Tag: Disability

Doctor Who and the Disability Discourse

I know all the meltdowns on social media were about the trans character and actress on the new Doctor Who, but what about the disabled one? Cos Shirley Anne Bingham is evidently cis and played by a cis actress, Ruth Madeley, but still, casting a disabled person as a disabled character is as “woke” DEI representation as a trans one, right? Someone’s got to be aggravated by that, surely? Twitter did not disappoint:

Cue a bunch of people advising his majesty that some people in wheelchairs are actually capable of doing that, including me:

Which was a slightly… aggressive response, perhaps, and it drew a response from someone that went “Ew no, I don’t want people like this in my community” which I’m still not sure if that was aimed at me or him, though I suspect it was the latter, i.e. she was more appalled at this clown potentially becoming part of the disabled community than at the clown wishing disability upon him. Anyway, I stand by it, and as you may see I’ve had an awful lot of likes on my tweet, more than I can ever remember having (except maybe for one I made after 2013 when I congratulated News Corp for winning that year’s federal election).

As for Garbageman, he’s since deleted his account. Which means that, however inadvertently, I took part in one of those Twitter activities I’ve always abhorred, i.e. I participated in a pile-on that drove someone off the platform. Somehow I feel less bad about this than I suspect I should, I’m actually kind of OK with this. Oh well.

Anyway, our next subject is still there; after asking a similar question the mobility of Shirley Anne’s legs, someone whose posts are private replied and then he said:

Because—as he actually said to someone else who called him out on this shit—a fully disabled actress would be “more representation” as if representation were something you can actually quantify and measure. Just how disabled is “fully”? Would you settle for the character and/or actress being paraplegic? Quadraplegic? Dead? Cos you don’t get any more disabled than not being alive at all. You tell me. I mean, Ruth Madeley needs those wheels to get her around, but she’s not completely paralysed. Not only does she have spina bifida, she has the fucking nerve to only be disabled to a degree that these goombas find insufficient. I mean, FUCKING LOOK AT THIS:

Being disabled and flexible enough to do that? Political correctness gone mad, obviously. What a cow.

And he called me a “mozza” when I called him out. What was that even supposed to mean? Did he compare me to Morrissey? Good grief. I haven’t been this insulted in a LONG time. He is, of course, whining about being called “ableist” and such things… honestly, just accept the fuck-up and that some people know more than you about some things. It’s OK to learn.

The funny thing is, I never even noticed what Ruth Madeley’s legs were doing in the first place. It was these dickheads going off about it that drew my attention to it, and got a bunch of people snapping back at them. All I know is that, if the day comes when I have to rely on a chair to get around, I want it to be packing heat like Shirley’s…

Doctor Who and the Davros Discourse

So not all Doctor Who fans who were looking forward to the return of Russell T. Davies as the showrunner are thrilled by his first effort:

Yeah, all-walking all-talking all-dancing all-singing Davros (OK, maybe not the singing and dancing) in the new Doctor Who Children in Need special has really got on some people’s tits. Because I’m not a complete idiot, I understand why; able-bodied Davros is quite a change for that character, who we’ve never seen like this before (except for that episode with child Davros). The episode itself is basically a comedy sketch (despite RTD’s puzzling insistence on Instagram that it isn’t) where Fourteen arrives at Skaro while Davros is still developing his Mark 3 Travel Machine, which has a notable difference in design that the Doctor fiddles with. It’s kind of adorable even as it screws with canon in a self-aware way that could’ve been irritating were it less funny.

Now, because I understand why people are worked up over the depiction of Davros before whatever turned him into Michael Wisher in “Genesis of the Daleks” happened, I also understand RTD’s rationalisation for same:

Discussing the new-look Davros, Russell T Davies tells Doctor Who Unleashed that it was a conscious decision to move away from some outdated cultural stereotypes. Discussing the Dalek creator’s problematic legacy, RTD reflected on his discomfort about continuing to play into the trope of the “wheelchair-using, disabled, disfigured monster.” Of course, the appeal of the original 1970s Davros design was the iconic image of a half-man, half-Dalek which became as instantly recognizable as his creations. Unintentional though it was, the image of a scarred and hateful scientist and his Dalek wheelchair does play into this outdated and harmful trope.

