Y’know, sometimes a question comes along that exposes your biases. I’m really, really glad you asked me this.
My initial instinct was to say no. There are a lot of tasks as a paramedic that require very specific motions that are sensitive to pressure: drawing medications, spreading the skin to start IVs. There’s strength required–we do a LOT of lifting, and you need to be able to “feel” that lift.
So my first thought was, “not in the field”. There are admin tasks (working in an EMS pharmacy, equipment coordinator, supervisor, dispatcher) that came to mind as being a good fit for someone with the disability you describe, but field work….?
(By the way, I know a number of medics with leg prostheses; these are relatively common and very easy to work with. I’m all in favor of disabled medics. I just didn’t think the job was physically doable with this kind of disability.)
Then I asked. I went into an EMS group and asked some people from all across the country. And the answers I got surprised me.
They were mostly along the lines of “oh totally, there’s one in Pittsburgh, she kicks ass” or “my old partner had a prosthetic forearm and hand, she could medic circles around the rest of her class”. One instructor said they had a student with just such a prosthesis, and wasn’t sure how to teach; the student said “just let me figure it out”, and by the end of the night they were doing very sensitive skills better than their classmates.
Because of that group I know of at least a half-dozen medics here in the US with forearm and hand prostheses.
So yes. You can totally have a character with one forearm, who works as a paramedic for a living.
Thanks again for sending this in. It broadened my worldview.
Association of medical professionals who are deaf or hard of hearing: https://amphl.org/
When I was growing up, I was around people who were mostly pretty good at staying positive about my range of career options as a deaf person and who encouraged me to dream big. But one of the few things I was told that I likely couldn’t do would be to be a doctor. This is because they weren’t sure how to work around the “need” to listen to certain things through a stethoscope. No, it didn’t have a real impact on my career-related decision making because I didn’t really have an interest in the medical professions anyway, my interests took me in other directions. But it was one of the few limits that some people put on my vision, and even though it didn’t have a practical impact on me I still felt the constraint a bit – just the idea that something random like a stethoscope could potentially shut me out from an entire field.
Now flash forward to when I’m in my 20s, back when I was interviewing people and writing articles for a university staff/faculty publication and alumni outreach magazine. And one day I find myself interviewing a deaf EMT for an article I was writing on deaf women working in various professions related to the various sciences. And this deaf EMT had a specialized stethoscope designed to be SO LOUD that even I, a severely to profoundly deaf person, could actually hear a beating heart or the sound of nerves working! And that was with putting the buds for the stethoscope directly into my ears, which meant that I actually took out my hearing aids in order to listen instead of having to figure out how to get headphones to directly funnel sound into the eeny tiny microphone in my hearing aid. The kind of headphones designed with buds going directly into the ear just DO NOT WORK FOR THAT, period full stop. And most things designed for hearing people DO NOT WORK for deaf people because they only use the little bitty baby amplification that hearing people use to protect their incredibly fragile ears that start to hurt at just about the point I’m starting to be able to hear that there even IS a sound to be heard. Hearing people run in terror from the kind of BIG LOUD amplification that us deaf people need. (Unless they are the kind of rock music fans who think all good music ends with actual, noticeable hearing loss at the end of the concert.) And on top of that, most things designed for hearing people naturally don’t compensate for the fact that I hear low pitch sounds MUCH better than high pitch sounds. Meaning, I can actually hear low pitch sounds if they are amplified loud enough, but for high pitch sounds – well, the first 32 years of my life they basically didn’t exist in my life, for the past 14 or 15 years the only reason I can hear high pitch sounds is because these days, with the advent of digital (not just analog) hearing aids, it’s now possible to have hearing aids that take high pitch sounds and process them so they sound like low pitch sounds. So this is what water sounds like! When it’s processed so that it’s actually something I can hear. But somehow this stethoscope–invented when (most? or all?) of us deaf folks were still wearing analog hearing aids–managed to be loud enough for me.
