EnglishOnze Judith heeft samen met FAA-leden Mira en Jax en samen met hulp van disability activisten buiten FAA, Nadia Buiter en Noah Littel, een speech geschreven voor de Dyke March. Judith en Nadia hebben de speech voorgedragen. Deze is hier terug te kijken.
De tekst van de speech is hieronder te lezen:
Hello dear DYKES!!!!
Today we are standing here proudly as 2 disabled and sick activists to tell you that disability justice is a queer and feminist issue.
This speech is a collaborative text, written by Jax Davis, Mira Thompson, Nadia Buiter and myself, Judith de Hont. Unfortunately two of us can’t be here physically, due to the current inaccessibility of society and the consequences of Long-Covid. We consider it of utmost importance to use our collective knowledge, because queer Crip is something that concerns all of us. Crip meaning Cripple, a term we like to reclaim. We would also like to thank historian Noah Littel, who advised us and gave us permission to use their work.
It is NOT a given that we are standing here before you. Moving safely through society is a privilege. Some of us can’t be here because we are made invisible by ableist structures and a broken medical system.
More often than not, disabled activists are being ignored and overlooked, even within so-called intersectional feminist spaces. The disability justice collective I’m a part of, Feminists Against Ableism, consists almost entirely of queer disabled/chronically ill folks, yet we’ve only been invited to events like these a few times.
Believe it or not, disabled people can be queer, queer people can be disabled. Being in a wheelchair just means we are a good ride. People assume visibly disabled people are cis and straight and can’t date or have sex, so why make queer spaces accessible to them? But we’re here and queer, so get used to it!
Thanks to the organization of the DYKE march we are able to tell our stories and share with you the different ways in which disability justice should concern everyone. Thanks to the DYKE march we can reclaim space for all disabled queer people, who feel connected to lesbian activism, no matter what flavor of queer they are.
We are also here to raise concern about the current lack of protection against covid and to encourage anyone who can to wear a mask. We want to underline the political implications of masking and not masking in public. Covid might be declared over, but an abundance of scientific studies show that Covid is still a mass disabling event. The amount of people who lose their life as they know it because of long covid is growing every day. Some of these people have been ill since the beginning of the pandemic and are without any proper medical help. The two of us have certainly seen our queer friends be heavily impacted by long covid.
So far, research published in the journal Nature shows that at least 10% of people who have been infected end up dealing with prevailing post-Covid symptoms or long Covid. We realize the failing political response is responsible for the lack of intervention and protection of risk groups. Please consider that a lot of our actions are influenced by governmental policy. So we are not here to shame, but to point out we can still create safer and solidarity spaces that all of us can engage in.
Masking strongly helps reduce the spread of Covid, but not everyone can mask. Sometimes the most vulnerable people can’t. True solidarity means masking when and if you can, so that people who can’t mask can move through society as safely as possible. Considering that queer people, especially queer people of color, are at a higher risk of developing long covid due to racism, discrimination, and our more precarious place in society, and considering the amount of queer people that are disabled, it becomes clear that covid safe places in our community are vital.
We need our lifeline away from the harm of society. A place that says: “We want you to live.”
It all sounds too familiar to us. The bodies we live in have been trained to be hyper aware of the fact that most people would rather see us dead than alive. You might remember what happened in the 80s, when a fast spreading viral illness, called HIV, was ignored for a long time because it was largely affecting our community and even seen by many as a rightful punishment for our existence.
Not only was queerness again mystified and classified as a contagious identity, many queer people were neglected and left to die in isolation. Many of these victims could have been prevented, if proper education and care was offered and if governments had not waited so long to provide the necessary research funding. But disabled and ill queer people were once again left to fend for themselves.
Queer history and disability history are intertwined and have a lot in common.
There are many similarities between HIV and long covid, both in their viral effects on the body and the way society deals with these viruses. We see this in how patients and risk groups are being isolated and how most people think safety measures are unnecessary, because they consider themselves as so different from the people who do get sick. It’s because of such parallels, that international activist group AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power,
ACT UP,
has now become one of the most prevalent fighters for covid justice.
