The Queer Disabled Historian

I have quite a few different blogs for different aspects of what I do.

@enbycrip is my main blog for thoughts on history, culture, intersectionality and marginalisation as a queer, disabled and neurodivergent person. It’s also where I post about academia and life stuff.

@ds9-polycule-tales is specifically for DS9 AU queer polycule fiction and general Trek fandom stuff.

@queer-crip-grows is for gardening, urban food growing, environmental and sustainability stuff, plus some solarpunky stuff too

@a-queer-crip-writes is for my short fiction and poetry

@a-queer-crip-arts is basically just a place for me to put the various art stuff I try so I can see progression with practice. One thing I can actually thank the GenAI bros for; I spent enough time talking about how anything an actual person makes is so infinitely superior to trash churned out by a plagiarism engine and how art is a skill learned by practice, not an innate talent, that I actually convinced myself to start putting my money where my mouth was.

I take commissions - copy editing and proofreading, plus sensitivity reading as a queer nonbinary disabled person. I take writing commissions for academic historical research and analysis, popular history, perspectives on queerness, disability and marginalisation, and also for fiction! Please PM if you would like to discuss a commission!

If you would like to tip me for my work, you can send it to my Ko-Fi. Thanks!

Okay, so thing I need to raise here.

That’s twice recently where a friend has decided to lash out in a really quite personal way on a post of mine where resulting conversations have come out as “it’s something I’ve seen a lot of recently that was irritating me for x reason and I’m stressed and that’s why I snapped”. And I’m hearing of similar experiences from other disabled people.

I follow a lot of multiply-marginalised people across various platforms because I spend 80-90% of my life lying down resting and it’s a way to learn how things affect people less privileged than me that is about what they choose to share. And I’ve seen discussions of this from a number of people I follow and Pages related to intersectional issues recently.

All the posts I’ve seen it on are from women or femme-read people, or ones the people reacting *thought* were women.

All the posts have been from disabled people and/or BIPOC.

The vast majority of the people reacting have had masc names and/or present masc in profile pics.

So what I would *really* like is for people to think about their behaviour online - and in meatspace too - given current conditions.

Things are *extremely* stressful right now. News from the US is incredibly worrying. Things with Palestine are horrific. International issues re Ukraine are stressful. Labour continue to make things worse for everyone who isn’t wealthy and right-wing AF. People want to take action to help this and ways to actually do anything are feeling increasingly pointless or dangerous for systemic reasons.

Frustration, anger, fear and anxiety are absolutely normal and understandable reactions to this. What I would like is for people to *think* about how they manage their reactions.

And in particular to think about why something from a particular person, particularly one you broadly agree with, irritates you enough for you to react by attacking them when you did not react that way to other people who said or shared it.

Humans are extremely social, hierarchical animals. All of our brains are constantly tracking hierarchies and calibrating our behaviour accordingly. You may not think that you are doing this, particularly when a particular reaction feels spontaneous, but the *trend* of results says otherwise. There is a pattern of people unloading anger, frustration, fear, etc etc on certain people because they are more marginalised than them.

I will absolutely note that my experiences in this as a white, usually-femme-read non-binary disabled person have been absolutely minor compared to, say, an out black disabled trans women. It’s still enough of a gut punch to me that I *know* it will affect my posting behaviour unless I take specific steps to prevent it from doing so. The cumulative effect of this for people who are much more marginalised than me, and especially for people who have no support offline and nowhere to turn for it except online, will be much, much worse.

And no, I’m not trawling around to find example after example of this because it shouldn’t take me breaking myself to do so for people to listen to me when I request this of them; *please be mindful in how you react to things you hear or read that stress you*. Take a moment and *think* about *why* something stresses you and if it’s something that’s a pattern of multiple people doing a certain thing, think about why *this* person is the one that makes you want to unload that built-up stress on *them*.

