I don’t want to police anybody’s feelings, but it seems a misstep if our primary response as disabled people to the ableism subtending anti-trans legislation is like, “This is why I don’t want a diagnosis for autism!” While self-diagnosis is a wonderful tool for some people, it also is only available to people who don’t need any of the care or resources gatekept by diagnosis. The vast majority of disabled people, including disabled trans people, rely on diagnosis to survive.

The parallel conversations in trans and disability circles about the role of diagnostic categories MUST BE thought together. Though all people (trans and disabled included) deserve access to affirming healthcare, the medicalization of our bodies is NOT done in our interest.

https://twitter.com/badinfinity2/status/1636519350629744645

Whether we’re talking about diagnoses, like gender dysphoria and autism spectrum disorder, or outdated categories, like transsexualism and asperger’s syndrome, medical models were invented to pathologize nonconformance & subjugate trans & disabled people to medical authority.

My dearest neurodivergent friends, I think it’s time to reflect on our attachment to the endless stream of threads attempting to enumerate neurodivergent traits or essential differences between neurodivergence/neurotypicality. First, these threads are almost always written by and for white people and rely heavily on white people’s experiences of neurodivergence, despite that almost none of them acknowledge their own centering of whiteness.

Every semester, at least a few colleagues express anxiety about student participation. I always suggest reframing the issue to honor multiple forms of engagement: how can we invite students to engage in ways that are accessible to them?

Here are some examples from my courses. The Notetaker: some students engage by documenting class discussion, even if they don’t add to it. These students produce a record for the entire class. It’s a great way to ensure all students, even ones who are absent, can return to the ideas produced during each class meeting.

One thing disability justice lends reproductive justice is a reminder that “bodily autonomy” is not a helpful framework for many people deciding whether to have an abortion. Autonomy, we are reminded, is a liberalist fantasy that denigrates the value of interdependence.

🧵1/9 While all people should have the right to make decisions about their own bodies, these decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. We each decide what is best for ourselves by considering our unique material, geographic, social, cultural, and political contexts. 2/9

This is Laurie Haynes, a psychologist who testified in MO last week that the ban on gender-affirming care should include adults.

She is also a member of the NARTH Institute, the most vocal advocacy organization for conversion therapy in the world.

This is a BIG deal. 🧵 I address the history of conversion efforts and NARTH in particular at great length in #QueerSilence, but it’s worth emphasizing here that conversion therapy has *always* instrumentalized ideas about children in order to discipline adults.

Today’s gender is a lesson on neuroqueer gendering. Every day a gentle flourish of the bodymind, a spin within a lifetime of kaleidoscopic transmogrifications. Gender as my choice of tea and the pace of my morning walk. Gender as scraping pleasure off my orientation to the world. I haven’t posted a daily gender in awhile because I received pushback from some nondisabled trans people, who felt that I was mocking the integrity of gender and failing to respect the gravity of many people’s transitions. I never want to hurt anyone, so I stopped.

There’s certainly a lot of misinformation in the #interabled article, but it’s worth remembering the number of carers, who are predominantly women and disproportionately women of color, whose disabilities go unrecognized because of the racialization and gendering of care labor. Christina Crosby and Janet Jakobson have recently referred to this problem as the “geopolitics of disability:” when the apparent independence of some disabled people is made possible by the sublimation of another group’s capacity to be disabled.

I’ve seen a lot threads about the new documentary Pray Away that note how conversion therapy reminds them of Applied Behavior Analysis. As the only Queer Disability Studies scholar who specializes in (and has experienced) conversion therapy, I can confirm the rumors are true! First and foremost, one of the leading psychologists for the development conversion “science,” Ole Ivar Lovaas, literally invented Applied Behavior Analysis. The methods feel similar because they’re nearly indistinguishable.

Anxiety really doesn't care about the kind of day you're having, huh? It just stays ready.

I think it’s time the disability community begin confronting its own hierarchies of capacity and inclination toward approximating abledness more seriously. I’ve been calling it healthism. Disability scholar Susan Wendell long ago distinguished between “healthy” and “unhealthy” disabled people based on how well a person can pass as nondisabled in a capitalist context, wherein ability is measured by productivity. This distinction is useful but insufficient.