RIKKI POYNTER: Alright, alright, you got us.
We're all just a bunch of big, fat fakers.
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RIKKI POYNTER: Hello and welcome back to the channel
and say hello to Libby, who you never see,
but she decided she wanted to be a part of this today.
For how long, we have no idea, but let's just take this in
while she's here.
Today I want to talk about the possibility of people
faking their disabilities, I guess.
This is all coming from something that recently happened.
As a disabled YouTuber myself, this is something
that I've dealt with on my own,
and other disabled friends have dealt with this on their own channels.
Molly, Jessica, James, Andrea, you know,
anybody else that you can think of that's a disabled YouTuber.
But really, this all started when a really big YouTuber,
whose name I won't mention, offered to help someone -
a disabled Twitter fan - He offered to help her
with her motorized wheelchair that she really needed.
Whether it was to help pay it in full or just you know, part of it,
I don't know the details, but the point is, he offered to help.
And this became a really big thing.
I think I even retweeted it, and it was just something nice to see.
But then, I saw a couple of days ago, well yesterday, I think actually,
that he had replied to some tweet
and I looked at what he was replying to,
and it was about the disabled person on Twitter
and apparently, he decided to stop helping her
because it seems that there's a rumor going around
that she was lying about her disability all along.
And she posted another tweet eventually,
and said something along the lines of, "This person," -
and the name was actually written out in full -
"This person is no longer able to help me with my motorized wheelchair,
so I am still looking for donations."
And that caused a lot of backlash, because of course,
when this guy's name is popping up on Twitter, people are gonna start,
you know, writing and typing and replying and whatnot.
And then eventually, she deleted the tweet and there was another tweet
that said the same thing basically,
but instead of writing out his full name,
it was just 'this YouTuber'.
Of course, the backlash didn't stop and it just kept on coming.
Now this person did get a lot of support,
but then, there were a lot of people that were accusing her
of faking her disability just to get money.
I wanna say this.
Yes, you may come across people who are faking being disabled.
It's very popular for people to fake being deaf
and pass out like little ABC cards, the ASL alphabet,
and try to get some money out of that.
And you know, there's been videos posted of that girl in the club
pretending to be deaf, so this one guy wouldn't dance with her,
and that's another video for another day, maybe.
But there are some things that people were saying that just made me go,
"You people really don't know much about disability
and we really have to educate you on this matter."
So, one of the things that was said was,
"Well, she went on a hike in March."
So, it is now January 2019 that I am filming this,
and this was apparently a hike that happened in March 2018.
OK, so this person apparently has EDS, POTS and something else...
fibromyalgia,
and it's still possible to move on your own two feet
if you have EDS, POTS, et cetera, et cetera.
Annie Elainey and Jessica Kellgren-Fozard
are the two very good examples of this.
Now, I am someone who has dealt with a lot of chronic pain.
I'm not sure if I have anything.
I have not been able to go to a doctor and figure that whole thing out
'cause that's expensive.
That's the thing about being disabled.
It's expensive, especially if you don't have insurance.
But anyway, the point is, you can be disabled and go on a hike.
For example, I and my friends, James Rath, Andrea Lausell,
Abby Sams and Elijah - whose name I cannot,
whose last name I cannot pronounce -
we were all part of James Rath's 'Playback',
a documentary which was about being disabled
and going out of your comfort zone.
And for him, he is a blind filmmaker
who wanted to climb up a freakin' mountain,
and we all climbed up a freakin' mountain.
So, James went up a mountain while blind,
I went up while being deaf and being severely pained,
and Andrea and Abby all went up being severely pained.
So, completely possible to go on a hike.
Will we pay for it in the long run, probably the next day?
Oh yeah.
Ambulatory wheelchair users exist, ambulatory cane users exist.
I have a cane myself and I've even used a wheelchair in the past.
Jessica and Annie both have used canes and wheelchairs,
and they still do.
Stevie Boebi is another example.
We have good days and we have bad days.
Now, somebody replied to me saying that
"Well, she says she can't walk at all."
OK, so again, this happened in March 2018.
It is now 2019, January 2019.
And I mean, I don't know when this person suddenly or started to say
that she can't walk at all anymore,
but this is almost a year later, and anything is possible
and anything can change.
You could be able to walk a lot more a year ago, six months ago,
and then all of a sudden, it's not happening anymore.
Another thing was, somebody said that the sister said that
she was faking.
More often than not, abled families are ableist
and think that the disabled person is faking.