This *very* much applies to both online and meatspace. We don’t hear enough about the increased interpersonal burden marginalised people deal with at times of societal stress because they are safer targets to let off steam at, but it’s far from an online-only phenomenon.

None of this means you’re not allowed to get angry, frustrated or anxious. They are very reasonable reactions right now. And none of it means not addressing a pattern of behaviour that upsets or angers you from a particular person, though I’d always urge asking yourself about intersectional power levels and how it might affect both your feelings and your actions before you do so. It’s about addressing general issues you have with people to *everyone* rather than unloading it on one person, and about trying to deal with the increased levels of stress *everyone* is feeling rn rather than letting them build up.

Including those of us who are predisposed to particular behaviour patterns because of neurodivergence, such as RSD. We can’t really stop having those reactions internally, at least not without years upon years of work, if ever, but we can think about how we let those out and who deals with the fallout. (I really can speak to this personally. RSD is *awful*, I hate it, but it *is* possible to recognise when it makes you behave in ways you don’t want to and find coping strategies that at least minimise how you affect other people.)

I’m sorry things are so fucking awful rn, folks. I hate that we, and so many other people, are having to deal with it. Love to you all.

I’ve not been posting about various stuff I’ve been doing over the last few weeks for various reasons - partially sheer exhaustion, partially a sort of weird holdover of “not wanting to go on about things because that’s performative” thing, partially that, tbh, much of the time when I’m posting I’m so *tired* that dragging complicated things about my own life out is so emotionally taxing and difficult that posting about them feels like a spoon hit I don’t have the capacity available to absorb.

But that’s probably not helpful. So here we are. Post One is going to be about the rehab programme because that’s been one of the main focuses of my time and energy since November.

I’m in the last week of my initial free 12-week chronic joint pain rehab programme at Nuffield Health, which has meant free membership there with specific classes which include exercise and also a whole bunch of advice on things that are supposed to affect pain. I’ve found it - complex but overall positive?

- It’s a rolling programme so when I first joined I was with a whole bunch of older women near the end of their programmes. That was really difficult for gender reasons, feeling maybe this wasn’t aimed at me at all etc etc. It became much more positive as they rolled off and a much more diverse group of folk in gender and age rolled on with me, and I’m honestly going to miss my peers in this. I’m still the youngest in the group, and I’ve not talked about gender in it because honestly that’s spoon-heavy, but it’s been a lot less difficult genderfeels-wise than I initially feared. I have been wearing my pronoun badges at least. I’d love some more Pride and non-binary-specific gym gear - please feel free to link any you know out there from ethical companies; I suspect a lot of it may be beyond my price range, but saving up exists.

- My initial health check showed I had put on a *lot* more weight than I thought, so I’ve been doing my best to utterly revamp my diet and how much sugar I was eating in particular as a maladaptive way to manage fatigue. My next health check is on Thursday after my last class and I’m trying *really* hard not to hope that I’ve lost tons of the weight because a) weight is not an indicator of health or worth b) I’ve been doing a LOT of weights work over that time and it’s entirely possible I’ve acquired a lot more muscle. This would be a very good thing. Trying to manage all of this and getting to a better way of eating with the old ED demon on my shoulder has been *complex* AF tbh. I do actually really need to thank person-centred therapy, many years in the disabled community in general, and FatDoctor and other people in the fat-positive community, esp the trans part, for this not fucking up my head more than it has. I should probably drop my old therapist a personal email to thank her for the help she was to me on this - is that a weird thing for an ex-patient to do? Does that cross boundaries?

- The “general advice on things that are supposed to reduce pain” bit was a barrier for me because it brings up so much trauma about pain clinics and other medical BS about pain over the last decade plus. The fact that it’s ten minutes before exercise has helped; not enough time to build up anger and then physical activity to release it. It’s also helped that we’ve had a lot of group discussions and almost everyone there is chronically ill or chronically injured so it’s been sharing experiences of the genuine systemic life problems that come with that and a *lot* of discussions about how unhelpful the wider medical system has been. Patient solidarity is helpful. Who’d have thunk it? 😜

- I’ve had to *keep* fighting my own “ADHD extremes” personality tendencies all the way through this, as I have through much of the last decade plus. I am *bad* at not throwing myself at things I’m trying to really engage with, y’all. I am *bad* at sensible moderation. It’s not how my brain works at *all*. But I’ve only had one sublaxion and one POTS collapse in the entire programme, and I am fucking proud of myself for that.