Until the deaf woman EMT loaned me her stethoscope for a minute and explained it to me, I didn’t even know that you could actually hear the nerves working, not just the heart or breath in the lungs! And never imagined actually hearing it myself
And the deaf EMT told me that, for deaf people who really can’t hear anything at all even with that LOUD stethoscope, there are other machines to pick up basically the same information that you can get through a stethoscope. And she also pointed out that’s a fairly small part of being a doctor or EMT, anyway. You don’t have to be able to use a stethoscope to join the medical professions.
And … somehow, even though I had never personally actually wanted to be a doctor anyway, and still don’t want to, and still don’t miss having tried it, it was still so awesome realizing that this one last barrier that had been put on my old childhood imagination could just fade away.
People need to know.
PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW.
That people with disabilities can do all kinds of things
THAT people with disabilities ARE ALREADY DOING all kinds of things.
Because … on one hand, yes, there are a FEW things that people with certain disabilities actually can’t do. They do not yet have driverless cars on the open market for everyone to buy, so until that’s ready, blind people still can’t do jobs that by definition have to involve driving (like taxi cab driver, bus or truck driver, etc). And deaf people can’t be phone operators. And although deaf people could translate between written languages, and although there are certified deaf interpreters who translate between signed languages (yeah that’s an actual thing), people who are really deaf (and not just a little hard of hearing) can’t interpret between spoken languages on the phone.
But most of the things that people THINK are impossible for people with disabilities to do? Can be worked around with the right technologies, devices, software, adaptations, and a little resourcefulness and creativity.
More people need to be like @scriptmedic, meaning they need to do the work to actually research the options and find out what is already being done. And they need to talk with people who have the actual disability to see what ideas they have. Because we often have a lot of these ideas, and we often see some of our supposedly more “innovative” ideas as being actually rather boring and ordinary because we’ve been doing them since before our memories even start. Just by example – As far as I can tell, from the bits I know (I’ve only known a few adults without hands at all well), many babies born without arms seem to just naturally do all kinds of things with their feet instead, because that’s what they have to explore the world with. It seems like a “gee whiz” creative answer for people who haven’t needed to adapt to life without arms, but isn’t so innovative from the perspective of an adult who has been doing all kinds of stuff with their feet literally since infancy. As a deaf person who has been using writing as a tool of communication since, like, age 7 or something, it baffles me when I still occasionally meet hearing adults who seem to find the idea remarkable. And all that is before you even get to the stuff where we have to actually work to come up with a solution, by drawing upon more sophisticated adult experience, knowledge of available technologies, and opportunity to talk with other adults with similar disabilities who are working to solve things too. We usually have a lot, a lot of practice working to come up with solutions for things we haven’t tried before, so we are often likely to see solutions that everyone else misses–and not just for disability related accommodations.
People with disabilities don’t want to set themselves up to fail any more than anyone else. So if they seem to believe there’s a way for them to do it, you should give them a chance to show you, or explain what they’ve already been doing in the past, or explain what they’ve seen other people with the same disability do, or explain what ideas they have that they would like a chance to try out. Don’t just assume and then stop trying. Talk to us.
This. All of this.
Are you looking at creating a disabled character? Then you need to think not about what they can or can’t do, but about how they might approach the same task with different tools at their disposal.
Don’t say “X can’t do Y or Z”. First, ask, “what is actually NEEDED to do Y? What’s the process? How could I adapt it?”
I’ll be the first to say that medicine is an ableist community. We are. We almost have to be, because the whole point of medicine is to reduce disability and disease. We assume total health is the baseline, that other states are “abnormal” and to be corrected.
And sometimes that leads to misunderstandings. Misconceptions. False assertions.
And I’m going to tell you this, because I think @andreashettle would like to know this: I am, functionally speaking, a person with “normal” hearing. (I have a very slight amount of loss from working under sirens for a decade, but functionally I do just fine).