And some of the commentary has been perfectly positive:

Of course, listening to disabled voices means acknowledging that disabled people aren’t a monolith and, as brother Ian demonstrates above, not all of us agree with Davies on this one… indeed, I had a squiz at the comments of the Youtube video of him saying this stuff and yeah, lots of people not really into it, with asking the fairly pertinent question of whether this ultimately just amounts to disability erasure. Personally, I’m not sure where I myself stand on all of this; not just because the subject is complicated—rather more so than the general discourse seems to think—but so is how I in particular relate to me being disabled.

Because I acquired my disability; I wasn’t actually born with this less than fully functional carcass… and I’ve never been entirely able to shake the suspicion that it’s not a “proper” disability somehow. That I’m a second-class cripple or something. I think the fact that I’m not in a wheelchair (though I expect to end up in one eventually) adds to that. I can’t remember exactly where or when, but I think it was in the Guardian that once I read an article that was obviously well-meaning about disability, but something about it definitely made me feel… kind of lesser as someone with an acquired disability rather than having been born with one. Probably it was just me, I’m sure that whoever wrote it didn’t mean it that way, but, well, that’s how I’ve seen myself ever since.

EDIT: I later saw this post on Bluesky regarding Ian Levine losing his shit above:

And while I entirely understand the point being made, in that I also have a different experience of disability to someone born with one, it doesn’t do anything to help my sense that my different experience is also a lesser one.

Accordingly, I find myself a bit… mixed about the Davros thing. I never actually saw him as contributing to the “disabled evil man” trope… but then again when I first saw him in “Genesis of the Daleks” in 1986 I wasn’t disabled myself, and I don’t think I even knew that it was a trope. (Or what a trope was, for that matter.) At any rate, I don’t think I ever saw Davros being in his Mark 3 Travel Machine as the thing that made him evil as such. I still don’t. That may just be me. I don’t really know. I would be curious to know what if any advice from disabled people Davies took before doing this.

I do want to note one thing I’m not seeing many if any people bring up in relation to all of this, which is that the show has kind of done this before. Back in the dim dark past of 1989, in “The Curse of Fenric”, one of the main secondary characters was Dr. Judson, the man running the Ultima machine from his wheelchair… until he gets taken over by the spirit of Fenric and can suddenly walk again. I don’t recall seeing any comparable reaction to this at the time, though admittedly I wasn’t really paying attention either; in 1989/90 there was no social media and people had to spew their venom forth in actual print in Doctor Who Bulletin or something, which I think I’d finally got sick of and stopped reading around then.

And probably no one cared, cos Judson wasn’t exactly an iconic Who villain on the order of Davros. But I do wonder what the people going off now think about that older episode. Especially with what we also know now about how Ian Briggs modelled Judson on Alan Turing and wanted him and the military commander in the story to both be gay and have had a past with each other, but the BBC weren’t having that in their on-its-last-legs SF series in 1989. How do we all feel about that, I wonder…

But the ultimate problem with the episode is that Davros should never have been brought back in the first place in the original series, as he was in 1979. With all due respect to messrs Gooderson Molloy & Bleach, I’ve always thought he should’ve been a one-and-done in “Genesis”. And for all that I enjoyed the episode; I thought having Julian Bleach play Davros out of the chair rather than in it was a really interesting idea (and he still looks like Davros somehow even without the mask and makeup), and the general comedic angle of it all was well done (Nicholas Briggs was spot on as the voice of Nyder, too). Maybe this makes me a Bad Disabled Person. Then again, I’ve never been much of a good one. CRIPPLE PUNK WHOO!

