Ableist Quotes

Being vegan is easy. Are there social pressures that encourage you to continue to eat, wear, and use animal products? Of course there are. But in a patriarchal, racist, homophobic, and ableist society, there are social pressures to participate and engage in sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism. At some point, you have to decide who you are and what matters morally to you. And once you decide that you regard victimizing vulnerable nonhumans is not morally acceptable, it is easy to go and stay vegan

Ethical veganism results in a profound revolution within the individual; a complete rejection of the paradigm of oppression and violence that she has been taught from childhood to accept as the natural order. It changes her life and the lives of those with whom she shares this vision of nonviolence. Ethical veganism is anything but passive; on the contrary, it is the active refusal to cooperate with injustice

Usually what everyone knows is insulting and sort of ableist, because the people who know everything always seem to think of themselves as being perfectly normal.

Any serious social, political, and economic change must include veganism.

Ethical veganism represents a commitment to nonviolence.

And if you are white in a white supremacist society, you are racist. If you are male in a patriarchy, you are sexist. If you are able-bodied, you are ableist. If you are anything above poverty in a capitalist society, you are classist. You can sometimes be all of these things at once.

They go for my leg every time. I don’t know if it’s because it’s shiny and they like that, or if geese are just little ableist fucks, but they’re always trying to attack me.

We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.

In the desire to be respected, people become ableist and prejudiced, straining to present ourselves as happy and healthy when it should be fine to be ace and unhappy and unhealthy, like all the unhappy and unhealthy straight people out there.

So it is always preferable to discuss the matter of veganism in a non-judgemental way. Remember that to most people, eating flesh or dairy and using animal products such as leather, wool, and silk, is as normal as breathing air or drinking water. A person who consumes dairy or uses animal products is not necessarily or usually what a recent and unpopular American president labelled an "evil doer.

We should never present flesh as somehow morally distinguishable from dairy. To the extent it is morally wrong to eat flesh, it is as morally wrong — and possibly more morally wrong — to consume dairy

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

Child sexual abuse teaches us lessons about power- who has it and who doesn't. These lessons, experienced on a bodily level, transfer into the deepest levels of our conscious and subconscious being, and correspond with other oppressive systems. Widespread child sexual abuse supports a racist, sexist, classist and ableist society that attempts to train citizens into docility and unthinking acceptance of whatever the government and big business deem fit to hand out.

Navigating ableist situations is like traversing the muckiest mud pit. Ableism runs so deep in our society that most ableists don't recognize their actions as ableist. They coat ableism in sweetness, then expect applause for their "good" deeds. Attempts to explain the ableism behind the "good deeds" get brushed aside as sensitive, angry, and ungrateful.

The Rest Is Resistance framework also does not believe in the toxic idea that we are resting to recharge and rejuvenate so we can be prepared to give more output to capitalism. What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so.

We are a society that treats people with disabilities with condescension and pity, not dignity and respect.

Many of us who are disabled are not particularly likable or popular in general or amid the abled. Ableism means that we—with our panic attacks, our trauma, our triggers, our nagging need for fat seating or wheelchair access, our crankiness at inaccessibility, again, our staying home—are seen as pains in the ass, not particularly cool or sexy or interesting. Ableism, again, insists on either the supercrip (able to keep up with able-bodied club spaces, meetings, and jobs with little or no access needs) or the pathetic cripple. Ableism and poverty and racism mean that many of us are indeed in bad moods. Psychic difference and neurodivergence also mean that we may be blunt, depressed, or “hard to deal with” by the tenants of an ableist world.

You know, as stupid-ass delusions go, this one is pretty good,” said Sloane. “It’s consistent, it’s logical, and it’s fucking moronic. Gold star.” “Don’t say ‘moronic,’” said Jeff. “It’s ableist language, and you know I won’t stand for that.” “Fuck you,” replied Sloane genially. “Much less offensive,” said Jeff.

A world that is less racist, less Islamophobic, and less ableist will be less queerphobic and vice versa. Hatred and intolerance are nothing but the fear of people who are different from you. By combating one type of hatred, you combat all types of hatred.

If we take the position that an assessment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism is not possible because we are all “on our own journey,” then moral assessment becomes completely impossible or is speciesist. It is impossible because if we are all “on our own journey,” then there is nothing to say to the racist, sexist, anti-semite, homophobe, etc. If we say that those forms of discrimination are morally bad, but, with respect to animals, we are all “on our own journey” and we cannot make moral assessments about, for instance, dairy consumption, then we are simply being speciesist and not applying the same moral analysis to nonhumans that we apply to the human context.