But you know what? I’ve never heard the sound of nerves. Never. I didn’t even realize that that is a sound you can hear.
So you, with your deaf ears, just taught me something about a tool I use every. single. day. of. my. life. About a sound I’ve never heard, with my “normal” ears and my “normal” stethoscope. (Okay, it’s a pretty kick-ass stethoscope, lezzbehonest rightnow.)
And for the love of all that is holy, I want to see these characters in fiction. Deaf doctors, one-handed medics, bilateral amputees running circles around other characters just to prove that they can.
I apologize for my misconception, for assuming that disability meant “can’t”. It’s a cultural part of medicine that I dislike. But now that I know it’s a thing I want to see it everywhere.
But if you’re going to do it… do the godsdamned research. Have respect for those who live with disabilities. Write better. Write real.
First off, consider that I had to specify I was talking about an owl, because Hedwig the human is famously very angry about their complicated gender identity in the broadway show Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
Only male snowy owls have pure white plumage, like she is described as having.
“But she’s a magical owl! They could be different”
No, no, you see, the only differences between magical versions of normal animals like rats and owls and cats that we are told about are increased intelligence and increased lifespan.
We can say that all pure white snowy owls irl are male, because snowy owls haven’t socially constructed the idea of gender, so their maleness is just a descriptor of their sexual organs.
But owls with more intelligence, and a closer relationship to human social structures? No one is going to say the owls in Harry Potter don’t have unique identities, and Hedwig is particularly self assured.
Occam’s razor suggests that the simplest solution is most often the correct one. You don’t have to make up any oddly specific facts about how every magical snowy owl is pure white. You don’t have to make up anything at all to know Hedwig is trans. Just look at what’s there and it’s clear.
You are allowed to imagine, however:
The scenes in the pet shop when Hedwig bit everyone all the time and no one could figure out why “he” was so terrible.
Until a tiny black haired kid with glasses who doesn’t know anything about the anatomy of white owls goes “oh she’s so pretty!” and Hedwig falls instantly in love with him. Shop keepers rush up in shock, saying “oh wow! He usually bites every-OW!” And getting cut off when the yet-unnamed owl turns on them viciously.
“Oh, it’s a boy?” Asks the naive young Harry, making the owl scream in anger, only for Hagrid, who reads animals better than anyone and always treats them like people, to get a hunch and ask the owl if she is a girl. Hedwig hoots happily and nibbles Hagrid’s ear as the bewildered staff try to insist otherwise. Hagrid doesn’t even entertain those idiots, isn’t it clear this owl is a girl? She just TOLD them she was!
Harry asks if he can hold her with wonder, and exits the pet shop that day with his first real friend, and the best birthday present ever.
This is not shown, even though it IS relevant to Harry’s journey. This segment of the book is all about the colorful characters and wonderful sights he encounters in his first trip into the wizarding world. Establishing that magical animals have strong anthropomorphic personalities and identities would add to this atmosphere. It would help establish an iconic side character. It would build on Hagrid’s “rough but kind, and competent in his own way” characterization in this segment of the book, and introduce his way with ferocious animals earlier than in the original. Introducing his actual skills here would only aid in coloring him as the literally larger than life hero Harry paints him as in this segment.
Instead the scene just cuts to after the pet shop. Skipping all the absolutely true things about Hedwig’s trans identity.
For the final, irrefutable proof?
Hedwig is killed off for absolutely no plot relevant reason. She has to be LGBT.
Thank you, now you know that despite JKR Harry Potter featured the first transgender owl in literary history. Landmark.
(The best correction I could receive on this post would be an earlier example of a transgender owl in literature, somebody please)
Mad Max Fury Road is the best because it screams in your face “HEY LOOK HERE’S A V8 INTERCEPTOR AND A MASSIVE FUCKING TRUCK COVERED IN SKULLS AND A GUITAR FLAMETHROWER AND BIG ACTION SEQUENCES AND EXPLOSIONS, ISN’T THAT COOL??????” and then it gently takes your shoulder and whispers in your ear “but you know what’s cooler? respecting women & dismantling the patriarchy”
Every time I reread the Hunger Games trilogy I become more furious about the movie representation.
