The Ashley Treatment
Not a good time to write in detail about what I think, here are some other folks who have expressed what's on my mind better than I could have. The first three especially address the Ashley Treatment from both disabled and feminist perspectives:
Wheelchair Dancer
Penny Richards at Disability Studies, Temple U.
Mary Johnson of Ragged Edge
Cory Silverberg
Arthur Caplan, Ph.D., director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania
Thirza Cuthand at Fit of Pique
I'm Funny Too at Did I Miss Something?
I posted briefly here and here.
The "Ashley Treatment." Do you suppose I could syndicate my medical plan too?
11 comments:
Thank you for posting these pointers - and hope you're a bit better now.
I've been really, really frustrated by the discussions on Pandagon and Alas. Actually, I'm almost thinking about reviving my blog just so I can post something long about how disability discussions work at Pandagon. There are several constants, such as:
1. When disability comes up on that blog, it will always be in a case where the parents or caregivers of the disabled person are constructed as subjects and agents and the person with the disability is constructed as an object who lacks rights and even a perspective on his or her own situation. This will seem natural, because Amanda never posts about cases in which disabled people assert their own subjectivity. Those cases aren't interesting to Amanda in the way that questions about what parents can do to their disabled fetuses or babies or quasi-babies (in her opinion) are.
(I can't remember seeing any posts by Pam that deal with disability at all, so I'm leaving her out of this for the moment. Jedmunds was even worse than Amanda, but he seems to be gone.)
2. People will claim expertise about disability based on very tenuous connections to disabled people and then use it to make sweeping, negative statements about the lives of disabled folks. Knowing someone who has worked in an nursing home makes you an expert on how hellish disabled people's lives are. People will then cite the statements of those people with tenuous connections to prove that "everyone who knows what they're talking about" agrees that disabled people are miserable and a burden.
3. Hate speech will be tolerated. You can say things about disabled people that would get you banned if you said them about anyone else.
4. While the discussion will ostensibly focus on whether the person has enough self-awareness to have a meaningful life, certain physical aspects of disability will constantly and uncritically be invoked to evoke revulsion. So people will cite the fact that someone drools or is incontinent or uses a feeding tube in order to prove either that their life isn't worth living or that their care is so burdensome that their caregivers are saints who should be permitted to do what they see fit, up to and including killing the disabled person. Because feeding tubes are icky.
And I'm sure there's more that I'm not thinking of right now.
Gah. Sorry to rant on your blog. Actually, I should probably post this over there, but the site seems to be down.
Hey Sally, thanks for trying at Pandagon, you fought the good fight.
What stuns me is how quickly people will accept that this is a "singular, extraordinary" situation. Puberty is hardly unusual; disability, even severe disability, isn't so bizarre. The family itself doesn't seem to consider theirs a singular situation--they WANT to see it become a widely-available option for other families. (That's their justification for putting up the blog.)
Everytime we accept "but this is a very unusual situation" as an excuse, we dismiss thousands, even millions, of families who are in a similar situation--and who *don't* consider cutting up their kid to be the best or only possible way through some big changes.
Penny: Yes!
The parent's blog is not just a defense of their own decisions, it is a sales pitch of a sort for other parents.
I find that the feminist blogs cited here are good for one thing only, takling about the rights of bio women and reinforcing dualistic (and some might argue classically patriarchial) notions of gender. Sally, your point about hate speech being tolerated is right on. I have read stuff about disability and gender on feminist blogs that make my jaw drop. What will forever escape my understanding is how these people don't get that this is about THEM as much as anyone, and how they can manage to see the connections between oppression based on gender and oppression based on race, but so easily see disability rights as a series of unique, tragic stories.
I started the thread at Alas and most of the commenters are driving me crazy. I didn't give a detailed explanation as to why I opposed this "treatment," but at this point, the thread has gotten so out of hand I got tired of reading comments. Lyndsay Byerstein was the most recent one who ticked me off....
Out of all of the comments I venture to say there are only about 5 of us against this. It's depressing.
Well, what can you expect? Most of those so-called "progressives" were cheering on the court-order dehydration (murder) of Terri Schiavo because of their own disability prejudices.
They will NEVER get it about this issue, that human rights exists irrespective of one's physical and cognitive status.
Great comments thread, and great post of today, blue. One good thing to come out of this for me is meeting amazing bloggers I hadn't encountered before, like Wheelchair Dancer, Ballastexistenz and others who have commented here. Rock on, all of you. The line that sums it up for me is something I got from Ballastexistenz's comment on Alas, something like, "It's not about 'disability', it's about oppression." YES.
Heart
Rachel: This comment takes the cake for me as most offensive thus far. Nice to know people with developmental disabilities have no autonomous rights and are subhuman.
Gah.
- matttbastard
"The parent's blog is not just a defense of their own decisions, it is a sales pitch of a sort for other parents."
I got that feeling too -- and that if other parents did it, it would help them justify their own actions.
That's just it, Liz. If they had said on thie blog that this was an agonizing decision and they still don't know if it was the perfect choice, but that they didn't know what else to do -- well, there ould be somewhere conversationl to go with that. A place we need to go for all the parents who lack rsources. Instead they say that they did not agonize over these particular choices and are absolutely confident they've done exactly the right thing. And they encourage other parents to follow suit.
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