I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.

Would you not call yourself fragile?' 'I am who I am.

I’m not crazy.” “Never said you were. Therapy isn’t necessarily for crazy, though it’s ableist to think that way.

No marriage is fair. It’s complementary. The idea of ‘fair’ is absurd at best, ableist at worst.” We both swivel our heads and look at her. “Ableist?” Freya asks. “Ableist,” Dr. Dietrich says. “Because saying a relationship has to be ‘fair’ implies only a certain balance and distribution of skills and aptitudes is valid. It upholds an arbitrary, damaging idea of ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ as requisite for fulfilling partnership. When in reality, all you need is two people who love what the other brings and share the work of love and life together.

If someone didn’t feel included, if someone felt marginalised, they would form their own band, write their own fanzine, or just call you out on what they deemed racist or classist, sizeist, sexist, body-ableist.

The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.

If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be. We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.

The brutal consequences of "monkey" arise because that word removes some of us from humanity, placing us among nonhuman animals in the natural world. "Monkey" strengthens racist, ableist, and speciesist hierarchies. Once a person is deemed not human, then all sorts of violence become acceptable.

Everything in my family has taught me that it's safer to be a happy spinster than to try and love anybody. And, let's be real, when you look at the entire white colonialist capitalist ableist patriarchy, you don't see a whole lot that looks that great in terms of love and romance for surviving queer Black and brown femmes. Not a whole lot.

Tag, you know ‘half-and-half’ is a pejorative use of an ableist term,” Jett chastises. “Both the minotaur contingent and the centaur contingent find it highly offensive –

Phobias are real mental illnesses, and conflating phobias with bigoted beliefs and behaviors invites further stigma and relies on ableist language.

I, too, feed into the idealization of youth and the ability to do things ‘young people should be able to do’ despite the fact that I know that’s ableist bullshit.

I’ve noticed tons of abled activists will happily add “ableism” to the list of stuff they’re against (you know, like that big sign in front of the club in my town that says “No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism”) or throw around the word “disability justice” in the list of “justices” in their manifesto. But then nothing else changes: all their organizing is still run the exact same inaccessible way, with the ten-mile-long marches, workshops that urge people to “get out of your seats and move!” and lack of inclusion of any disabled issues or organizing strategies. And of course none of them think they’re ableist.

There are some animal advocates who say that to maintain that veganism is the moral baseline is objectionable because it is “judgmental,” or constitutes a judgment that veganism is morally preferable to vegetarianism and a condemnation that vegetarians (or other consumers of animal products) are “bad” people. Yes to the first part; no to the second. There is no coherent distinction between flesh and other animal products. They are all the same and we cannot justify consuming any of them. To say that you do not eat flesh but that you eat dairy or eggs or whatever, or that you don’t wear fur but you wear leather or wool, is like saying that you eat the meat from spotted cows but not from brown cows; it makers no sense whatsoever. The supposed “line” between meat and everything else is just a fantasy–an arbitrary distinction that is made to enable some exploitation to be segmented off and regarded as “better” or as morally acceptable. This is not a condemnation of vegetarians who are not vegans; it is, however, a plea to those people to recognize their actions do not conform with a moral principle that they claim to accept and that all animal products are the result of imposing suffering and death on sentient beings. It is not a matter of judging individuals; it is, however, a matter of judging practices and institutions. And that is a necessary component of ethical living.

Discrimination can be subtle but it undoubtedly exists in the workplace. Corporate culture can be sexist, classist, racist and ableist, and simply having representation without challenging the roots of the ‘isms’ will not get us very far

Disabled people can and do have problems . . . However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken or inadequate. That is ableist thinking.

Most sick and disabled people I know approach healing wanting specific things—less pain, less anxiety, more flexibility—but not usually to become able-bodied. And many of us don’t feel automatically comfortable going to healing spaces at all because of our histories of being seen as freaks, scrutinized, infantilized, patronized with “What happened?” prayed over, and asked, “Have you tried acupuncture?” and a million other “miracle cures.” Able-bodied practitioners without an anti-ableist analysis—including Reiki providers and anti-oppression therapists—often see us as objects of disgust, fascination, and/or inspiration porn. Mostly, these practitioners dismiss our lived expertise about our bodyminds and their needs, or on the flip side, they tell us we’re “not really disabled!” when we insist on the realities of our lives. This carries over into organizing, where, even in HJ spaces, often when the crips aren’t there, there’s no access info and no accessibility.

