I will wait for you to put what you learn into practice

so that the harm towards me from this University is minimized and so that my dignity as a disabled person is preserved by the reporting process.

With kindness,

Cy

The Cyborg Jillian Weise also
Cy. Weise also Cy. Borgweise

Poet & Associate Professor
Founder, Borg4Borg

Writer, NYT as here [link] and here [link]
Email: [e-mail]
Website: jillianweise.com

About my name: I decline the title "Dr." I have 22 years of experience with ableism from doctors of philosophy and 40 years of experience with ableism from doctors of medicine

I choose the title "Cy." and that means I am disabled and I am a cyborg. I go by "Cy" until the time when more disabled people feel at liberty to identify as cyborgs, or to self-describe and identify as we wish.

My pronouns are cy/cy's/cyself or she/hers/herself.

I honor all preferred names & pronouns.

My favorite poem is 'Mabel' by Grace Paley: 'Mabel I don't know how to write this / poem which is after all a love poem / only about the way we often / looked at each other with something / like the plain pleasure of two women ...' "

END OF EMAIL TO HR

Invitation to practice #DisabilityJusticePrinciples
yes, even inside #HumanResources
especially inside HR and #Academia

#DisabilityTwitter #AcademicTwitter