Anyway, as a closing thought, suffice to say I find this a bit over the top:

I know this is from Ian Levine’s FB group and I don’t think he started this, but I’m sure he’s all in favour of it. If it stops him making “Davros in Distress”, I’ll take it too…

Not everything is temporary

Someone posted this interesting piece on Masto today, and I’ve been pondering it… and I’m still not sure what I make of it. Basically our author did himself an injury while on holiday in June, and he’s still recovering from that, but in the meantime he’s been pondering something from an accessibility course he’s been reading that he writes about here:

1 in 5 people currently have a disability. 100% of people will have some form of disability in their lifetime. Quote from Cindy Li, “We’re all just temporarily abled.”

There’s certainly some truth in that quote, in that shit will happen to all of us at some point that, frankly, gets in the way of us being able to live normally. But I have a bit of an issue with it, in that we may indeed all be temporarily abled but the converse isn’t true. We are not all temporarily disabled; some of us get abled again. No harm to Jim Nielsen, who does at least seem to be on the mend and has found the experience an educational one… good luck to him on getting back to his old ability. Speaking as someone who’s never going to do that, I just find something irritating about that quote…

Disability Pride Month

It’s been Disability Pride Month all month, and I’ve said nothing about it cos, frankly, I don’t know what to say about it. But I think this video nails at least some of my issues about it (you should also watch it because Jo uses a microphone attached to her prosthetic foot in this video which I think is fucking MARVELLOUS), particularly the use of the word “pride” in a context like this. Cos I know it’s not about literal pride in being disabled as such, it’s like not being ashamed of being disabled. I’ve just always found the use of the word “pride” in this sort of way to be… I don’t know what, exactly, but off-putting. It’s using a word to indicate you are not the opposite of that word rather than that you are that word, they’re not the same thing. “I’m not this thing!” That’s nice, good for me… what am I supposed to be in a positive way, then?

Anyway, Jo also brings up the idea of being “differently abled” and yeah, FUCK THAT TO HELL. I am able to feel pain (physical and mental) I might not otherwise experience if I weren’t disabled, that’s as far as THAT goes. I am able to stumble in a way that I couldn’t before. I am able to only walk rather than run as well. Bah. This is why I’ve always been enamoured of the cripple punk movement since I first discovered it (yes, something good and useful did come from Tumblr! Unimaginable), there’s none of that bullshit and it’s actively opposed to that “inspiration” Jo also talks about, i.e. the pressure she feels as someone who’s a public figure in the disabled community to put a brave face on things all the time. And I’m not a public figure of any sort, but even I feel that sometimes. I kind of like having cripple punk there as a corrective to that. More useful for me than disability pride.

Babylon Bullshit

So the Babylon Bee is a right-wing religious political humour site, of which this is an example:

Oh what a comedy classic. John Fetterman is a Democrat senator and, as of last year, a stroke survivor. Whether or not he should be in politics in his not exactly optimal state of health is a question for which I don’t there’s an easy answer, except to note that an appearance he made where he greeted the audience by saying “good night” (I presume that’s at least in part what inspired this “joke”) did him few favours…

Anyway, he’s in politics with a disability (he apparently has no cognitive damage but does have auditory processing disorder; I’m not sure how that doesn’t constitute a cognitive issue) and he’s a liberal politician at that, so obviously that makes him a fair target because disability is FUNNY AS FUCK, isn’t it, when you don’t have one. And, well, I responded to the Babylon Bee by hoping that they did.

And then a moment later this happened:

…OK, then. I fired back a response asking them to explain why my tweet was apparently so much more abusive than the BB’s original post mocking a man’s health issues, and they basically told me to go fuck myself (not in those words as such, but you know what I mean). Anyway, I didn’t feel like pulling a Jordan Peterson cos I find Twatter useful enough even now that I don’t want to abandon it entirely (too many people I follow there don’t want to switch to Mastodon), so I deleted the tweet and have to wait until tomorrow to use the account again… but, while conceding I said something pretty harsh, I stand by it nonetheless. Fuck Babylon Bee.

