Every person need to be taught disability history
Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.
Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”
Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.
Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.
Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.
Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”
Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.
Teach about us.
Oh! Oh! I got one! Meet Edward V. Roberts-
Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.
Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.
This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.
Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.

Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.
After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.
Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a "hopeless cripple" whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.
Here is a great online course for disability history!!
“Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in.” – Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco
According to disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole, these advocates “showed us what being an ally could be. We would never have succeeded without them. They are a critical part of disability history and yet their story is almost never told.”
Please read up on the Black Panthers' involvement in the 504 movement, they were integral to the occupation lasting as long as it did and were INCREDIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS! They are more than a footnote in that part of disability history, and I want more people to know this part of their legacy!
Read about Bradley Lomax (and his aid and fellow organizer Chuck Johnson, who I've struggled finding sources on outside of articles on Mr. Lomax :( ) here and here! Together the two were integral in bringing Black Panther Party organizing and activism to the disability rights movement!
I wish there were more information on Mr. Johnson, as his work is dear to my heart as someone who also requires caregiving. ;3; <3 Considering how little information there even was available online for Mr. Lomax just ten years ago I am hoping we get more coverage of Mr. Johnson's contributions to this important part of disability history sooner rather than later. I do not want his activism ignored!
Do not let the full richness of our history be whitewashed! The Black Panthers kept the protestors fed, they HEAVILY publicized the protests in their paper The Black Panther and agitated on the protest and protestors behalf, and paid organizers' way to Washington to pressure the HEW secretary to actually sign the damn act. In turn, the Panthers did this because the Oakland ILC did outreach to them, and helped Mr. Lomax with transportation. This is solidarity buried under focus on the white organizers. Please please please cherish it. Keep it close to your heart, read about it, celebrate it, share it!
Obviously there were more Panthers who helped but I have already lost the first draft of this and I'm starting to fade -- here's two more detailed sources to read for more, and I highly recommend you do!
Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is... drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren't joining this site anyway, you're not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.
Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can't keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You'd kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.
my dad likes to call the stretches of time where you’re not creating “dreaming periods” and says that they’re meant to allow you to absorb all of the beauty, life, and inspiration from the things around you so that when you’re able to create again, you will have fanned your spark back into a flame. sometimes its hard to see those moments as anything but stagnation, but he always says that they’re natural and healthy and needed—things that should be embraced rather than feared.
Why...why isn't she wearing pants?
it's more of a pussy out look
Mario Heritage Post
128x128 transparent ibuprofen png for when u and the discord server want to take ibuprofen together
putting ketchup on fries is too permanent for me … i have to dip . i control the sauce
Pequeño pero matón
They should put these on all the civil war miniatures. Spice things up a little
Being raised by areligious jews with 0 exposure to christianity outside pop culture is so fun. One time I asked my ex-catholic friend why a picture of jesus had a bristle crown and she looked at me like I was insane. One time I heard someone mention the "lance of longinus" and responded, word for word, "Like from Evangelion?" One time during a history lesson my professor described an important monk and scholar as "Dominican" and I spent the rest of class super confused and hung up on it because I was very sure that the Dominican Republic didn't meaningfully exist as an entity back then, maybe she meant he was a native Taino or something but that's a weird way to say that and I'm pretty sure this was pre- European contact? Really fucks people up when they realize I genuinely have no idea.
This but it's my partner taking an art history class in college and the professor looking at them like they grew a second head when they answered "What came out of Jesus' wound when he was stabbed on the cross" with "...Blood?"
Additions that prove my point by mystifying me because what on earth would come out of a nail wound besides blood. Are you telling me it was something besides blood. What was jesus full of that wasn't blood. You guys are scaring me
Apparently it was water?? I guess he was also stabbed on top of being crucified (which feels like overkill imo) and water came out, which was a huge deal in medieval symbolism and also to my medieval poetry professor, who was genuinely shocked and upset that I didn’t know. This man fully docked me points because I, a whole ass Jew, hadn’t somehow heard about the secret waterballoon Jesus lore that I guess everyone is supposed to like… intuit
On the plus side, it does lead to some absolutely wild medieval Jesus art of angels tapping him like a fucking keg
a friend of a friend went to go see passion of the christ for kicks without knowing anything about the story
when jesus was hauled up on the cross he turned to my friend and said, in all evident sincerity, 'i know they're not going to kill the main character but how's jesus getting out of this one?'
