Ableism

The loss of Stella Young, a prominent 32 year old disability activist, writer, and comedian this weekend will leave a considerable gap in the landscape of disability advocates. Whilst those who knew the young woman personally will undoubtedly feel her loss, so too, will the great number of young disabled …

I’m on a new medication as of July. It’s working really well, only after I was on it for a few weeks, I started to have a lot of muscle stiffness, cramping and spasticity, including pharyngeolaryngeal pain. A lot more than usual. This is part and parcel to my underlying …

TW: self harm, suicide, depression, forced institutionalization, abuse. (author’s note: I have to be honest, I wrote the first draft of this blog post several weeks ago but had so much trouble bringing myself to proofread it that I’ve just been sitting on it ever since. Writing this proved to …

Earlier SpasticFantastic posted a great article calling out Takei on sharing an ableist joke for which he later apologized. The joke centered around a picture of a woman standing from a wheelchair, with the caption “A miracle has occurred in the alcohol isle”. SpasticFantastic did a great takedown of the …

In case you haven’t heard, at a recent concert, Kanye West told everyone in the crowd to stand up, “unless you got a handicap pass and you get special parking and shit.” He spotted two people who remained sitting, and one raised a prosthetic limb in the air, to which …

Ray Rice is an American football player who has been in the news this week for punching his fiancee in the face and knocking her unconscious in February of 2014. She later married him that March and continues to defend her husband to this day. Rice has been kicked out …

I have a derp cat. Her name is [redacted], but I call her derp cat, because she’s quite derpy. She’s my cat’s sister, and technically, she is not mine, but I feed her and I care for her, and she spends most of her time up in my apartment. If …

On June 26th, I had my gallbladder removed in an attempt to lessen the frequency with which I get pancreatitis. For those unfamiliar, pancreatitis is a condition where for some reason, bile and digestive enzymes back up into the pancreas causing inflammation and pain. In a colloquial sense, my pancreas …

I’m sure you’re all familiar with actor and director, George Takei. First famed for his role as Hikaru Sulu in Star Trek, the Japanese-American actor has turned social-media sensation, and activist for social justice, after coming out as gay in his later years. Like most people, I found great enjoyment in …

In the spring of 2012, two major events happened in my life. First, I went vegan. Then, about two weeks later, I was officially diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. Since I’m lactose intolerant, cutting out dairy helped with my symptoms, but since I started being treated with real medicine around the …