So, lung infetiction month 2 and the CT scan shows it IS receiding from my right
lung but it is still here in the left one so welcome to antibiotics round 3.
I apologise if I yawn a lot in this video but who knew you needed to breathe to sleep.
Hello lovely people!
I’m Jessica, I’m a disabled content creator and I make videos about disability,
chronic illness and LGBTQ+ issues in an entertaining and educational way! And yes,
I do dress like it’s the 1950s every day- vintage style, not vintage values.
If that sounds like something you’d enjoy then subscribe!
This video is sponsored by Surfshark, find out more about their amazing VPN service later…
Today we’re going to talk about: words! Specifically, two little words that have
some pretty big implications to the disabled community.
The first one – ableism,
- boom. The word you were all expecting.
You’ve certainly come across the word ‘ableism’ if you’re disabled, know someone who’s disabled,
or have spent any time thinking about disability… or on the internet, probably.
But the second one – disablism -might be a bit more unfamiliar, although it’s something
we’re hearing more and more about. And as we shall see, that’s for a very good reason!
So come and take a little trip down language lane with me.
As far as basic definitions go, both words refer to the discrimination that disabled people
Experience. Ableism is discrimination in favour of able-bodied people,
and disablism is discrimination against disabled people.
Did that sound like the same thing to you? Are you sat there saying “But Jessica,
these are the same thing just seen from different sides of the fence!”
- And…you’d be right? Kind of.
But are there no disabled people who
are also technically ‘able-bodied’? Are we all using wheelchairs 24/7?
One could argue that if you’re thinking of doing something that favours one group,
you’re implicitly excluding the other group.
Like, a building with only steps up to its front entrance is ableist because it’s favouring the
able-bodied people who can walk up them, and disablist because it’s excluding the disabled
people who can’t manage the stairs.
So in that sense, ableism and disablism can be interchangeable.
But the cynical among you now might have another question: “Jessica, if they basically
mean the same thing, why do we need two separate words at all?
Isn’t this just making up new words and labels to - ”
- I’m going to stop you there, before you inadvertently do a disablism.
How? Well keep watching and you’ll find out.
Let’s break down why the two are different,
what they really look like to a disabled person like myself,
and why disablism is actually a really powerful word that we should all be using more often.
First, let’s start with familiar territory.
Back in lockdown last year, I made a fun video to try and explain what ableism is,
in the simplest possible terms. If you haven’t seen it already,
I’d highly recommend it. You can click the card above.
- And not just because it features my evil but debonaire ableist twin.
Ableist assumptions are something that disabled people come across on a daily basis.
They’re often unconscious, or at least not ill-intentioned, and most likely come from a place
of thoughtlessness or negligence. And let’s be honest, that’s something we’re all guilty of at
times. But these ableist notions can nevertheless be obstructive, insulting, and downright damaging.
Businesses, big companies and other organisations can find themselves doing institutional ableism,
by failing to provide the basic accessibility arrangements that a disabled colleague might need,
or by making assumptions about what all of their employees are capable of.
Like, in a survey, seven in ten people in the UK with mobility
and sensory impairments reported having difficulty accessing goods and services,
mainly because they struggle getting physical access to places.
On the other hand, you’ll often run into interpersonal ableism in
conversation with individuals, whether they’re strangers or
friends. Well-meaning comments can come across as dreadfully naïve or dismissive,
and can leave us feeling ignored, misunderstood, and somehow inadequate.
- “You should expect mean comments if you’re going to be disabled online,
honey”. Oh sorry, was I given the choice to be an entirely different person?
That’s because ableism is based on the underlying belief that disabled
people should somehow be ‘fixed’ in order to become more able.
You know, like everyone else (!)
But hang on a minute. What does it actually mean to be, quote, ‘able’?
You know, people are very quick to have a go at defining disability, but when
you take away the ‘dis’, what are you actually left with?
Some people, whose job it is to think about these things, have suggested that an able
person be defined as someone who is ready and capable of contributing to society.
- aren’t we all doing that anyway just by being here?
But with just the teensy bit of scrutiny, that opens up a whooole can of worms.
Who’s going to be the grand judge of whether or not someone is capable?
What does it actually mean to contribute?
Contribute what?
Do you have to be working to be a worthwhile individual?
What is work?