The same with doctors.
Stevie made a whole Twitter hashtag
that I'm not gonna say here out loud in fear of being demonetized,
but it was about doctors being ableist
and just pretending that anything that the disabled patient said was untrue.
You know, a lot of times, their responses are, "Oh, just lose weight"
or "do yoga" or "go vegan".
Hi, I'm vegan and that doesn't really change anything.
But do you know how often hearing families
will tell their deaf sibling, child, whoever,
to like "just turn up your hearing aids"
or "you're not really deaf, you only have a tiny bit of hearing loss",
or "you just have selective hearing".
This is more common than you might think.
The fact that the sister could actually be the one lying
about her sister being disabled or not disabled,
could very well be an actual thing.
And one final thing that I saw was somebody had a link to a wheelchair
that was able to be shopped or purchased
by Walmart or Amazon or something.
It said, "Hey, here's a wheelchair for $100.
You don't need that $3,000 wheelchair" that is motorized, mind you.
This $100 wheelchair was a manual, you know,
you got to actually push it yourself.
There's nothing wrong with suggesting an alternative,
especially a cheaper alternative.
Because again, being disabled is very expensive,
depending on your disability, right?
However, what's important to know is that not all aids are equal
and not all disabled people are equal.
I know someone who does have a manual wheelchair,
but it's made with parts that work for them,
because they can't have this certain cushion or this certain back piece
or something or whatever.
Annie is much better off, I believe, with the power chair.
If I'm wrong, Annie, you can come for me in the comments.
Manual chairs, I imagine, are exhausting.
When I was in a manual wheelchair for the first time,
TSA or somebody at the airport was the one pushing it,
so I didn't have to deal with that.
But I can just imagine having to constantly, you know, move your arms
and to move the wheelchair is a real pain in the -
I was gonna say 'ass' but I think arms would be better.
But not only that, certain disabilities, EDS and whatnot,
I believe, can affect your arms, so they can get really tired,
so having to try to push that manual wheelchair has to be exhausting.
So now you'll just have a little dial thing that you can push forward,
or a button that you could push down,
and it's gonna go and take you to wherever you need to go.
So yeah, no need to fret if you were suggesting an alternative
to try to be helpful, but just know that if the person is replying back
and saying that, "Unfortunately, that doesn't work out too well,
because of my specific needs," please understand that.
The disabled person is always going to know more than the abled person
who has very little experience with whatever it is that's going on.
So, back to the possibility of faking a disability,
again, I had been accused of this many times,
and that's a video I plan to make later.
People think I'm not deaf because I speak, you know,
or that my ASL kind of sucks, but...
OK, that makes no sense, whatsoever.
You know, people did the same thing to Jessica
when she posted a video on Ai-Media,
because people thought she was faking being deaf
because she signed BSL or SSE, BSL, whatever, instead of ASL.
When Molly and I did a collab,
people accused Molly of faking her disability,
faking being blind because she knew where to look
when I was sitting beside her, as if she couldn't feel where I was,
and as if she couldn't hear the direction
of where my voice was coming from.
And people accusing me of being deaf
because I can understand her at times,
despite us saying in the actual video that we did
that videos are edited and we would discuss our plans ahead of time,
and we'd often have to re-do certain things that we said and whatnot.
And again, people accusing Annie or maybe Rachel and whoever else,
of not actually being disabled and not needing a parking spot
or a wheelchair or a cane,
because they may have seen them stand up and walk
once upon a time on a Tuesday.
Again, sometimes we have good days, sometimes we have bad days.
Nothing is created equal and it's even on a day-by-day basis
for a lot of people.
So, keep that in mind.
I'm not saying that nobody has ever faked being disabled.
It has happened.
However, more often than not, we're disabled. It's a thing.
Of course, there are some things such as just simply being ignorant
about something, and that is OK.
Nobody knows everything in the world.
I didn't know a whole lot about blindness until a few years ago,
when I had blind friends and you know,
other disabled people.
I didn't know a whole lot about anything else.
Ask questions.
It's OK.
But just don't accuse people, all of a sudden, of faking,
just because you're not really sure what something is.
So, I hope this video was helpful.
I hope you learned some things.
I hope I was able to debunk some ideas for you,
and as always, I very much appreciate you watching.
And if you feel so inclined to, I will have a link down below,
to help translate this video into any other language that you may know,
other than English.
Again, thank you very much for watching
and I'll see you later. Bye.
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