Post No. 2,641 - Disability “accommodations” are just being decent - diagnoses are NOT required!

One of the major actions to come out of disability activism is what is termed “reasonable accommodations” - which refers to changes to enable people with disabilities to be a part of, and function in, particular places.

This is commonly interpreted around access, as someone in a wheelchair is visible, but it goes beyond that to people with non-apparent disabilities, and ensuring the ability to fully be part of places and activities, whether that be work, entertainment, etc. 

As an example, I used to part of the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) committee of a water industry organisation (I left soon after I retired). They began each meeting by asking if there were any reasonable accommodations that meeting participants required, and in one we had a guest who had impaired visibility, and as a result used a screen reader: as that meant any messages put into the chat were read out at the same time others were speaking, they asked if we could defer using the chat function while they were participating. 

Reasonable accommodations are often not something expensive or difficult: they may just require a little informed consideration - or, in my grumpy parlance, being decent.

Sometimes being decent is required even without disability considerations. 

As an example, when we moved into our house, we had a house warming, and two people somehow thought it was acceptable for them to go into my bedroom - which had a cat that was scared of people in it, apart from it being personal space. 

Having the basic manners and decency to respect people’s private, personal space does not require any justification: what was done was a gross invasion of privacy. 

Similar to that, is people rearranging possessions to suit the way the busybody prefers - which, for anyone with a modicum of common sense is clearly absurd! People have preferences based on what suits them best. 

It is like a right handed person setting up a left handed person's workspace in a way that suits the right hander (did you know that the sides of the mouse allocated to functions can be changed to suit handedness?). 

In the context of some disabilities, this video goes into that aspect quite well:

“5 Ways People Try to Help Someone With ADHD That Aren’t Actually Helpful (and What to Do Instead)”   https://youtu.be/3kS3gPMQuP8?si=y8_mcZZfIcvfjCJv    excellent comments about not assuming something that works for you will work for others!!!   (includes an ad)  

I have long preferred being able to see things so I can use them - I hate hiding things in cupboards and wardrobes, and consider that, frankly, amathiac as it means visitors/guests, for instance, do not know what you have in a kitchen, for example, unless you go rifling through all the cupboards. 

Other people respecting that does NOT need a formal diagnosis of a problem in the person whose space it is: it just requires the visitor to be decent, rather than arrogant, self-centred, presumptuous, and amathiac.

Even worse is the anger some people have expressed when I state the truth that I can have a coffee and still go to sleep afterwards. A friend with a degree in genetics told me there is a specific gene which means some people are not affected by caffeine, but are at an elevated risk of cancer if they are carnist and eat overcooked meat. Another possible explanation is the dopamine hit on ADHD brains that enables sleep - as jokingly portrayed at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cXqCdWoiYk0. 

I’ve often wondered about the anger, and perhaps those people have invested so much of their self image in pretty picture of them being smart about sleep hygiene by avoiding caffeine and doing various other rules that my statement threatens their poorly founded self esteem. 

Bad luck - your flawed worldview does not justify being angry or threatening when it is shown to be flawed by a truth.

I wish to make it quite clear that the requirements around decency also applies to people without disabilities. 

As an example, an appalling (worst ever) manager I worked for in the 80s used to ring us at home when we were ill, so I did same to him - to annoyance of his wife, who I told if she was unhappy then get him to stop doing that to us (she was a doctor, by the way). 

Now, I could see the social expectation in that company was to go along with that managers behaviour (it was supposedly about a [sociopathic] version of “dedication”), which I could equally see was amathiac (see https://youtu.be/NUAGnEvl1_Q?si=kU61g7OkjN5F25C7&t=447) - or, in another word, wrong. 

So I refused to do so ... and was considered aggro for standing up for decency - and stupid (their terminology at the time) for not going along with abuse ... 

Go figure ... 

Neurotypicals should be a lot more reluctant to point that finger ... 

Going back to the concept of accommodations, whether on the basis of disability or just human decency ... anyone who gets irritated at having to accept even minor differences in other people needs to get a grip: that is life. Get over yourself, and start being a decent person, accepting of the rich variety that makes life. 

See also https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/09/aspects-of-character-content-warning.html. 

PS - even in places where legal protections against discrimination don't exist, workplace accommodations often result in improved productivity and/or reduced staff turnover/claims for compensation, and those need to ALWAYS be considered against the cost of any accommodations that do involve expense. 