Wait, why does being disabled necessarily stop you from working?
What exactly is it that society is demanding of us?
Will there be a test at the end?
What are we doing with the people who fail?
What if you just broke your leg so you’re not very ‘useful’ right now?
Have you ever met a baby? They’re not very productive.
Frankly, that’s a whole other philosophical problem that I’m not here to answer.
I came across another definition of ableness, which seems to reduce all the
beauty and complexity of our existence to the coldest of biological analysis.
An able person, the one that everyone should apparently aspire to be,
is a so-called ‘species-typical individual’. Basically, they’re the average Joe,
the person that is slap bang in the middle of all possible variations of what it means to be human.
But that’s problematic too.
Because when you think about it, nobody is average. That’s… just
how averages work.
There’ll be some people that are better at doing a certain thing,
and some people that are worse at doing that thing. But they might excel at their own thing.
However you look at it: ableness is an ideal that, actually, nobody really matches up to,
whether they identify as or meet a legal definition to be disabled or not.
It’s certainly a sliding scale, but where should we pin our ableist expectations on that scale?
- WHAT IS THE SCALE?!
What should be our base assumptions about what people can and cannot do,
and whether they deserve reasonable adjustments to equal the playing field?
Right now, society’s expectations are at a level that leaves no room for the wonderful
colour and variety of human nature, and ultimately leads to ableism as a weight
dragging us down to a bland, beige, and boring average, which doesn’t even really exist.
Speaking of things that don’t really exist,
- dragons.
- Genuinely, anyone else obsessed with House of the Dragon? How are we supposed
to wait until Spring 2024 for the next series?!
But while we’re being pedantic about language,
I want to share an interesting viewpoint about the nature of disability itself.
We often hear people described as ‘having a disability’. I’ve done it in this video,
and I typically describe myself as being disabled.
I list it in the same way I list any of my other characteristics.
But there is a school of thought that says since a person doesn’t actually HAVE that
disability in the same way that they might have brown eyes, or curly hair, what they
actually HAVE is an impairment, and then the disability comes from how society responds to it.
This is ‘the social model of disability’.
It allows for a degree of flexibility, right? Because society’s response to said
impairment determines whether it’s going to be something that impacts your life.
Take vision problems for example. If you need glasses here in the UK, we’re pretty well set
up to get you checked out, quick puff on the corneas, measured up and sent on your way with
a fashionable bit of eyewear. You can carry on your daily lives with minimal disruption,
and needing glasses in the UK doesn’t typically count as having a disability.
But elsewhere in the world, in a rural village in a developing country,
where that slick system doesn’t exist, the simple need for glasses can become
a serious disability, and can become a life-or-death problem.
So disability in itself is not a personal characteristic, it’s a social construct,
but it’s one that can be DEconstructed with the right approach to ability.
But to do THAT, we need to address the darker side of disability injustice,
and that’s disablism.
Before we do that though, let’s take a lighter note and skip to thinking about
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My lungs hurt.
Disablism. To recap, disablism differs from the more familiar ablism by being
discrimination AGAINST disabled people.
Yeah we are just not forgetting people now.
And while this definitely includes most ableist behaviours, it also encompasses a much
uglier kind of discrimination – one that stems from the belief that disabled people are truly
inferior to others. This can lead to more sinister, oppressive and abusive behaviours.
Sorry, but this is where it gets a little bit less cheery.
- oh my gosh, like I was being so super cheery before(!)
Bring it back.
Bring it back up Jessica!
It’s not just about NOT considering the needs of disabled people,
You know: not thinking about having a braille menu or a tv loop for hearing
aids or having a sign language interpreter for any
of your events or even captioning or any of your programs. CHANNEL 4 (!)
but rather it’s actively doing things to exclude and sideline them.
At this point, you’ve been listening to me for a while,
so I’m guessing that’s NOT your general viewpoint, but I promise you, it’s out there.
And by giving it a name, it’s easier to take more seriously,
and to try and address. Because even today, to be disabled IS to be discriminated against.
And as a population as a whole, that leads to some pretty shocking statistics…
In a survey done in 2003, less than half of disabled people who were of working age
were actually in work, compared with 80 percent of non-disabled people.
Fewer than one percent of people aged 16 to 24 with a physical impairment were accepted
into university, compared with 8 percent of young people with no health problems.