These books were about an indigenous woman (with a brain injury in book 3) living in poverty overthrowing a corrupt white government.
She was demisexual, had stomach hair, was not even remotely romantically driven (and canonically didn’t even find romance until after she had finished a revolution.)
And Peeta was disabled and physically abused as a child and they both suffered from mental health problems and the parallel between the Capitol and the ruling rich was so very transparent.
And I’m seeing fun coloured makeup in stores labeled “Capitol colours from the Hunger Games”!
These books were about the revolution of the most oppressed taking over the extravagance and elitism and decadence of the ruling class while citizens starved.
These books were a parallel to our current social dynamics, they were a call to arms. They were a battle cry for the impeding ruin of the rich white ruling class.
And the movies portrayed them as a fantasy, a romance story, a cute little tale. When the real story in the books was one of strength and upheaval and shifting paradigms and revolutions.
And like…… the death of a young Black child sparked the rebellion.
When Katniss thinks about running away in the second book it is the memory of Rue that makes her decide to stay and “cause all kinds of trouble.”
That is an indigenous woman deciding that the death of a Black child is so horrific and unacceptable that she needs to start an entire uprising about it. That is WOC solidarity.
Then again, when Katniss is talking with Peeta about not leaving he literally, canonically and verbally SAYS it’s because of Rue.
The movies did not lend enough weight to the injustice and violence that Black women face; they didn’t waste any time in deciding the rebellion came from their White Katniss’s determination to overthrow the Capitol.
The movies purposely and aggressively erased all of the racial oppression and power and dynamics that were so apparent in the books.
They made Katniss white, they made Gale white, they erased Peeta’s amputation, they seriously diminished the PTSD both of them faced (which was actually one of the more accuract accounts of PTSD I had ever read in the books), they drastically lessened the weight and importance of Rue’s death.
Anyway, fuck the movies. The books are miraculous. Right down to the respect of survival sex workers. Right down to the power imbalances of society being set in the hands of a violent old white man who has surgery to appear younger.
The author said these books was based on her interpretation of kids’ experiences in war torn Vietnam and Iraq. None of these kids were supposed to be white.
Wanna do direct action but you can’t run, can’t fight, can’t deal with stress, can’t risk getting arrested? Not near a community to support? You can still do something.
Like write to prisoners.
Prisons try to disappear people, isolate them, crush them. Don’t let that happen.
Write to activists in prison, write to trans people in prison, write to isolated prisoners, write to prisoners who no one else thinks are worth writing to.
Write to prisoners.
Are there any programs or websites that help facilitate this which are based on the UK that you know of? Most of the info I’ve found tends to be US-based or just gov.uk general info about writing to someone you know in prison.
But given that I’m chronically ill or seems like a great way to actually do something and be an active part of change.
Great to hear that you’re interested!
The Anarchist Black Cross is a prisoner support network that has chapters in a lot of countries and cities. In the UK there are:
Do check out some of the ‘do’s and don’t’ on one of these websites before you start, there are some basics like ‘don’t talk about illegal activities’ and ‘don’t stop writing without being honest to the person about the fact that you’re going to stop writing’ that are essential to know, and a lot of less important tips that just make it easier to start writing to someone you don’t know yet. Goodluck!
Shoutout to @freackthejester for pointing out Black and Pink (http://www.blackandpink.org), that can help you find LGBTIAQ+ prisoners in prison in the US, with chapters in:
And whenever there is no explicit prisoner-support organization, ask your local anarchists! Most anarchist groups do some prisoner support as well since supporting those who defy the state is basic anarchist praxis. This long list of Australia anarchist organizations probably includes groups that do some prisoner support: https://anarchy.org.au/directory/
Also contributed by people in the notes of this post so far:
Turns out people really like the extra resources on this post so here we go. Most of these urls were listen by Anarchist Black Cross Gent but I took out some dead urls and make them clickable.
