And, actually, there are many disabled people who can’t do sports, even within the paralympics etc., or can’t do them often enough to become sports stars.

But disabled people’s sports skills wasn’t what I was talking about, nor was I saying nobody wants to be cured of anything. I was saying that it’s really weird when society automatically views some limitations in human bodies (those considered disabilities) as ‘to be adjusted to’ and that ‘adjustment’ as the main determining factor in the person’s emotional life, but does not view people with more ‘acceptable’ limitations (such as not having the body of a sports star, or the mind of an astrophysicist, or something else that requires what’s normally considered to be exceptional ability in a particular area) in that manner nearly so often (not that there are not pressures, but the pressures are different).

There are autistic people who believe that if they were ‘normal’ they would have the romantic or sexual relationships they crave.

There are people with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia who long to be cured, and lead a ‘normal’ life.

People don’t seem to understand that Hyperacusis isn’t just being irritated by loud sounds, it’s being caused real pain by them. It’s not a choice, it’s a real condition that cannot be changed.

It would be nice if I could just go to a resturant and eat without having to be constantly scanning for the next family with kids who are coming in, to make sure with a glare they know to sit elsewhere.

The main focus of the Green Paper was on sick and disabled welfare claimants, particularly those receiving Incapacity Benefit (IB).

The main problem perceived with IB is that it attracts too many people onto it and then traps them there once they claim it. It keeps people in poverty and more importantly from the British Labour government’s perspective, it deprives the labour market of potential workers.

Because paid work is regarded as the only morally sustainable route out of poverty, then “the Green Paper can be read as a means of using the work ethic to blame those who lack work for the situation in which they find themselves.”

The Green Paper suggests that the only difference IB recipients have to those officially defined as unemployed, is that they “have managed to hoodwink doctors into believing they have a condition or impairment that means they are unable to work or they connive with doctors who overstate their patients’ mental or physical problems.”

The Green Paper is based on the medical model of disability, and not the social model, because it focuses upon the ability of IB recipients to do paid work, rather than upon the ability of employers to make accomodations for sick and disabled people.

Over 40% of IB recipients are women. Research from 1993 found that female recipients of disability benefits are more likely than male recipients to have children(20% of female compared with 13% of male recipients). “Disabled women with dependent children [..] will not only have to deal with the sexism through which labour markets are structured but also with the disabilism of labour markets which means that disable women are, on average, paid less than their able-bodied peers and disabled males.” Also because of the social construction of motherhood in which women are always ‘there’ for their children, disabled women who (re)enter paid employment may be in “fear of not being defined as a ‘good mother'”.

In contrast to empowering sick and disabled people to work, the policy proposals are “likely to oppress them by expecting them to be like able-bodied workers without addressing the social and institutional basis of disablement.” This is because they are based on long held myths regarding sick and disabled benefit claimants, rather than on the their lived realities.

The article quotes a report in the New York Times (8 June 1998) that:

“Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani will soon begin requiring physically and mentally disabled mothers to work for their welfare checks…City officials say the old system, which allowed the disabled to stay at home until city doctors certified that they could work, denied job training, work experience and career counselling to people who desperately needed those services.

It was also noted how a distinction would be drawn between those ‘with disabilities severe enough to qualify for Federal disability benefits’ and those entitled to state benefits, with the former exempt from the work-focused aspects of the new regime.”

I’ve encountered the same problem in the developmental disability self-advocacy movement. A lot of people there spent so long being told they could not get jobs, that the backlash has involved assuming anyone could get and keep full-time work if they only tried hard enough and/or got all the right supports. And of course government agencies are totally willing to buy (or pretend to buy) that line of crap, because it saves them money.

I’ve had total strangers tell me I’m employable because “everyone is employable”. If I explain why I’m not, I look like I’m just arguing for my limitations, because it’s quite a litany of reasons to sit through. (“I could do ________ if I didn’t have _______, but I do, so I can’t,” several times over.) Which comes across as “negative”, but for me it’s just the reality of the situation. I can do sporadic work, that is pretty random and not to a time schedule, that’s pretty much all. Until jobs exist that are so flexible and well-paying that they adapt to the ever-shifting way my body functions (and account for long periods of time when I just can’t do them), then I can’t get one, and that’s just realism speaking. But I always get told it means “giving up on myself,” which it absolutely doesn’t. There are many things I can do, and do well, I just have to do them on a seemingly totally random schedule and basis. (This blog, for instance, I can keep up because it has no absolute and fixed topic that I absolutely must blog on, no deadlines that I absolutely must meet, and allows me to write in reaction to things in a particular and complex way that I’ve never seen a full-time or even standard part-time employer able to duplicate.)

The idea that people with a single label or set of labels can actually differ from each other seems like something that bureaucracies just can’t fathom (or outright don’t want to fathom) a lot of the time.

That is not the reaction the government of the UK has. They think people on disability benefits have it easy and are lazy scroungers who have nothing wrong with them and just want a free ride (they admit that a tiny monirity are the real disabled and we can pity them in the way you describe, but the rest need a kick up the backside). To them, adjusting to a disabillity means getting a job and not needing any help. TO go along with that, the mental health industry now promote the “recovery” movement. Once I was told a had a lifelong condition and would never be able to work. I was forcibly treated and incarcerated to ram that message home. Now times have changed and apparently if I just changed my attitude, I could “recover” and would no longer be disabled. And if I don’t change my mind by myself, my benefits will be cut and I’ll be on the streets.