Up to four in five websites surveyed didn’t meet the basic accessibility criteria laid down by the
dedicated Web Accessibility Initiative, which recommends things like captions,
good colour contrast, and text alternatives to images that screen readers can use.
Nearly a quarter of disabled people reported receiving harassment in public,
specifically because of their impairment.
Behind all of these statistics there are personal stories
of the hurt and oppression that comes from disablism too.
Take Tara Flood, for example. She’s a gold-medal winning
paralympic swimmer who was born without forearms.
But before she became an athlete, she worked in a bank, where she said she
experienced discrimination that was sometimes subtle,
sometimes painfully obvious. She was often excluded from client meetings,
even when she was the team leader and had good relations with her clients on the phone.
When wanting to move to a different, more public facing department, she was told that she might
not be the right image for the bank. And she was overlooked for promotions time and time again.
Most tragically of all, Tara let all of this slide, because of the way she’d been
taught to view herself. She’d been sent to a special school when she was two,
and thinks that this segregated education played a big part in
her relationships with others and her approach to these kinds of situations.
Disablist attitudes are teaching kids from a young age that they don’t
deserve the same opportunities as their non-disabled friends.
Which is just – well, there are no words.
And while things have got better since Tara Flood was in school, there’s still way too much
of it around. I see it in my comments all the time.
There are deeply ingrained systems and structures that treat disabled
people as objects of pity and compassion, who need charity,
rather than as fully functioning members of society with full civil rights.
Because of that, disabled people’s rights end up woefully under-represented and
under-resourced. Those WITH the disabilities often
don’t have a voice in the policies and decisions that govern their own lives.
For instance, certain healthcare services are rationed based on assessments of a
patient’s quality of life, with people with disabilities being denied treatments because
someone decides that… well, it’s not like their life was going to be terribly exciting
anyway. They won’t need to leave the house for more than an hour a day. What on earth
could a disabled person have to do? It’s not like they have friends (!)
Ultimately, these approaches are making judgements about the value of a disabled
person’s life – something we would scarcely consider for someone without a disability. And it
doesn’t end there. Many of us will be fortunate enough not to encounter it in our daily lives,
but active mistreatment and deaths have come about just because a person is disabled.
Also yes I have realised that there is a tree surgeon. He is not my tree
surgeon. I cannot do anything about it.
It might be motivated by fear, prejudice, worries about the cost of healthcare,
mercy, or just hate, but in the 15 years between 1990 and 2004,
nearly 700 disabled people died as a direct result of disablism.
Let’s face it. This is a terrifying reality,
and a massive injustice, and more people should be talking about it.
The other great injustices in the world – sexism and racism,
have been addressed through high-profile campaigns. Women died for suffrage,
and the BLM movement has moved mountains for racial equality.
As a result of these, there’s now widespread acknowledgement that
gender and race discrimination has no place in modern society.
So what are we going to do about disability then!?
Well, this isn’t really something that’s going to be fixed by passing new laws. In fact,
the law around disability discrimination is pretty much on a par with that for
gender and racial discrimination. It’s just the lived experience that’s so different.
But neither should it be entirely up to us, as individuals, to fix. It’s going
to take a lot more awareness, and a lot more support from all corners of society.
And for that, having a word like disablism to neatly and concisely
describe what’s going on, is a powerful weapon to wield.
It’s arguably even more powerful than ableism,
because of the ill-intentions that it implies are right there.
Ultimately, disability is complex, and there’s not going to be a one-size-fits all solution.
But people with disabilities are PEOPLE, whose difference should be celebrated, not suffered.
Our contribution to society should be appreciated,
and our rights over our own lives should be respected.
Making the world a better place for disabled people is actually
making the world a better place for everyone. It’s a win-win situation!
So whether you want to call out disablisms, or rail against ableist assumptions,
go forth and use your words to make the world a better place!
I know you’ll be amazing at it.
Thank you so much for watching and for putting up with my inability to
read. I hope you took a lot from this video and found it thought provoking.
Let me know what you thought in the comments down below.
Thank you to Surfshark for sponsoring today’s video. Remember to click the link in the
description: Surfshark.deals/Jessica and use code JESSICA for 85% off and 3 months extra for free!
If you’re new here, please consider subscribing (I
breathe better most of the time) and I’ll see you in my next video.