I love it when people try to claim representation in fiction is being taken “too far” to the point where it’s no believable. They’re like:
“What’s next, a mixed-race immigrant on the autism spectrum?” Hi, my name is Rachel, also known as Rachna, and I’m a mixed-race immigrant on the autism spectrum.
“What’s next, a transgender Latino man with chronic pain?” What, you mean my former colleague, Marco?
“What’s next, a Black Jewish lesbian?” Bitch, I know I three Black Jewish lesbians, WHAT’S YOUR FUCKING POINT?
im so tired of the argument being “what’s next? a feasible combination of human conditions other than straight white cis able-bodied dude? that can’t possibly happen!”
This is the future that leftists want to see.
File under “things which reactionary conservatives think to be horrific but are actually pretty awesome.”
WhAT’s NeXT???? HuMAn BEiNgs???? ThAT aReNT mE???????
There’s quite a few mixed-race artists that have a white/European parent in kpop/jpop, but not as many mixed-race artists that have a black/African parent are known. So, here’s a list because diversity is nice.
Insooni ~ R&B Soloist (61)
A fucking legend tbh. One of the first (if not the first) black artists in Korea. Was a R&B girl group member in the 80s and now a well respected soloist. Your faves try to get pictures with her. Here’s EXO:
And hand in hand with Yuri of SNSD:
Yoon Mirae ~ R&B Soloist (36)
A second generation R&B and HipHop singer in Korea. She and her husband TigerJk are Korean hip-hop royalty. As well as couple goals.
Nesmith ~ Group Vocalist (34)
The lead vocalist of popular Jpop group The Second. And a Tokyo Dome Veteran.
I have to include his baby picture because it’s just too cute~~
Crystal Kay ~ Soloist (32)
She’s a popular Jpop singer affectionately called Kurikei by Japanese fans. She debuted at 13 years old (!) in 1999. She debuted around the same time as BoA and the two have been friends since they were 15.
Elly ~ Group Dancer/Rapper (30)
One of the main dancer’s of one of Japan’s top groups. J Soul Brothers is kinda like the Super Junior of Japan lol. He’s also a rapper under the name CrazyBoy now. A fucking king.
Mandy ~ Group Dancer (27)
A main dancer of Jpop group Generations and a breakout variety star in Japan. People really love him; that plushie of his face is official group merch. Fans make bentos (lunches) of his face too!
Likiya ~ Group Dancer/Leader (27)
Elly’s younger brother is in the same company as a leader and main dancer for popular rookie group The Rampage. They won the New Wave Award at the Asian Artist Awards in Seoul last year! And voted sexiest of the group by his members which is a far greater honor tbh. Here’s Mandy, Elly, and Likiya just cause this gif is super cute.
Lee Michelle ~ Soloist (26)
She’s an R&B/Kpop singer, but recently she came in second place on Hip Hop Nation 2 as a rapper. Super talented, but also super underrated. She first came into the media spotlight on Kpop Star on the same season as Winner’s Seunghoon.
Saarah ~ Group Vocalist
Bananalemon is a Jpop group that just recently debuted, but they’re already gaining quite a lot of attention for their girl crush concept. The group is influenced by 90s R&B groups like Destiny’s Child and TLC.
And these are some of the most popular half-black artists in Asia as of now. Jpop girl group GLOSS will be debuting later this year with two half-black members so keep an eye out for them too!
“Unappropriated Beauty“ is a poster ad campaign tackling the issue of cultural appropriation in a non-accusatory, educational way. These adverts are size-compatible to fit in different settings, including bus shelters, billboards, mobile devices, and magazines. The goal of this project is to educate the consumers of appropriative media so that they are better equipped to decide for themselves what is and what is not cultural appropriation, and therefore lowering the tolerance for appropriation being applauded in the media.
wupacing 