Stuttering is only a problem -- in fact is only abnomral -- because our culture places so much value on efficiency and self-mastery. Stuttering breaks communication only because ableist notions have already decided how fast and smooth a person must speak to be heard and be taken seriously. An arbitrary line has been drawn around "normal" speech

Don’t be ableist. I already told you, Ever, I’m awkward.” She took another bite of her sandwich. “And awkward people can get away with anything. No one’s going to think, Oh, she shook up that soda. They’re going to say, Oh, that poor weird girl had an accident. And now they’ll discount everything else I do all summer. Which will be useful to us when we enter the Melee. People want you to be one thing. If I’m weird, then people will forget that I’m also a genius who’s here to win.

I don’t need to hold consciously racist beliefs or intentions in order to benefit from being white, any more than I need to hold consciously ableist beliefs in order to benefit from a society that considers me “ablebodied” and thus “normal” and is set up to accommodate the way I move, see, and communicate. But it goes deeper than just receiving benefits and being able to take them for granted. I have also internalized the message of my normalcy and that it is better to be white, and better to be “normal” than “disabled.

An abolitionist is, as I have developed that notion, one who (1) maintains that we cannot justify animal use, however “humane” it may be; (2) rejects welfare campaigns that seek more “humane” exploitation, or single-issue campaigns that seek to portray one form of animal exploitation as morally worse than other forms of animal exploitation (e.g., a campaign that seeks to distinguish fur from wool or leather); and (3) regards veganism, or the complete rejection of the consumption or use of any animal products, as a moral baseline. An abolitionist regards creative, nonviolent vegan education as the primary form of activism, because she understands that the paradigm will not shift until we address demand and educate people to stop thinking of animals as things we eat, wear, or use as our resources.

We cannot end just one form of oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of oppression. Furthermore, inability to see one’s own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others face (in a homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice activism. Those who are privileged must give way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns and methods to the activist’s table.

It doesn’t have to be either healing or organizing: it’s both. Someone asked me at a talk I was giving at Portland State University’s Take Back the Night how we choose between healing and activism. I tried to tell them that healing justice is not a spa vacation where we recover from organizing and then throw ourselves back into the grind. To me, it means a fundamental—and anti-ableist—shift in how we think of movement organizing work to think of it as a place where building in many pauses, where building in healing, where building in space for grief and trauma to be held makes the movements more flexible and longer lasting.

A pessimistic orientation does not seek accommodations with the system. We share the goal of the undercommons, which “is not to end the troubles but to end the world that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed” (Halberstam 2013, 9). Moten and Harney don’t play the liberal game of reform; they are constantly reframing the problems at hand. What questions we ask are crucial—for bad questions yield worse answers, ones that compound the problem. On prison abolition, their intervention is decisive and reconfigures the coordinates of the debate: for them, it is “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery” (Moten and Harney 2013, 42). How do you abolish a society? How do you fight state power? Is anti-statism, ethical (that is, nonviolent) anarchism, the only solution? Is it a solution? Or do you dare to seize power, as with the example of Morales? A universal politics takes these questions to heart. For this reason, its skeptical negativity is put into the service of a more virtuous end: locating antagonisms, rather than settling for conflicts or pseudo-struggles. Its challenge is to sustain the antagonistic logic of class struggle, and avoid the comfort of static oppositions. The cultural Left has its enemies (Trump, Putin, Le Pen, Erdoğan, Modi, Duterte, Netanyahu, Orbán, Bolsonaro, Suu Kyi, MBS, etc.)—and, conversely, notorious leaders blame liberal media, demonizing bad press with the “enemy of the people” charge—but nothing really changes; the basic features or coordinates of the current society remain the same. Worse, the liberal capitalist system is legitimized (only in a free democracy can you, as a citizen, criticize tyrants abroad and, more importantly, express your outrage at the president, politicians, or state power without the fear of retribution) and the cultural Left is tacitly compensated for playing by the rules—for practicing non-antagonistic politics, for forgoing class insurgency and not engaging in class war (Žižek 2020f)—rewarded with “libidinal profit” (Žižek 1997b, 47), with what Lacan calls a “surplus-enjoyment” (2007, 147), an enjoyment-in-sacrifice. That is to say, cultural leftists, with their “Beautiful Souls” intact, enjoy not being a racist, a misogynist, a transphobe, an ableist, and so on. Hating the haters, the morally repulsive, the fascists of the world, is indeed an endless source of libidinal satisfaction for “woke” liberals. But what changes does it actually produce?

