Nicky

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

"It's not complicated, it's genocide"

i genuinely think trump knows what he’s doing, the way he executes things so everyone forgives him, he’s evil, but he’s aware of what he’s doing

On the one hand, people often get "tired" of someone having an ongoing disability. To paraphrase another post, "Your friends will take you to the ER the first time you shit blood, but the 20th time, that's TMI." Plenty of people with ongoing conditions and have experienced the people around them eventually running out of sympathy, eventually expecting them to "get over it" and be abled, even if that's never going to happen. These onlookers can't comprehend chronic disabilities, or illnesses that don't just go away eventually. They believe in the power of Proper Treatment™ even if there isn't any such treatment for what you have.

On the other hand, people also seem incapable of understanding that you can be temporarily disabled, or that treatments can help you become less disabled. Look at how people accuse people with DID of "faking" if they're not miserable, or if they've learned to manage/accommodate/decrease their symptoms. To them, it doesn't matter if you've been in therapy for years, known for decades, or anything – apparently, knowing anything about how to deal with your disorder means you don't actually have it. Or, if you have a situation like "I was hearing impaired before, but the source of my impairment was curable, so I'm not now.", people seem to take that as evidence that your hearing impairment wasn't that bad or never actually mattered.

"Trans men have male privilege."

These are the responses I got when I posted a roommate search as a trans guy.

(EDIT- forgot to add this special one)

*

Last time I moved in with someone who didn't know I was trans, once they found out things gradually started getting weird. We got into an argument because they didn't think a trans guy should wear what I was wearing one day. One of them started shoving me around until I was on the ground, right next to the stairs. Then as I was trying to move out he kept blocking my path and chasing me around the parking lot. So yeah, I'm gonna let someone know before I move in that I'm trans.

you have to be kinder to people who are slow processors.

you have to be kinder to people who don't understand your jokes.

you have to be kinder to people who forget important dates.

you have to be kinder to people with cognitive decline.

you have to be kinder to people who were always this way, too.

People have always been people. There has never been the mythical golden age of the "good old days."

"At least we're getting richer"