DREDF

The Crip Sense: “I See Women and Girls With Disabilities. In Your Organizations.”

/ Ingrid Tischer / 2 Comments
In my particular line of work — fundraising — I have the “challenge” of making the case for funding cross-disability civil rights work from institutional funders who are still predominately stuck in the disability = tragedy trope.
I need allies from outside the cross-disability communities because that’s how philanthropy — and everything else — works: it’s who you have relationships with, who you can ask for help, give help to.

I was really excited about closing out Women’s History Month this year by developing  and delivering an interactive workshop, “Building Your Organization’s Capacity to Ally With Girls Who Have Disabilities: Principles to Practices” for fellow (sister?) Alliance for Girls members, as part of my work at DREDF.  (To the members who attended — you were GREAT participants!) Based on issues I’d recently written about, I wanted to call it “The Crip Sense or ‘I See Women and Girls With Disabilities. In Your Organizations.’” (Scroll down for 3 “posters” of workshop content.)

I said that part of having The Crip Sense is seeing things that are painful:
  • Disability human and civil rights violations. Way too many of them.
  • Violence against disabled children and adults – especially people of color (PoC) with invisible disabilities — even by caregivers, school personnel, and law enforcement officers, and that such violence at home, in school, and on the street is excused or rationalized.
  • Girls who have internalized stigma that makes it feel “normal” to disown, downplay, or deny having a disability.
  • Girls who hear – even from some disabled people – that “initiative” and “personal responsibility” can defeat systemic barriers born of — and well-maintained by — prejudice, and that they’ve failed if they’re defeated by rigged systems.

Color photo of a fortune cookie that reads,

Why This Workshop, Why Now

In 2017, an inclusive movement includes cross-disability civil rights organizations, as a given.

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Before I Resist and Persist, I Must Exist: Bioethical Choice, Living “Like That,” and Working the Early Shift of Cleaning Up Ableist Narratives

/ Ingrid Tischer / 5 Comments
filmdis-feb-18-1I represented DREDF in this conversation but it’s stirred up a big case of the feels about “choice” and being a liberal woman writer with a congenital disability, and the context this establishes for storytelling, and resisting and persisting. I continue, after 30 years of adult activism, to feel like I have an  early shift of ableism — prepping the world to accept that I exist — while my nondisabled fellow human resisters and persisters get to sleep in.  And if I weren’t white, conventionally educated, cis gendered, unthreateningly queer, and had all sorts of middle-class, married advantages, I’d probably never sleep at all. Image courtesy of the Disability Visibility Project.

 Step 1: I Exist!

As many people who know me know — all too well — I’ve been writing a novel* for the past 400 years or so. The novel, The Cure for Gretchen Lowe, is the exploration of a what-if premise: What if a congenitally disabled woman were offered an experimental therapy that would cure her? The cure itself, Genetic Reparative Therapy (GRT), was never the point of the story because biomedical research, real or invented, never seemed like the most interesting part of the story. What I’ve been stuck on, like an oyster (or barnacle), since the idea first irritated my imagination was how I saw that my character’s situation began as a will-she-or-won’t-she question. From what I’ve observed in 50+ years of congenitally disabled life, that question isn’t typically a question to The Average Reader. “Well, of course a person like that would want GRT!”

I’ve considered that point of view quite a bit — 400 years allows for that — and much more seriously than I make it sound here. But that assumption also irritated me mightily: As a lifelong like-that-ter, I’ve run up against a lot of nonconsensual of-coursing when it comes to my bioethical choices. Simply opening my story — which I refer to as being “CripLit” —  with a genuine choice, not a pro forma one, felt like I wrote in letters across the sky: I EXIST.

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HEY! YOU! MEDIA! Top 5 Notes to Anderson Cooper Regarding His 60 Minutes Hit Piece That I Shot B-Roll For Once Upon a Time When It Was Going To Be About the ADA’s 25th

/ Ingrid Tischer / 5 Comments
60 Minutes Came to the Bay Area, birthplace of the Independent Living movement — a largely unknown chapter of US civil rights history — for footage for a piece about the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
They filmed me, moving about the Ed Roberts Campus (ERC), where I work at Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF), an ERC founding partner.
They filmed other members of the cross-disability community.
And they used that footage to undermine and dishonor the law that made me — a woman with a disability — a full citizen in 1990.
60 Minutes came to OUR house, used us, and told the world people with disabilities are either dupes, greedy, or both.

Top 5 Notes to Anderson Cooper Regarding His 60 Minutes Hit Piece That I Shot B-Roll For Once Upon a Time When It Was Going To Be About the ADA’s 25th

Segment also provides excellent instruction in “How to add insult to injury” by failing to caption its online streaming video

1. If an access violation is so obvious it can be found through Google’s aerial view, then, yeah, I expect a business owner to be able to find it.

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#CripTheVote: You Have Hillary Clinton to Blame for This Blog Post

/ Ingrid Tischer / 5 Comments

For the first time in my 50 years on July 28, 2016, I heard my disabled childhood described through the civil rights lens by a presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. She centered my childhood where I would have: on education and public schools.

It’s difficult to explain the magnitude of hearing my disability identity described in the language of equal rights and not special needs. As meaningful as it was to see a woman accepting the nomination, the tectonic shift I felt was in Clinton accepting me as I am: as a person who deserves respect and can serve the greater good. Not as a diagnosis who has nothing to give or a vote to cast. Certainly not as a target to mock whose vote is irrelevant. Because I have gained my right to an education, I gladly accept the responsibility that comes with answering these two questions:
What do I want to contribute to that is bigger than myself? What is it that I have to contribute?
In using the education that Hillary Clinton and other disability rights advocates fought for, I have a shot at becoming a role model who works together with others rather than being labeled an “inspiration” who is kept at a distance.
The story of childhood is the story of education. The access to and quality of education determines whether that story is one you want to retell over and over, or one that threatens to scare you into silence. The school-to-prison pipeline and the violence that students of color with disabilities experience in the name of “discipline” are the education issues that need urgent action today. I appreciate Clinton’s past work because I see potential in it for protecting the rights of more children and youth with disabilities.
B/w photo of a little boy and younger girl sitting. Both smile and the boy is giving the girl a mischievous sideways glance.

The author and her older brother. Hillary Clinton said, “Every kid with a disability has the right to go to school.” That was an idea – not the law – in 1967 when this photo was taken. Three years later, this little girl could not start first grade at the neighborhood school where her older brother went. The school had a pet rabbit named Pugsly. Inclusion: DENIED. An education: DENIED. A bunny to pet: DENIED.

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The Top 10 Reasons Why Medically Stunting the Growth of Girls With Severe Disabilities Continues To Be an Ethical and Well-Thought-Out Solution To the Problem of Financially Stunting Public Funding for In-Home Social Services, Which Is…Huh, How ‘Bout That.

/ Ingrid Tischer / 9 Comments
5. Because we need to support the decisions of overburdened parents/caregivers of severely disabled children right up until the time when their decisions require public funding for adequate and affordable in-home supports.

It’s feels like it’s 2007 all over again, what with “growth-attenuation therapy” for severely disabled children – many of whom are girls – being back in the news.  And today, just like then, people with disabilities are trying to make this all about them. But there’s no unrecognized ableism framing this “ethical debate.” It’s not as though fearful parents who really do care about their children — who really are severely disabled — are being given an absurd and brutal choice:

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