Where anti-discrimination laws exist, you must comply with the laws. If you do so graciously, you are a better human being, in my opinion, than if you do so with a lot of whingeing and complaining.

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below, and there’s also Instagram. 

Remember: we generally need to be more human being rather than human doing, to mind our Mӕgan, and to acknowledge that all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk.

 

 

Post No. 938 – Reflections from The Past Week

This week I read an article on LinkedIn about power sharing and dynamics between the genders – at least, that is the term I would use: the (male) author was basically having a whinge about women having more power and being more violent than men: the claim was that women are ten times more likely than men to hit first. Based on my life experience, although women DO commit violence, including sexual violence (e.g., see here), men have the far greater association with violence – and, in terms of the male experience of violence, most of it is at the hands of other men.

It was a shame the author had devolved into that line of argument: his original starting point was good (I would have liked and shared it if the article had stayed along those lines) – it was how, a couple of decades ago, the emphasis was on empowering all genders, and that is something I would agree with. As an example, I was, in the mid-90s, the (female) workplace representative for Equal Employment Opportunity in the Workplace, and one of the selling points I was happy to use - and was well received by most men, although not all - was that the changes being implemented would help men as well as women (e.g., allow the men to spend more time with their kids).

That does seem to have been lost.

One of the reasons it has been lost, I suspect, is akin to something that I understand the great Dr Martin Luther King Jr. alluded to once: if you don’t give a discriminated group realistic and credible – to them – hope, that group will become increasingly more extreme.

Dr King was writing in terms of the civil rights movements of the 60s in the USA, which were largely based on ending racial discrimination, and he begged US President Johnson for something to give his people hope, warning that not doing so would lead to violence, the year before, I think, the Watts Riots (incidentally, anyone who makes disparaging comments about people destroying their own homes or neighbourhoods knows nothing about being on the receiving end of endemic discrimination  or how things like houses or neighbourhoods can become associated with being trapped – which is something I can relate to, as that is how living in the suburbs etc has left me feeling [I’m more country girl than city, but even better is being on the water :) ] ).

In terms of gender relations in the here and now, despite laws banning discrimination since the 1970s (in Australia), there is still a great disparity in terms of social and economic power between men and women, and women are being driven to stronger activism and views because of the lack of credible – to women - progress.

There is a saying to the effect that groups who are in power feel that they are being discriminated against when a situation moves towards a more balanced position: that applies, in this instance, I consider, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, as the British High Court in India in the 1850s pointed out,

you    do    not   restore    equality   to   a   disadvantaged   group   by   providing   ongoing   equality  of   opportunity   -   it   is   necessary   to provide   advantageous   treatment (at least until balance has been provided).

That means, as far as I am concerned, quotas.

(Incidentally, there was an interview with a female activist in the 1960s who related the story of how they initially campaigned for equal power for women at a University, and got a reply along the lines of “oh we think around 30% is enough power for women”; they responded by advocating for “all power to women” and the response was quickly changed to “oh, 59% is fine”. Amusing perhaps, but it gives a really clear illustration of the problem. Another illustration of this problem is those unthinking [i.e., stupid] people who respond to “Black Lives Matter’ with “All Lives Matter”: yes all lives matter, and it is BECAUSE black lives are being treated as if they DON’T matter that it is necessary to remind everyone that they DO matter.)

There have been enough articles on how things like merit-based job applications do not work, so I’m not going to bother repeating them (or even trying to link to them, Dear Reader – links can be found by a suitable Internet search or three :) ), and so-called “blind applications”, where personal identifying information is removed are just another attempt at at dithering around the edges: it is high time for disadvantaged groups to be given their power.

There is another aspect that I want to talk about here, and that is power in the home and interpersonal relationships. I consider that housework should be done equally (throughout all levels of society – which puts a constraint on the expected work commitments at higher workplace strata :) ), but that also means that decisions about standards of housework also get shared – if one person likes housework done to a higher standard than the other, they compromise and meet in the middle: if they can’t do that, they need to consider either ending their relationship, or living separately. [1]

Being open to such relationship possibilities as living separately is one of the things I’ve learned from polyamory - along with things like the difficulties, and the irrelevant ideologies that can take over groups. I’ve found all communities I have become a part, from the first one – the sailing community in the little town in central Queensland that I lived in as a kid (teenager) are not as good as I first think (e.g., see my email at the end of this post). In the case of the polyamory community here, it at one stage became overtaken with group that had child-indulging [2] approaches to parenting, and an expectation that everyone would share their belief that nothing else in life mattered as much as children, family and house to live in – which is complete and utter ******** [3] ... and fortunately has been brought under control, as I understand it, in that group. I’ve always been annoyed by (former – none of them now have this position in my life) friends who view getting into a relationship as something which justifies subterfuge (such as portraying an image, rather than being oneself) and a plan to change the entrapped partner into the person’s life priorities, values and views.

