Problems I’ve observed within disability discourse/communities:
•Intra community Ableism and violence because being disabled is not a single shared experience. Even microaggressions like gawking at mobility aids, physical differences, and stimming are still very prevalent.
•The question of who gets to be disabled as a salient identity still too often ending up meaning cishet white men.
•The gendered and racialized expectations of labor and what is labor you are expected to do/have the ability to do intrinsically despite disability.
•Erasure of each other’s disabilities in order to hold up individual need. Expectations that others have infinite spoons to help.
•Flattening of different severities of disability across people.
•Forcing expectations of labor on others who have not consented to be supporter or pick up extra work. (I.e. those that say “It’s a gift to get to help me” which I’ve legit seen)
•Using dismantling of ableist expectations of independence to justify unhealthy codependent relationships and erase disabled experiences where autonomy and independence is denied by Ableism.
•Associating severe disability with disabled people who have the privilege to access healthcare, family support, and resources to get by without working; ignoring the less privileged disabled people who have no choice but to push through pain and damage their health in order to get by, who in turn are perceived as less disabled.
Really good things about disability discourse/communities:
•knowledge sharing
•validation
•understanding when you say you can’t do something or need something
•recognition of interdependence in all relationships and the importance of intentional human connection
•a lot less fat shaming cuz fuck if any of us can expect another to have the spoons for losing weight
•generally more diverse body positivity and positivity around visible aids and physical differences
•tons of other stuff
on that note though trans girls get a lot of shit at conventions
like i’ve been in full feminine cosplays and stuff and i’ve walked into washrooms with my cis friends and started talking with them about something and i’ve been told shit like “this is the girl’s washroom” and “i’m not comfortable sharing the bathroom with a man” directly to my face
and i’ve had people ask for my picture and when i say yes they’ll reply with “whoa, i totally thought you were a girl!”
and just generally a lot of other transphobic microaggressions and shit
being a trans girl and cosplaying is a rough time
not to mention the awful “trap” archetype thing and shitty dudebros who go around calling every feminine-presenting amab person a “trap” and either being disgusted by us or fetishizing us lmao
shit like this is why i stopped!
fun experiences being a trans woman into cosplay, within the past two years:
-shitty fedora man asking “CAN I HAVE YOUR PHOTO, MISTRESS” when i was wearing something kind of revealing and passed well besides for my voice (he clearly had no idea what fandom i was from and just wanted to get off to the photo later). i said yes and once he clocked me he went “it IS a MISTRESS i am talking to correct” and i said yes again. he asked me like three more times throughout taking the photo before he finally went away
-snapback-wearing trans bro and his friend at a meetup asking me if they could “borrow my dick”
-second trans man, this time my roommate, going off on a tangent while i was in the room about how much easier it was to be transfeminine
-this one actually hurt
-someone’s friend apologetically telling me, without me asking, that the only reason she clocked me was because of my voice and what i could do to improve it
-thank god i wasnt cosplaying a girl when this happened but this shitty dude in a Teemo hat at ACEN last year started complaining about “traps” and asking this other (presumably cis) girl next to me if she was a trap and he eventually stopped after someone nearby was like “transgenders cant help it”. afterwards teemo hat man gave an excuse about how we trick people and need to be “watched out for”
anyway!! this is probably why i’ve only met four other trans women over my entire time at conventions (and only two of them actually cosplay) and no one wants to fucking talk about it but us so i figured i’d at least raise awareness
