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This is incredibly upsetting. It is a video made by a man whose mother is a disabled woman. She has dementia. She has forgotten who she is and is happily eating an icecream. Her son begins questioning her about his identity and as he does so, the happiness slides from her face. She's increasingly anxious and his questioning turns to badgering. Cut to the son sobbing in the car. 'I feel like she has died,' he says. Yes, you do. And that is something that you will and must come to terms with because this is not about you. I had to learn that and confront my own ableism about the changes that happened to my mother after she'd had a stroke - I was impatient, resented her dullness and difficulty with doing things, hated that she could not remember things that she had remembered before. People will tell you that this is about 'grieving'. Sure you are 'grieving', in a way. You're (often) grieving the loss of something that has been...

  The doublethink of the disability sector just astounds me.  In case you don't know about that book...there is a book by George Orwell called 'Nineteen Eighty Four' .  Lots of people will have read it. It's a book that was written almost 70 years ago.  The book was about this society which was run by 'the Party' - this grey, awful, brainwashed society where everything you did was watched by the government (the Party), where everything was strictly rationed, where your thoughts were controlled by propaganda, where independent thought and action or a perceived lack of loyalty was swiftly and brutally punished.  And then there was double-think.  Doublethink was a word that Orwell invented. The characters in the book had to learn doublethink to be regarded as a 'good Party member' - if you ever deviated from what the government was saying, it was akin to blasphemy. People who disagreed with the 'party line' were shunned. ...

Ever been to a disability conference? Most disabled people and family members have.  They're generally overpriced, are run and organised by non disabled people and are directed at service providers for the commodification of disabled people. I love the Famous Five and also the idea that they could be inappropriate, swearing, disabled people - attending the most annoying disability conference ever, with token crips and all the kinds of non disabled disability sector workers that we encounter every day. Here's the link for your free book - Five Go To A Disability Conference .  Contains a shit load of swearing.  Enjoy. Image description - an image which depicts a standard 'Famous Five' book cover.  The lettering reads 'the famous five' and 'five go to a disability conference'.  It is illustrated by Enid Blyton.  A boy is in the front in a crowd of people, wearing dark glasses.  A girl with short hair and a dog is beside him and there is also a girl...

Murder apologist bingo - for the version with comments, go to https://www.dropbox.com/s/mx6f1m6uslia8l0/final%20image%20murder%20apologist%20bingo.jpg?dl=0 She could be any woman, that woman.   Middle aged, with an unremarkable face.    Like me, she’s the parent of several disabled children.  She doesn’t look like the type of women who would murder her children.  The newspapers clearly thought the same.   She’s an ordinary mother accused of an extraordinary crime.    ‘Australian mum is arrested over the death of her two children’, one article reads.    ‘Mum accused of killing children with poison’, says another. Queensland mother Maree Mavis Crabtree has been accused of poisoning her two disabled children, Erin and Jonathon, aged 18 and 26.   They are described as severely disabled.   An arrest has been made.  There is no further information available. The comments on socia...

Dear LGBTIQ+ Community I would like to extend our love, support and solidarity today, the day after a decision where sixty one percent of our nation voted for you to have the same rights as other Australians. I am fifty. The year I was born, 1967, was the last time that the rights of a group of Australians were voted on.  But on that occasion, it was a referendum, not a plebiscite, which is effectively an opinion poll - which government are not obliged to act upon.  The referendum asked whether Aboriginal people should be included in the census and whether the Commonwealth government should make laws for First Nations people.  That included the 'right to marry freely'.  Three states voted against that right, and the Territories were excluded.  But that was fifty years ago, and this is 2017.   I can't help but wonder how it must have felt for those Aboriginal people to know that about 10% of the population did no...