Category: opinion

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Navigating the Disabled World with Multiple Health Conditions

Teenager girl with Compass Reading a Map in the forest

I am someone who has newly entered many spaces. I often lurk from the beginning, aware I don’t know anything. As a multiply-marginalised and multiply-disabled person, it has taken me a while to get any grip on who I am and how I experience the world.

Finding labels like nonbinary, queer, disabled, and neurodivergent have been a powerful tool for me in a society that avoids talking about these communities. However, it has been a rocky journey walking among the different sub-categories of the disabled community, as someone who embodies more than one. 

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all Columns Disabled and Sexual Essays opinion

Disabled and Sexual: The Met Police Guidance on Women’s Safety is Useless to Disabled Women

british police lamp sign saying "metropolitan police"

TW:  This article discusses sexual violence, domestic abuse and abuse towards women and femmes, in particular disabled women and femmes. It also mentions police misconduct as well as the murders of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa. Please practice self-care. 

Disabled and Sexual is a monthly(-ish) column by Hannah Shewan Stevens which will explore all the challenges, comedy, and fun that disabled people experience as sexual beings, even while we are desexualised by a predominantly non-disabled society.

This month, the Metropolitan police’s misguided advice on women’s safety, reminded every woman and femme of the inescapable knowledge we live with daily: none of us are safe.

The Met advised anyone concerned about being approached by a lone male police officer to ring 999, “shout out to a passerby, run into a house or wave a bus down” for help. It also suggested quizzing the officer on their reasons for the stop. 

In the wake of the trial of Sarah Everard’s killer and the murder of Sabina Nessa, the police’s PR face has been an undeniable mess but for disabled folks, the latest advice felt particularly ignorant and exclusionary. 

A blind person cannot easily flag down a bus for help, a wheelchair user may not be able to run for their life and a non-verbal person is incapable of quizzing a police officer. 

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Why Being a Disabled Freelancer on Universal Credit is a Double-Edged Sword

a white woman with brown hair holding a camera up to her face
Image of Shona - Fordtography

I’ve been on a mixture of Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) and Universal Credit since I was 17 years old, due to my disability limiting my ability to work. Both are a benefit that can support people who are unable to work, or unable to work full-time hours.

I was never able to get a Saturday job like my friends due to my disabilities, nor attend university. So at a young age I quickly found myself with very few options – and a family unable to support me financially. 

At that age, I had no idea that accessible work options even existed, so I truly believed that I would never find a job that I could do.

Being able to sit here today and say I have found accessible employment, that I can do whilst receiving Universal Credit, a vital safety net, is amazing. But, it’s also a double-edged sword and not the life-changing moment I’d hoped it would be. 

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all Columns opinion Pain Chronicles

Pain Chronicles: Being Fat Isn’t a Disability, but Society’s Attitude to it Can be

an old theatre with red seats and cream walls

Pain Chronicles is a monthly(-ish) column from Caroline McDonagh-Darwin about coming to terms with living with a chronic illness. It will include funny stories and brutal honesty, with some thrown in chats with her mum Shaz, and other friends too, along the way. 

For her 50th birthday, I took my mum to see Matilda in the Palace Theatre in Manchester. We were all the way up in the heavens – having to pay £2 for the tiny binoculars fancy women have on sticks in films set in the early 20th Century. But we didn’t let that stop us having the time of our lives.

Before booking, I’d scoured the access information on their website (which was, and still is, limited). I knew the lift went to the rear circle and there would be almost no steps for our back row seats. I knew they had a disabled toilet.

What I didn’t have is much information on the seats themselves.

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Abortion is a Disability Rights Issue – and Not Just Because of Eugenics

A yellow sign on the floor "You always have a choice" with a pair of shoes visible in the bottom of the shot

TW: Abortion, eugenics, sexual assault/rape.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week or so, you’ll have heard about Texas’s bill banning abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy – before most people even know they’re pregnant. If you don’t live on Twitter, though, you may have missed eugenics creeping into the debate.

A tweet from Richard Hanania of the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology points out that you generally can’t screen for Down’s syndrome before about week 10 (the NHS says you can screen for it and Edwards’ and Patau’s syndrome between weeks 10 and 14), and that lots of those who find out their child may have Down’s choose not to continue with their pregnancies. 

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What Happens if You’re too Broken for the NHS?

Two people (heads not in shot) in a therapy session, one is balancing a notepad on their knee

By all accounts, a lot of the stigma that once existed around mental health has been eroded. Studies show that people’s knowledge of and attitude towards mental health issues has significantly improved in the past decade, with a Time to Change survey reporting that since 2007, 4.1 million people have improved attitudes towards mental health. So, these days, it is a lot easier to open up about your mental health.

But it’s not enough.

We’re sold this story of everything getting better if we only just speak up -– like the only thing holding us back from recovery is ourselves – but the reality is a lot more complicated than that. A lot of public discourse emphasises how so many people with mental health issues are ‘suffering in silence’ and that if they only reached out to get help, everything and everyone would be rosy. But that’s not the case.

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No Spectrum 10k, Autistic People Don’t Want to Know the Cause and We Don’t Need to be Cured

A white woman with brown curly hair looking at her reflection in the mirror and smiling

Trigger warning – This article discusses eugenics in relation to finding a “cure” for ableism.

This week, we saw the launch of Spectrum 10K – a project aiming to gain DNA samples from 10,000 autistic people and their families to examine our genetics, to see how our experiences “shape our wellbeing”. It aims to be the largest study done, but after its launch by celebrities such as Paddy McGuiness in the media completely uncriticised, it has quickly raised alarm bells across the autistic community. 

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Environmental Activism is Ableist. Here’s What we Need to do About That

a container of colourful plastic straws

Intersectionality has been one of the buzzwords we have seen a lot of lately, especially when it comes to activism. Sometimes criticised as a product of the ‘woke brigade’, the idea is to be as inclusive of different demographics when it comes to taking up a cause. What is not always discussed, however, is how environmental activism lacks inclusion for disabled people – to the point of ableism. 

Cultural conversations have centred around the subject of banning disposable items, including plastic bags, straws and cotton buds. According to the BBC, the delay in the UK for banning single-use plastic straws and cotton buds was due to the pandemic – but points out that they are still available if disabled or for other medical needs.

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‘Lacking in transparency, ethics, and compassion’: NICE pauses publication of ME guidelines

A white woman sleeping curled up in a bed, the colours slightly washed out

When NICE paused publication of the new ME guidelines this week it rocked the community that lived with the condition. Danielle Watts discusses why the harmful treatments some professionals are opposed to cutting out can’t be allowed to continue.

When Daniel Moore was a child he developed myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). At the time ME was often described as ‘yuppie flu’, thought mainly to affect the middle-classes and to be a symptom of laziness rather than any serious illness.

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Why the Channel 4 Paralympics Advertising is Angering Disabled People

Billboard for Channel 4's Paralympic coverage, black text on yellow background reading "It's rude not to stare"

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Paralympics. On the one hand it does give elite disabled sportspeople a platform and raises awareness, but on the other the coverage is often surrounded by a lot of inspiration and trauma porn.

That for me can put a dampener on the whole proceedings, so when I heard that Channel 4 had set out its most ambitious ever Paralympic plans I was excited. With an over 70% disabled presenting team, live subtitles, audio describing and sign language it sounded like a real effort was being made to break the mould.

However the advertising campaign has let it down.

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