- That notwithstanding, this has been A Lot, esp as one of the classes is on a Thursday, the day I see my brother. I don’t talk about him on social media a lot because he is nonspeaking and can’t consent to me sharing stuff about him, but getting weekly contact with him again has been incredibly important to me, and to him, from what he has communicated to me. It’s also high-energy and sometimes exhausting, when he is having a particularly high-energy day, or a tough day, and means cleaning up afterwards. Given how often much less high-energy social contact just kicks the shit out of me, I’m really proud that I’ve missed very few days with him, but it has been *exhausting*. I have spent every Wednesday and most weekends since starting the programme entirely in bed, just crawling to the bathroom, and even with that I am *still* just bone-deep exhausted right now, though I think some of that is still fallout from the *great* weekend away we went to for a friend’s 50th a fortnight ago, of which I *still* spent much too much time in bed.

- I think that, no matter how hard I tried not to, I let myself somewhat entertain the idea that this programme might utterly transform my health if I put enough work into it. Because no matter how hard I try not to, it’s *difficult* not to get sucked into the prevailing medical orthodoxy about fatigue disorders that a big part of the fatigue is “deconditioning” and fixing that will fix the fatigue. Instead, I’m doing a thing that is genuinely helping my mobility but any effect on fatigue levels is very much on the “increasing” scale than otherwise, despite the level of pacing involved (which is the only thing that lets me do anything at all). So after the classes end I am going to be in the space where I need to keep on doing this to keep the mobility improvements and the long-term effects on my health (particularly re reducing my huge osteoporosis risk) and that is going to be *tough*. Some of it will help, esp re the flexibility to pace around other things I’m doing, but making sure I *keep* doing this when it’s going to mean keeping on having to ask my dad for lifts to the gym and the level of exhaustion involved is going to be *tough*. Going to do my best to keep up with other group people there in the hope that will help.

- Doing this at a time when, frankly, Labour is increasing attacks on disability support is extra-scary. I am *really* afraid any improvements in mobility etc will be read as “well you’re cured then” as opposed to “you’re improving prospects for your longer term health and increasing your capacities in certain ways but the work it takes to do and maintain that has at best huge knock-on effects on the energy, including the cognitive energy, available to do anything else with”. The proposed cuts to Access To Work mean any work I can ever get is even more going to have to be remote, which is scary too. The way disability is continually viewed in such zero-sum, capitalist-centered ways continues to just sap my energy across the board, and I’ve got so little to start with.

(In which I attempt to read more essential socialist, anarchist and other vital theory).

I ended up *racing* through’ “Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow”, Pyotr Krotopkin’s 1898 book substantially revised in 1911 that’s frequently cited as one of the founding texts of anarchosocialism.

Honestly, this is terrifyingly brilliant and terrifyingly apt well over a century since it was written (and nearly a century since it was substantially revised).

You will need to have an interest in the minutiae of agricultural and industrial production in the 1910s across the globe, though focused in Western Europe and the US, to enjoy the early chapters of the book. Luckily for me, I'm a social historian so I found it genuinely fascinating, but I can imagine other readers without that particular SpIn potentially being a bit bored to tears by them.

The good news is that all of that can be meaningfully skipped over by the modern reader, should you not be interested in it - it largely exists to prove the author's credentials as an economist and that his theories for a rational anarchist society are based on hard and detailed economic knowledge rather than vague idealism, as that is always the charge thrown at those who dare to propose visionary ideas for societal and economic reform.