Apparently a subset of the slur discourse crowd thinks using words like "queer" is something people are only doing ironically.
well, that's it, i'm making a shirt that says 'non-ironic faggot'
"Queer and sincere"
I've seen the use of the "crazy sjw feminist" stereotype from gamergate days die down a little but one thing that remains ever present is the way fat activists are treated. Anything they say is dismissed and ridiculed, they have insults hurled at them with so much cruelty and disdain. The moment a fat person asks any group of people to change their worldview on fatness, it's immediate insults and brick walls. This includes left leaning people. Everyone loves to gang up on fat people, it hasn't changed a bit.
I find that left-leaning people almost always justify their fat bigotry in science-y terms (not actual science on fatness, which they never know anything about when questioned), and right-leaning people in terms of character traits they believe are associated with fatness.
To me, it's all excuses to keep enjoying higher social status and apparent moral superiority for the non-act of existing in a thin(ner) body, or having lost weight. In other words, people are addicted to their thin privilege and are not about to let reason stand in the way of their enjoyment of said thin privilege.
Yeah, I find that thin leftists predictably buy into the “obesogenic environment” (what Cat Pause called the “poor fatties can’t help but make unhealthy decisions”) theory, and will outright say “once we make the world a better place fat people will stop existing!”
Which both ignores that body variation is natural and there will always be some fat people, and ends up positioning being fat as the worst thing in the world and the driving reason for change. All of the things that are advocated for under this umbrella (better access to a wide variety of food, exercising in a way you enjoy, less crushing work days, etc) are good things in and of themselves! You don’t have to argue that they’re good because they get rid of fat people, and if you frame that as their main benefit you’re doing everyone a disservice.
lowering the social stigma of gender nonconformity also lowers the threshold of how bad people have to be suffering before they’re willing to discuss their feelings openly. I guarantee you that a TON of humans who felt vaguely alienated by/uncomfortable with their assigned gender have lived and died within a cisgender identity framework, because the enormous social cost of being honest just wasn’t worth it if they weren’t miserable. that was a bad thing!
letting people weigh their options for themselves without putting a thumb on the scale is freeing. so of course we’ve started hearing people discuss wildly unusual ways of experiencing gender. it does not matter whether the teenagers who made up the goofy-sounding new gender term you’re annoyed about end up being capital-T trans or not. it just matters that they feel safe talking about it, because everyone benefits from that. you cannot lower one threshold without lowering the other. this is a feature, not a bug. this is a good thing!
Yes, and this is also why I’m such an advocate for pulling “crossdress“ and its derivatives back from the semi-stigmatized status as ‘outdated relics‘ within the queer community. Because even ignoring the way that “crossdressers and gnc folks are all just eggs”* rhymes well enough with “trans folks are just crossdressing“ that it may singlehandedly prove Horseshoe Theory, gender nonconformity is, in fact, alive and well as a separate phenomenon and should therefore not be lumped in with transgenderism.
I also want to expand OP’s second paragraph argument: Not only does destigmatizing gender nonconformity necessarily help destigmatize transsexuality, it can also help cis folks become more confident in their identity. There’s a post by @froody et al. about how “going through a period of questioning your gender that ends with ‘I am cis’ lets you unlock Cis+“ (1), and that fact’s entirely true. Experimenting with your gender presentation can both provide more pleasing ways to present cis and (help) determine if you’re trans.
*See, eg. the misuse (2) of Will Wood’s I/Me/Myself by some of his fandom to claim that he’s trans, rather than cis and gnc.
And like, we should also accept that the grey area between ‘being trans’ and ‘being gendernonconforming and cis’ is very fucking blurry and always will be and some people can’t be coherently describes as trans or cis and that’s good. That space between yet another binary is a thing to treasure.
Sand Under a Microscope.
There are roughly 8,000,000,000 grains of sand per cubic meter of beach, and roughly 700,000,000,000 cubic meters of beach on Earth. That's 5 sextillion grains of sand. An incomprehensible number, and yet every sand grain is microscopically unique. Like a snowflake, no two are the same.
soxy i'm sorry but what the fuck does "crab rangoon is a food thats an animal" supposed to mean
i bet u feel so stupid rn. theyre grazing