You'll break the first time they put you in the sparring ring, and that's before the dragons sense that you're...' He shakes his head and looks away, his jaw clenching. 'I'm what?' My hackles rise. 'Go ahead and say it. When they sense I'm less than the others. Is that what you mean?' 'Damn it.' He rakes his hand over his close-cropped light-brown curls. 'Stop putting words in my mouth. You know what I mean. Even if you survive the threshing, there's no guarantee a dragon will bond you. As it was, last year we had thirty-four unbonded cadets who have just been sitting around, waiting to restart the year with this class to get a chance at bonding again, and they're all perfectly healthy-' 'Don't be an asshole.' My stomach falls. Just because he might be right doesn't meant I want to hear it... or want to be called unhealthy. 'I'm trying to keep you alive!

Standardized testing has always been predicated on a racist, classist, sexist, and ableist standard.

I want to start to dream about what transformative justice looks like when someone who causes harm is disabled. I want there to be something - anything - that isn't ableist written about the intersections of neurodivergence or psych disabilities and being someone who's caused harm. Right now, if someone talks about how our psych disabilities or neurodiversity are intertwined in some way with how we've caused harm, either people fall into apologism: "they have psych disabilities, you can't blame them," or we're seen as monsters: "they have THAT disorder, they're toxic, stay away from them." Mostly, it's the latter, and the ableist demonization of people with psych disabilities as killers and monsters leaves no room for us to really talk about what happens when we are Mad and might cause harm. I want something else. I want anti-ableist forms of accountability that don't throw disabled people who cause harm under the bus, into every stereotype about "crazed autistic"/"psychotic"/"multiple personalities abusive killers." Instead, I want us to create accountability recommendations that are accessible to our disabilities and neurodivergence.

And everyone knows I’m a mad scientist. It’s amazing what everyone knows, isn’t it? Usually what everyone knows is insulting and sort of ableist, because the people who know everything always seem to think of themselves as being perfectly normal. But that’s neither here nor there.

The FBL's attention to individual virtue obscures the ableist attitudes inherent in these billboards. Reeve appears strong and “super” to many Americans, and Ali “courageous,” simply by virtue of their living with a disability. In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.

Can we keep ourselves open to the experience of nonnormativity as something other than inferiority, deviancy, and intolerable aberrancy (a mere ableist projection of the pathologizing fantasies of normativity)?

Creepelyn,” Layla called. “Open up, weirdo. You can’t get out of this one.” Creepelyn? What the fuck? “Oh my god, you’re so mean,” Veronica snickered. “You can’t, like, call autistic people creepy. It’s ableist or whatever.” Layla scoffed. “Oh, please. She’s all, like, ‘I’m so neurospicy, UwU.’ No one cares, and anyway, she’s probably self-diagnosed like half the internet and uses that as an excuse for her extreme creepiness.” “I haven’t noticed her being creepy…” “Shut up,” Layla hissed, slapping the door again. I expected Evelyn to ignore them, so I was surprised as hell when the door swung open. Layla pushed into the room while Veronica lingered right outside. I’d seen enough. No one talked about Evelyn that way, and Layla sure as hell didn’t get to push her around like that. Veronica squeaked when I appeared from my secret spot, her hands flying up in a defensive gesture. “Hi, Ivan. I was just—” I jerked my head to the side. “Get the fuck out of here.

Ableist values are central to animal industries, where the dependency, vulnerability, and presumed lack of emotional awareness or intellectual capacity of animals creates the groundwork for a system that makes billions of dollars in profit off of animal lives.

One definition of a blind spot is “a loss of vision in a particular area,” and it can exist in the psyche just as it can in the periphery of the eye. But because this term is viewed by many as ableist, I would suggest using “lapses of awareness” or “unknown obstacles” as alternative phrases.

Burnout isn't just about not having a deep enough analysis. It's about movements that are deeply ableist and inaccessible.

calling is actually deeply entangled with white supremacist ableist heterocispatriarchy. But it is.

