10 Principles of Disability Justice By Sins Invalid
My explanation for ME Advocates
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10 Principles Of Disability Justice By Sins Invalid
1.) Intersectionality
2.) Leadership of the most impacted
3.) Anti-capitalist politics
4.) Cross-movement solidarity
5.) Recognizing wholeness
6.) Sustainability
7.) Cross-disability solidarity
8.) Interdependence
9.) Collective access
10.) Collective liberation
The following slides offer my personal explanation of these principles for people with ME. Sins Invalid offers their own detailed explanation at
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Intersectionality & Cross-Movement Solidarity
Intersectionality means understanding that the way someone experiences oppressive systems like racism, sexism or ableism, depends on the intersection or overlap of oppressed groups they belong to. This means that we cannot expect to fully understand ableism without also understanding how it interacts with other systems of oppression.
Cross-movement solidarity means ensuring that we work with other movements promoting freedom.
We must make our movement safe for people of color, birthing people, queer people, prisoners, and those with all forms of physical and mental disability or illness.
Likewise, we must push other movements to fight against ableism and healthism and to be safe spaces for disabled people.
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Leadership of the Most Impacted
When we decide where to focus our activism we should listen not to the person deemed the biggest "expert" but to people with the most direct experience of the problem. This grounds our solutions in the needs of those most affected.
For ME Advocacy it is essential that we listen to severe ME patients because they are the most strongly affected. People who are more affected by oppression have a harder time being heard, so it is important that we highlight and amplify their messages.
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Anti-capitalist Politics
Capitalism lets a tiny fraction of people, owners of factories, land, housing, etc. to accumulate wealth far beyond their needs.
For everyone else, your ability to access basic needs or fulfill desires depends on your ability to work. Your value is tied to your productivity.
Disabled people's ability to live fully is curtailed under capitalism by our inability to conform to standard labor practices. Disabled rights are therefore fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, so disability justice REQUIRES anti-capitalist politics.
For people with ME this is even more true as your ability to produce anything requires energy. Slowing down and doing less is the only option for people with ME, something capitalism punishes with poverty and homelessness.
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Recognizing Wholeness
Disabled people are whole people. We have unique desires, needs, history and life experiences.
Recognizing wholeness means that we do not prescribe one size fits all solutions to disabled people. It means we respect the autonomy of disabled people to decide how they would like to deal with their own problems.
For people with ME, recognizing wholeness means accepting different outlooks on our disability. It means not enforcing toxic positivity or rejecting people's happiness. It means accepting that what is the right decision for one person is rarely the right decision for everyone.
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Bodily Sustainability
I use the term bodily sustainability to specifically talk about the sustainability pillar of disability justice.
Just like environmental sustainability, bodily sustainability means recognizing that our bodies resources are not unlimited and not using them past the limit of regeneration or recovery. We must value our disabled body-minds even when no one else does.
This means we must pace our actions in accordance with our energy.
For people with ME this means finding creative ways to fight and protest that will not lead to severe crashes and/or permanent decline.
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Cross-Disability Solidarity
Disability justice must encompass and build solidarity between all forms of disability including physical impairments, chronic illness, mental illness, blind and deafness, mold and toxin injuries, chemical sensitivities, neurodiversity, intellectual, and developmental disabilities.
It is important to avoid the "disability olympics" and fighting over which forms of disability are most legitimate.
All forms of disability face unique challenges and all deserve compassion and justice.
For people with ME it is especially important not to bring down the validity of mental illnesses like depression when we are fighting for recognition of ME as a physical illness. It is also important to make sure our advocacy includes those who have ME as well as other forms of disability and to work closely with movements fighting for common comorbidities like fibromyalgia, MCAS, POTS, and long covid.
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Interdependence
Indigenous cultures deeply understood the idea of interdependence. That like an ecosystem we all rely on each other and liberation for one group of people relies on liberation for all.
Focusing on interdependence means building systems of mutual aid and peer support that keep our communities going regardless of government policies. It means embracing community because we understand that we are all more successful when we work together.
For people with ME this can look like letting go of the drive to be independent at all costs and instead embracing the process of building a support network that can sustain everyone. It can look like recognizing that you can't self-care your way back into health, but you can build a community where you are valued despite your illness.
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Collective Access & Collective Liberation
Access needs are not shameful. Collective access means finding creative solutions to meet everyone's access needs either through individuals or groups. It means that access needs are a group responsibility. No one should have to sacrifice autonomy to be a part of our community.
We understand that we fail or succeed together. We cannot have disability justice unless that liberation includes people of all abilities, races, genders, classes and sexualities. We understand that liberation must be collective.
As ME Advocates collective liberation means looking at ourselves as more than ME advocates but as advocates for disability justice. We must understand that the problems faced by the ME community are just one facet of the ableist world we live in and we must work with and alongside everyone fighting ableism to succeed.
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The 10 Principles of Disability Justice by @sinsinvalid are an incredible tool for disability justice organizers and activitists. In this post I break down my interpretation of them specifically for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) Advocacy.
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ME/CFS is a complex chronic illness and disability. Our severe chronic fatigue and energy impairment combined with massive symptom burden can make advocacy difficult. Simply put, it is not a battle we can fight alone. We must ally ourselves with other larger movements like the broader disability justice movement if we are to be successful in bettering the lives of the millions missing and millions more pwME and long covid.
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Furthermore, as people who have experienced the worst of the medical industrial complex caregiving crisis palliative care crisis and general ableism we should be able to see that the our fight should not end with a goal to cure MECFS.
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While solving our one illness is important, there will always be undiagnosed patients and those with stigmatized illness who are left behind in the systems we are trying to escape.
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This is why we must prioritize marginalized voices and understand that the problem is not JUST ME/CFS, the problem is the way people with diseases and disabilities like ME/CFS are treated.
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The problem is not JUST that we are disabled. The problem is how we treat disabled people.
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Marginalized people shouldn't be fighting to be normal, we should be fighting to change normal.
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"This is disability justice. We honor the longstanding legacies of resilience and resistance which are the inheritance of all of us whose bodies and minds will not conform. Disability justice is not yet a broad based popular movement. Disability justice is a vision and practice of what is yet-to-be, a map that we create with our ancestors and our great-grandchildren onward, in the width and depth of our multiplicities and histories, a movement towards a world in which every body and mind is known as beautiful." -Sins Invalid