Krotopkin proposes a society where production and consumption are highly local and decentralised, though knowledge exchange, education, luxury goods and technical expertise remain international, and become freer than they were then and are now. Where education is long, broad, rational and practical; where everyone capable of it takes part in local food production and handicrafts as well as other forms of more intellectual and artistic work, and where individuals have a lot more autonomy over their lives than then or now.

His analysis of the destructive effects across all human endeavour of capitalism and the worship of capital is sharp, incisive, rational and unequivocal, though his small foray in the conclusion into picturing the spiritual effect of a world where one could be free of the choice between exploitation and exploiting is genuinely gut-punching to read. He did not picture the climate crisis; he hoped we would destroy capital long before the dominion of oil, but his concentration on the importance of preserving soil fertility and scientific sustainability feels terrifyingly prescient.

Where he falls down is his unexamined colonialist bias; his frequent references to "civilised nations" and several reference to Africans as "savages" are painfully grating. Bizarrely, he also makes approving references to education within the Black community in the US and actively refers at several points to economic colonialism being intensely oppressive. He was writing in an *intensely colonialist period and to me this reads as clumsy attempts to *begin* to reach towards anti-colonialism while utterly failing to examine the bias his life and education was steeped in. He is better on misogyny; despite writing about people as a whole with a somewhat patriarchal bent, he is scrupulous in noting the presence and capacities of women and girls in work and education.

Hey UK folks, if you would like to do something that could end up being lifesaving for an incarcerated person, a KTB anarchist named Ryan Roberts has been ill with a severe cough in HMS Swaleside for months but is not receiving any diagnosis or treatment beyond painkillers.

Ryan Roberts (Prisoner number A5155EM) needs urgent medical attention

- He has a bad cough, which has been ongoing for some months

- He has been given basic pain relief, but it hasn’t stopped the cough getting worse

- He has additional symptoms; chest tightness, breathing difficulties, and difficulty speaking, and the constant coughing keeps triggering migraines

- Ryan has the underlying condition asthma, which is likely contributing to the issue

Actions that need to be taken by HMP Swaleside

- Ryan needs to be seen immediately by a qualified medical professional to diagnose and prescribe treatment for the underlying cause of the cough

- He needs to be allowed to to receive effective treatment for the illness

- It is clear the cough is not going to resolve with simple pain relief by this time; proper diagnosis and effective treatment is needed

How you can help

- Call HMP Swaleside on 01795804100 and request to speak to an orderly officer to request Ryan receive proper diagnosis and treatment

- Call Safer Custody on 01795 804295 and explain your concerns, or leave a voicemail message after hours

- Send an email addressing HMP Swaleside Governer Lee-Ann Williams on [email protected]

- Fill in a Safer Custody Concern Form at https://www.prisonersfamilies.org/hmp-swaleside.

Please put your relationship as “friend” on the form.

Access to medical treatment is a basic human right that applies to incarcerated people as much as anyone else, and someone being untreated with a respiratory illness in an incarcerated population right now is frankly very frightening.

Thanks ❤️

Oooh!

I basically live my life in bed when I’m not actively doing other things. That’s the only way I have the energy to do anything at all ever. When I do one of my hourish rehab classes, I’m usually flat in bed for most of the rest of that day and the entire next day, because delayed-onset fatigue is a thing my life is defined by.

It’s not remotely what people think of when they think of “pacing”, but it’s much closer to the daily reality of most people who live with fatigue disorders than the “I take a break for half an hour then I’m fine to go on” people picture when they hear the phrase.

I have heard the word “pacing” at almost every medical appointment I have ever mentioned fatigue at, and never yet had the slightest advice on doing it. Not even the ongoing CBT and Mindfulness websites recommendations I get if I ever mention low mood etc. The term is applied as a panacea by people who have zero understanding of what “pacing” is, how to achieve it, or what it actually means in the context of most fatigue disorders. Or how much pushback most people with those disorders will have when actually trying to implement it, because most people, including healthcare professionals, parse resting as “not trying”.