There's nothing wrong with wanting less pain or a different experience of it. There is nothing wrong with wanting to transform generations of passed down trauma. But, what gets more complicated is when those desires bleed into the ableist model of cure that's the only model most of us have for having more ease and less pain. That model and its harsh binary of successful and fixed or broken and fucked, is part of what contributes to suicidality and struggle in long-term survivors.

I always wonder why folks are so quick to think that speaking out against things like sexism, racism, abuse, homophobia, ableism, and such is more divisive than actually being sexist, racist, abusive, homophobic, or ableist. Speaking out against injustice isn’t what divides—instead, acting in ways that are divisive does.

The English language is perniciously ableist. We speak in metaphor that constantly puts down disabled bodies, with phrases like "turning a blind eye" and "it fell on deaf ears" falling from our lips so easily. People often tell me it's not that big of a deal. But, of course, if you've been listening to your language make you sound stupid, ignorant, and useless for your entire life, when you've made a profession out of the craft of language, you cannot help but find pain in the ways that language cuts you to the quick. ASL has its own barbs. All languages do. But English is troublingly ableist. (Page 42)

I recommend trusting that the reason for an algorithmic decision is some kind of preexisting social bias manifesting in subtle (or obvious) ways. It feels unsatisfying to lack a reason, and that dissatisfaction can fuel a drive to achieve social justice. Tech is racist and sexist and ableist because the world is so. Computers just reflect the existing reality and suggest that things will stay the same—they predict the status quo. By adopting a more critical view of technology, and by being choosier about the tech we allow into our lives and our society, we can employ technology to stop reproducing the world as it is, and get us closer to a world that is truly more just.

My expertise lies in racist language. I am still learning to identify my own ableist language, terms like “crazy” and “stupid” and “dumb,” and to catch myself before using these terms and others. I replaced quite a few ableist terms for this paperback edition. I am striving to clean out all forms of bigotry from my vocabulary. It is striking how many terms we routinely use that are dirtied by bigotry.

Stuttering is only a problem–in fact is only abnormal–because our culture places so much value on efficiency and self-mastery. Stuttering breaks communication only because ableist notions have already decided how fast and smooth a person must speak to be heard and taken seriously. An arbitrary line has been drawn around "normal" speech, and that line is forcefully defended.

Actions, words, and ideas can be ableist. In my experience, ableist ideas are not always premeditated or purposeful. They are part of the script we've been handed by a society not built for every body-mind. Thanks, Aristotle. Pervasive and invisible, ableism is so deeply woven into the fabric of our ideas about what is "normal" and "good" that we barely even notice it is there. Once you start to notice ableism, you will notice it everywhere. I do mean everywhere. It is difficult not to maintain ableist practices because they are so ingrained into our individualistic, "pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps" society. Ableism is all around.

To blame the Bible for using disability as a metaphor for weakness is missing the point. Nowhere in the Bible does it command, "Thou shalt use ableist metaphors.

This is what it is like to be disabled in an ableist world. We are erased from a society that never wanted us around and continues to use extreme measures to cure us instead of accepting us as we are.

What we have internalized as productivity has been informed by a capitalist, ableist, patriarchal system. Our drive and obsession to always be in a state of “productivity” leads us to the path of exhaustion, guilt, and shame. We falsely believe we are not doing enough and that we must always be guiding our lives toward more labor. The distinction that must be repeated as many times as necessary is this: We are not resting to be productive. We are resting simply because it is our divine right to do so. That is it! Rest in this proclamation for a moment.

oppressive behaviors aren’t the same as phobias. Phobias are real mental illnesses, and conflating phobias with bigoted beliefs and behaviors invites further stigma and relies on ableist language. For more on these troubling dynamics, I strongly recommend Denarii Monroe’s excellent piece for Everyday Feminism, “3 Reasons to Find a Better Term Than ‘-Phobia’ to Describe Oppression.”1 Accordingly, throughout this book, I’ll be using the terms anti-fatness and anti-fat bias in place of “fatphobia.

As that appalling ableist Paul Steinberg said in the nineteen thirties, ‘A city cannot operate to its full potential if it has to cater for a number of defective individuals'.