Importantly, covid has a significant impact on those with HIV and AIDS who have a lower immune response, and the vaccine protects them less than it protects people without HIV and AIDS. Adopting covid safety measures in queer spaces means making them accessible to people with HIV/AIDS too.
Lesbians in the 80s and 90s were leading the way in hospital care for people dying of AIDS and now this DYKE march has been a breath of fresh air in how ready the organization was to adopt covid safety measures.
Dykes and queers are part of leading the charge yet again.
Regarding how governments have dealt with covid and HIV, we see a political policy unfolding of effectively deeming certain lives more worthy than others. That is called eugenics. We see this policy too in our government’s response to the current genocides taking place such as in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
And it is clear to us that disability justice activists need to speak up against these genocides. For every death that happens, more people have become permanently disabled. The lack of medical supplies and proper hygiene will cause a lot of people to suffer majorly from life threatening complications. Everyone there is disabled right now, because the very nature of genocide is disabling and meant to make living life inaccessible.
How does this affect us, here right now?
Just like disability is not an isolated experience, neither is queerness. Our queerness here is currently being weaponized against Palestinians and queer people there.
We must speak out against this and say: not in our name.
We cannot think that staying silent on Palestine will save us. So say it with me: FROM THE RIVER TO THE SEA
Palestine will be free
From the river to the sea
Palestine will be free
Genocides are not only linked to disability and queerness, they are linked to the violent repression of the right to protest as well. We have seen a significant increase in police violence against protestors for years and it is clear that anti-genocide protests can count on extra violent repression. Doorbraak recently published 3 articles about police violence at Leiden Pride where people who were protesting the capitalistic pinkwashing of Leiden Pride were ordered to take their masks off. Since the student protests for Palestine, there has been a further criminalisation of masks. With religious queer, disabled people of color being the most targeted with violence of the inherently racist police, they will be most affected by mask bans. If the trend of mask bans that is currently happening in America will happen in the Netherlands as well, queer disabled people will get even further segregated from society.
To slowly conclude this speech, we want to reiterate that every single person here has and will experience ableism in their lifetimes.
Not only will almost everyone become disabled at some point, but the way hate against queer people works in society is meant to be disabling. Just look at what is happening to trans people right now. Hate against trans people aims to make society as inaccessible as possible for them. Anti-trans sentiments are directed at their access to healthcare, to exercise, and even to something as utterly basic as a public bathroom! Being at the intersection of disabled and trans means access to these things is restricted even further.
The late trans, disabled icon Sylvia Rivera said it best. “They have been brainwashed by this fucked up system that has condemned us and by doctors that call us a disease and a bunch of freaks.”
We need to recognise ableism for what it is. The fight against ableism is important for queer people. Disabled people also need spaces where they can explore their identities and sexualities. Not having these spaces has kept us trapped in closets fighting against inaccessibility. And we have more to talk about than just accessibility and medical diagnoses. Kirsten Hearn, co-founder of Sisters Against Disablement and Lesbians And Gays Unite In Disability, summarized this perfectly in 1986: “We wanted to talk to you about body image, about symmetry, about the way in which we relate to each other, about sex, about many other things. You have forced us to talk about access.”
Another queer disabled icon of color is the late Stacey Park Millbern, who is one of the people who coined the term disability justice. She once said: “I would want people with disabilities twenty years from now to not think that they’re broken. You know, not think that there is anything spiritually or physically or emotionally wrong with them. And not just people with disabilities but queer people, gender non conforming folks, and people of color. And all of the people I think that society really pushes down and out. And just to know that we are so powerful.”
And that is what we want YOU to know. There is nothing wrong with being disabled, it is just a different way of existing.
Disabled is just what we are. Queer is just who we are.
None of that should be seen as a bad thing. We all deserve to take up space. No matter what society tells us.
It is so important that we do not push each other out of our community spaces for living different queer lives. We need each other.
Reclaiming space means we hold space for each other to be every unique flavor of queer we are.