For people with fatigue disorders, pacing is *radical* in its effects on capacity. It lets you actually have some life, which is the big thing fatigue disorders feel as if they take from you. But we are stuck figuring it out for ourselves against enormous pushback.

If you are considering pointing out logical and biological flaws in Trump’s executive orders - seriously, *they don’t care*.

They don’t give a shit about logic, or fact. They are setting out a statement of intent for fascist eugenicist measures towards trans and disabled people that will particularly affect BIPOC people in those groups. As well as mass fascist eugenics measures towards BIPOC immigrants.

You cannot get round this with a cute logical or linguistic gotcha.

It is intent to remove marginalised people from society on a mass scale that WILL involve death both quick and slow.

I’m not in the US, but things are bad enough in the UK already and half the UK’s political class are rushing for collusion with their hands out.

Acting as though cute logical gotchas will disarm this intent to mass murder like a TOS computer is so facile it hurts. It’s the “you is a pronoun” thing again and again. It’s giggling from the sidelines while the US goes full fascist.

Please. Just stop.

If you mean “I intend to stand in solidarity with marginalised people”, simply say so. Intent for solidarity is helpful. Intent and ways to help practically are far more helpful.

If you feel the need to post the things I referenced above, please reconsider and give a few quid to a trans, disabled or BIPOC person in crisis’ GFM, or a grassroots community org, or a Palestinian GFM. If you can’t afford that, offer a marginalised person in your life practical support. A lift to an appointment. Help picking up meds. Offers to come over and clean or cook. Wear a mask. Hell, tell a trans person they look cute or share tips on ways to respond to ICE raids to help BIPOC immigrants escape. These are small things, but they actually help.

Dragon puppy with a teddy it loves.

Dragon puppy learning to use its flame.

“Oh gods baby, please stop burning Mx Teddy. I’m happy to keep sewing up the chewing rents but I can’t do much when you flame them.”

Mx Teddy is now 40% fire retardant by weight & you have no eyebrows left.

Sitcom/dramedy idea - loosely, *loosely* based on the Wanderings of St Cuthbert.

Your protagonists are six idiot novices/barely monks sent running out the monastery ahead of a Viking attack by their elderly grumpy yet badass mentor who stays behind to cover their escape with the corpse of their monastery’s saintly founder.

The rest of the series is them wandering northern England with the *remarkably active* saintly lich, who has no one else other than these utterly clueless dickheads with which to right wrongs, fight paganism and Vikings and find himself another foundation.

Scientifically, cats literally relate to humans in at least a partially parental way.

Making biscuits on you is a kitten behaviour. Cats learned to make cries that have elements of human infant sounds as part of their self-domestication. They literally seek a relationship with us with features of parenthood to it.

Yes, they can absolutely tell the difference between human children and adults and also co-parent with us on kittens AND human infants - that’s why many cats will put up with clumsiness and somewhat unwieldy love from their human’s babies and toddlers that they would never tolerate from an adult human, because that is *their* giant hairless kitten too, and they *get* that kittens are clumsy and playful and don’t mean harm.

Feral cats live in colonies and have complex social relationships. They can react to us as adults *and* as parents, because that’s a common situation in colonies.

I hate when people who, frankly tend to not understand animal social behaviour even slightly, denigrate our relationships with our animal companions. It’s too frequently just anthrocentric BS; this idea that humans aren’t another animal too and that one of our species behaviours isn’t seeking community, including with other species as well as our own.

None of this means it’s okay to treat a cat like a human baby, or worse yet like a toy. The point is that cats are autonomous social beings like us, even if the way they manifest that is different from the majority of humans or dogs, and having a form of a parental relationship with your cat is absolutely fine, same as having a sibling relationship, or a roommate relationship, and people who denigrate others for regarding their animal companions as autonomous beings with their own needs, personalities and emotions are being shitty.