The idea of consent in care labor is radical and comes from our experiences receiving these kinds of clusterfucks of so-called care. On sick and disabled internet gathering places I hang out in, it’s a common practice for folks to ask before they offer advice, or to specify when they’re not asking for solutions or tips—or, when they are, what specific kinds of information they’re open to. For many, it’s mind-blowing that disabled and sick people get to decide for ourselves the kind of care we want and need, and say no to the rest. Ableism mandates that disabled and sick people are always “patients,” broken people waiting to be fixed by medicine or God, and that we’re supposed to be grateful for anything anyone offers at any time. It is a radical disability justice stance that turns the ableist world on its ear, to instead work from a place where disabled folks are the experts on our own bodies and lives, and we get to consent, or not. We’re the bosses of our own bodyminds. This has juicy implications for everyone, including abled people.

A non-ableist cyborg politics refuses to isolate those of us cyborged through illness or disability from other cyborgs. Disabled people, in other words, can no longer be cast as modeling a cyborged existence that nondisabled people have yet to achieve. Such a move only strengthens the abled/disabled binary, suggesting that disabled people are fundamentally and essentially different from nondisabled people. If, as Haraway and others argue, technoculture is pervasive, then disabled people are not alone in the cyborgian realm. Cyborg theory could then turn itself to interrogations, for example, of why the very same technology is alternately described as “assistive” or “time-saving” depending on whether a disabled or nondisabled person is using it. In this framework, “cyborg” becomes an opportunity for exploring or interrogating the abled/disabled binary.

Take the credit associated with the aforementioned categories of playing video games and buying diapers. There are many ways to parse the values embedded in the distinction between the “idle” and the “responsible” citizen so that it lowers the scores of gamers and increases the scores of diaper changers. There is the ableist logic, which labels people who spend a lot of time at home as “unproductive,” whether they play video games or deal with a chronic illness; the conflation of economic productivity and upright citizenship is ubiquitous across many societies.

Historically, feminism was built on this mired foundation, first advocating for parity yet paradoxically not always across all bodies, or without anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-classist, homophobic, transphobic, and ableist aims central to its agenda. As a movement, the language of feminism - and, more contemporarily, 'lifestyle feminism' - has in large part been codependent on the existence of gender binary, working for change only within an existing social order. This is what makes the discourse around feminism so complicated and confusing.

We value and honor the insights and participation of all of our community members. We are committed to breaking down ableist/patriarchal/racist/classed isolation between people with physical impairments, people who identify as “sick” or are chronically ill, “psych” survivors and those who identify as “crazy,” neurodiverse people, people with cognitive impairments, and people who are of a sensory minority, as we understand that isolation ultimately undermines collective liberation.

Those who seek greater justice in our world need to work toward a deeper understanding of oppressions. Activists need to develop the kind of understanding that will lead to a lifestyle—a way of being—that works against all oppressions. . . . This requires us to be open to change as a response to what other social justice activists say—especially those advocating against parallel interlocking oppressions. We cannot end just one form of oppression, so we need to be on board with other activists. If we are not, we doom social justice activists to perpetually pulling up the innumerable shoots that spring from the very deep roots of oppression. Furthermore, inability to see one’s own privilege and ignorance of the struggles that others face (in a homophobic, racist, ageist, ableist, sexist society) are major impediments to social justice activism. Those who are privileged must get out of the way so that others can take the lead, bringing new social justice concerns and methods to the activist’s table.

Ableism," her husband said, encountering the concept for the very first time. "Moby Dick...was ableist...to Captain Ahab?" "No," she said, her head in her hands. "No. No. No. No." His grasp of such subjects had always been limited. He believed, for instance, that sexism was when someone was "mean to Mary Tyler Moore.

My acceptance in society is conditional on my behaving respectably and being productive. That’s really a deeply ableist reality, but I shouldn’t pretend it isn’t true. Though having to mask as a desirable, respectable person can be very soul-crushing, it does protect me from physical violence, institutionalization, poverty, and loneliness.

What peer review board decided they would get to be the “sane” scientists, while we had to be the “mad” ones? It’s outdated and more than a little ableist, and it shows a flagrant disregard for the neurological diversity of the scientific community.

Through the neurodiversity lens I began to wonder, for instance, whether since the very start, I had been disabled by a neuronormative society. This, I came to see, had hindered my learning, my development, and my prospects right from the beginning of life. I also began to understand my trauma and mental illness as stemming from not just relative poverty and parental neglect but also a structurally ableist world.