Those friends, incidentally, are male as well as female, although more female than male.

On that, if I go back to the point I started this post with, about comparative violence between genders, my personal experience – which is NOT necessarily reflective of society – is that:

• sexual assaults are more often committed by women (I am quite satisfied that such is NOT the case in broader society);
• violence is roughly equally committed by male and female, but the forms are different: more commonly physical, in the case of men, and more commonly verbal (including misuse / abuse of superior word skills, which counts as an abuse of power as much as running a dictatorship or perpetuating sexist abuse), emotional and financial by women. In no case is the violence acceptable – no matter how well it can be explained by things such as discrimination, but the insights gained by knowledge of such factors helps to give a more nuanced and effective response, which will include remedying such also unacceptable factors as the discrimination.

Here's to change for the better, more nuanced understanding, and an end to compulsory stereotypes :)

Notes

[1] This also applies to earning an income. In my view, that should be split evenly, unless there are valid reasons otherwise – e.g., one partner being differently abled, or having very young children. That latter point does NOT mean “the woman” in a heterosexual relationship should stay home: I knew a young male engineer in the 80s who was the one chosen to stay home – largely because his wife earned a higher income than he did.

[2] I have a – current – friend who has occasionally advocated that people who want to have children should first prove that they can raise a dog – properly, in a disciplined way, not by overindulging or indulging in teenage “adoration” rubbish. As I get older, have had more to do with raising partner’s kids and have seen others efforts (successes and failures), I am more and more inclined to agree.

[3] Anyone in a developed society who does think that in this day and age is, in my view, (a) so undeveloped as a person (particularly spiritually) that they are in the grip of the self-replicating DNA(including implications such as this), and (b) environmentally irresponsible, because of the environmental problems that go with overpopulation in such societies. (In undeveloped and many developing societies, there are survival issues which are different, and the current environmental impact of those people – because of things like poverty or impoverished lifestyle – is lower.)

I apologise for publishing these posts twice, but Blogger keeps changing my formatting. I can either publish it and then correct it, or save and close the post and correct it when I reopen it, but that leaves an extra copy in my "drafts" folder ...

Love, light, hugs and blessings

Gnwmythr, Pagan Energy Worker, Wéofodthegn

I am revamping my former website, and getting at least one other underway (pronounced "new-MYTH-ear"; ... aka Bellatrix Lux … aka Morinehtar … would-be drýicgan or maga ... )

My "blogiography" (list of all posts and guide as to how to best use this site) is here, and my glossary/index is here. The reasons for my caution when using Wikipedia are here.

I started this blog to cover karmic regression-rescue (see here and here), and it grew ... See here for my group mind project, here and here for my "Pagans for Peace" project (and join me for a few minutes at some time between 8 and 11 PM on Sunday, wherever you are, to meditate-clear for peace), and here for my bindrune kit-bag. I also strongly recommend learning how to flame, ground and shield, do alternate nostril breathing, work with colour, and see also here and be flexible. 

May the best in me, my Higher Self,
and those of the Clear Light who assist me,
help me to keep myself grounded, centred and shielded,
to be Balanced and a Fulcrum of Balance,
a centre of Balanced Positivity and Spiritual Maturity,
with my aura continuously cleansed, cleared and closed,
repelling all negative or unwanted energies,
whilst allowing positive, balancing and healing energies in and through.

The real dividing line is not between Christianity and Islam, Sunni and Shia, East and West. It is between people who believe in coexistence, and those who don’t.

Tom Fletcher, Former UK Ambassador to Lebanon

• All of the above - and this blog - could be wrong, or subject to context, perspective, or state of spiritual evolution ...

Tags: abuse of power, communication, discrimination, evolution, gender, growth, hope, ideology, inequity, metaphorical blindness, self interest, society, taking advantage of others,

First published: Sunnudagr, 16^th October, 2016

Last edited (excluding fixing typo's, Blogger's change of my formatting and other minor matters): Sunday, 16^th October, 2016