🧵 It's hard to know what the actual situation is when most of the folks answering are presumably abled.

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 It's hard to know what the actual situation is when most of the folks answering are presumably abled. Abled folks actually have very little idea of how inaccessible and ableist their surrounding environments are.

However, I am aware from reading what disabled people in other countries write that situations are no better or even worse than the US in many of the Anglophone countries and many European countries.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AmerExit/comments/1gt0zy6/im_disabled_what_are_my_chances_realistically/ @disability

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 2/?

This is incredibly depressing because ADA is largely unenforced in the US. My experience as a grad student at my state's public university has illustrated how unenforced things are. It's 34 years post-ADA and UC flouts ADA and other disability law on a daily basis. This place has destroyed my health, using my own tax dollars & tuition to do it.

The idea that the "minimum wage" conception of rights that ADA is is still better than most of what's out there in @disability

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 3/? the European and/or Anglophone world really illustrates how entrenched ableism is and how little abled people are prepared to change that. It's such a low fucking standard and it hurts everyone because disability is a very very common part of being human.

Keep an eye on how many immediately talk of disabled people as "public charges" without understanding that for a lot of disabled people, they're herded into that by systemic ableism.

@disability #Ableism

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 4/? If you use public money, including ours, to build infrastructure, schools, and workplaces that fence us out, it makes it very very difficult to get educated and to work. That is, even if abled people were not bigoted as fuck when it comes to disabled people. You've segregated us.

Then if we try to support ourselves by founding our own businesses or freelancing, you punish us as proof we're "not really disabled" because your thinking is so fucking binary and you know NOTHING @disability

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 5/? about how disability works while simultaneously thinking you're the experts on it and staffing disability cop offices nearly entirely with abled "experts".

If you make it incredibly difficult to get an educating, to get training, or to even exist in public spaces including schools. If you don't enforce bare minimum laws like ADA in workplaces...if you fine or sue disabled people for trying to find other means of support, why act surprised that we become "public charges"? @disability

[meganl@mas.to]

🧵 6/? That "public charge" situation is entirely something of systemic ableism's own creation. The same way that right wingers attack democratic governments and then say "See? Government is bad!"

I'd like to see more abled people follow disabled people, read disabled writers, journalists, artists, and scholars. I'd like to see abled people get active in calling bullshit on this system because this international ableism is biting particularly hard right now. It's your future.

@disability