Good luck with that

KIIS FM’s Kyle Sandilands forced into sensitivity training after offensive comments about Paralympians

Oh THAT’ll work.

Radio station KIIS FM has had to employ a second censor and provide sensitivity training to Kyle Sandilands after the shock jock described watching the Tokyo Paralympics as “horrific”. […]
The latest breach follows an incident in October when Sandilands, who reportedly earns $5m a year, and ARN apologised for using a slur against people with disability.
“Have you been watching the special Olympics (sic), it is horrific some of the things,” Sandilands said live on air.
“Some poor bloke ran for the high jump and then veered right ’cause he was blind and landed on his arse on the ground.”
The report found that while the presenters expressed some admiration for the “spirit of the contest”, it would have been clear to the audience that “the Paralympians in question were being mocked by Mr Sandilands, and that they were mocked for the techniques used to participate and compete in their particular sport”.Sandilands implied that participants in the Paralympics were “a generic group of people that were somehow intrinsically inferior and were in need of special treatment or ‘lifting up’”, the report found. […]
Sandilands has been a divisive figure in Australian media for decades. Thirteen years ago he was dropped by Australian Idol (then on Channel Ten) after a public backlash over a lie-detector stunt on his radio show in which a 14-year-old girl revealed she had been raped. Both Sandilands and his co-host apologised on air at the time, saying they did not know the girl had been raped.
Although Sandilands apologised in October for “using filthy language and some derogatory archaic terms”, he said: “I’m never going to change. I’m still not changing [for] the woke world.”

I don’t know how Vile’s whole career didn’t end after that debacle with the 14 year old girl. All that’ll come out of this “sensitivity training” is a bunch of shitty jokes for content on his show before he goes on being a cunt as usual.

How about no

This sort of thing shits me to tears. I say that as someone who acknowledges the usefulness of positive thinking, but who admittedly isn’t very good at it. Mindset is obviously important. Mindset only goes so far, though, especially once it brushes up against external physical reality. The late Stella Young once put it very well: “No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp”. She loathed the platitude about the only real disability being a bad attitude as much as I do. And I do, admittedly, have something of a bad attitude if you want to call it that; it sounds a bit better than years of poorly treated depression which is nearer the truth, but I have… issues, shall we say, with the “D” word that I don’t really want to go into. WHATEVER. I do not like the bad attitude platitude. I’ve no doubt a better mindset would make it easier for me to cope with my physical reality, I’ll concede that… but it won’t change the physical reality in question.

And that physical reality is that I am disabled following the stroke I had in the afternoon of June 6 2009. That fucked me up, and continues to do so in various ways. I’ve never exactly been in great health, and I derive a certain bleak amusement from looking back at old Facebook memories from before The Incident when I’d come home from a night out, and how even then a lot of them boiled down to “good night out but goddamn my legs and feet can barely carry me”… things could be hard pre-stroke, and the older I get, the more difficult things just naturally become with age. But things are kind of made even more so by virtue of one half of my body simply not working as well as the other half.

I acknowledge that I am fairly harsh on myself a lot of the time, and I know a good deal of that is down to my frankly substandard mental health (the latter not helped by my frankly substandard physical health, of course), but I am, let’s be honest, not the most shining prospect. However, even if I liked myself more than I do… what physical change would that mental change make? Would it undo the stroke damage? What about my shitty circulation? My diabetes? Would I have more physical strength to do more things? I don’t think so somehow.

Smiling at stairs won’t turn them into a ramp. Similarly, I can’t see that smiling at myself will suddenly make my left hand and arm as flexible and functional as my right. Self love will literally not solve shit for me as long as the body doesn’t fully work like it should.