Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

I've been struggling with not being able to articulate how I'm feeling about the overlap between disabled and trans issues in light of the Supreme Court ruling, the overambitious interim "guidance" from EHRC, and how widely the decision is being interpreted by police forces and NHS bodies and etc.

Around the time I started testosterone, I realized that medical transition is effectively acquiring a long-term health condition and while, yes there is specific transphobia in healthcare, there is also endemic ableism and a lot of the negative experiences that heretofore-non-disabled trans people are shocked and miserable about are just part of how healthcare treats people with any chronic health conditions.

So yesterday I read something on Facebook shared by a page called The Disabled Eco-Enby. It's so good ( but so long. )

( depressing shit )

"Things blind or partially sighted people wish sighted people knew..." goes the social media post.

The third comment is already from the parent of a blind child.

And of course it's saying "my child can do anything a sighted person can do!"

Yeah. Including grow up with a lot of ableist thought patterns, which is what I did in that environment.

When I went back later, it was a whole thread. Full of stuff like "nothing will stop my VI grandson!"

Okay I hope he can get a job or benefits, I hope he can get a bus or a train!

I know we're still fighting the same misconceptions that were old when I was young, that if the default assumption is that blind people can't do things it's an improvement to say we can. I just wish there was a bit more nuance and less defensiveness, less evidence that the adults in the situation have accepted the ableist premise of society and are still defining success as "exactly the same as a sighted person."

I dunno. Maybe I was just seeing this in the middle of an incredibly busy and kind of demoralizing work day, maybe I'm just projecting from my own visually inspired childhood.

But if nothing else, the question was what blind and partially sighted people want sighted people to know. Can we not have one social media thread without sighted people immediately butting in?

The most horrifying detail in this story about a wheelchair user not being able to get to the stage to receive her award for disability work is hiding in the caption of the photo.

I am so jaded and cynical when it comes to ableism that I'm not often surprised any more, but I did a whole Mike-Hobbes-style wheezing, hyperventilating laugh when I read the caption under a photo of this white woman using a power wheelchair holds a fancy plaque while rolling her eyes and pointing over her shoulder to some steps up to a stage. (There's a podium behind her that is only suitable for a standing typical-height adult, so in the absence of other microphones she wouldn't have been able to be heard even if she had been able to get to the stage.)

The caption is "Despite a ramp being available, staff presumed Ms Landre didn't want one."

There was nothing else about this in the story! I want to hear how the staff that presumed that are never going to do so again.

Why not always have the ramp out? Why ever "presume that somebody didn't want one"?

The many possible answers to this (it's poor quality, they lied about the existence of the ramp, they assume no one ever wants a ramp because of systemic ableism and it didn't occur to them that this event would be any different...) are all bad.

It really threw me when I realized that I'm much closer to the deadline for returning my PIP review than I thought I was. Not least because I had to factor in shit like weekends and the mail because I actually had to mail this form in like it's the goddam 1990s.

When my original PIP form was done digitally, and when the DWP knows to send me letters in large print, it's fucking bullshit that they send me their normal-ass form.

I sent it back with four pages of typed additions to my previous claim, so mostly about my ankle (but also I wasn't even on the current brain drug yet, and then there's testosterone...).

I was close enough to the deadline that I had to pay eight pounds in postage to make sure it'll get there in time, fuck everything about this.

I walked home from the post office feeling really deflated.

Having to work on this today was the last straw for deciding whether I am going to this black-tie gala dinner for work: a few days ago when I'd been a stresshead about everything to do with work, D had said "okay how about we go to Slaters after the gym on Saturday and sort this out" so that had been the plan but then I tried to imagine dealing with strangers about my body in an inadequate binder and then I tried to imagine carting all these clothes with me to London, working like normal that afternoon, getting myself into these clothes, finding a place I've never been to, being the only person wearing a mask, somehow eating enough food, getting from there to a hotel I'm supposed to book myself but am not at all sure how to do...

...and I couldn't. It was just literally unimaginable. Way too many difficult things in a row, without a breather between any of them. So I'll have to fess up on Monday that I'm not doing this. I hate that prospect, but I hate it a lot less.

But the weather was nice and since we didn't have to go clothes shopping and some people at the gym had mentioned it's Salford Pride, D and I planned to go to that. I was really glad for something to look forward to.

By the time I got home and D had had his post-gym shower, he'd learned that Salford Pride is now a ticketed event for crowd-control purposes, and that tickets were sold out. I'm so used to going to these small Prides that I forgot about tickets (I've bought a ticket for Manchester Pride once and it was in like 2009)! I'm glad Salford has been successful enough that they need to limit numbers, but I was disappointed to be kept out by this.

I had an okay afternoon: I sat outside, I helped MB re-pot some mint and oregano, getting myself and the patio covered in topsoil and water. I'm feeling a bit restless but utterly unambitious.

For lack of a better way to mark the occasion, I went back and re-read a social media thread I'd started while trying to fit both dayjob and PIP into yesterday. People showed me nice photos of animals and plants and other good things, and some said nice things about me.

( To spare my blushes and your scrolling finger. )

I've saved my favorite for last:

one of the most Erik-Supreme-Competence I can think of is how, despite the overwhelm of the task at hand, you are taking the time to not merely acknowledge all the cool things people are sharing, you are enthusiastically being excited about them. What a joy it has been to read this thread - as much for your generous responses as the wonderful sharings.

You are the key to this - the insight to ask and ask for things that will brighten not just your day but anyone lucky enough to find this thread - and then enrich the whole experience by folding your joy into the mix. This is amazing and so utterly you being yourself and I wish you could be building a list of all the ways you shine at being Erik (and we could all blurb that list like on a book jacket "astonishingly important... 100% makes the world a better place")

And then five heart emojis in a row. Five!

She's right, I absolutely did dive in to this thread, almost everyone got me reflecting their reply back at them: it's great to see ducks, I'm glad your dog is enjoying the park, and yes that whole thing about the Iron Pigs... It really does cheer me up to get out of my own head, that's what helps the most at times like this. I can recommend it, if you're having a tough time yourself.

And I kinda found some way to mark the occasion of having finished the terrible disability hoop-jumping. I might not have gotten to partake of the queerness and sunshine at Salford Pride, but I manufactured something similar.

Next weekend D and I are going to Electromagnetic Field, "a non-profit UK camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters." We have friends who go/have gone, and D has been interested in this since the last one -- it has happened every other year.

About three weeks ago, we were invited to look at the list of workshops, talks and other suchlike that people had volunteered to give. Showing an interest at that point would help organizers prioritize and allocate space to things, so I was keen to help out, especially as someone only interested in the less-techie things.

I spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes on the website after dinner, and by the end of it I had vertigo, the beginning of a migraine, and had to go to bed at like 7:30 that evening.

All because the website only has dark mode. This is what happens when I try to use dark themes.

I was really surprised, at first, that such a nerd thing didn't have any other options. But then I shouldn't have been surprised; my "favorite" example of how light themes are treated is in how Discord explained their approach to theirs:

Even within our office, it was hard to find more than one or two actual light theme users. Our small team of designers didn’t design with it in mind when creating new features. It became an afterthought. Testing on light theme was rare, and considered a chore.

It eventually became a Discord community inside joke that light theme was bad and you were bad for using it.

(That post is almost five years old and it was written to announce the new golden age of light theme; I started using Discord after that and I still hate it, haha. But it's amazing to see how much worse it was! The sidebar was still dark! Because no one could need to read those words too! The contrast is terrible! If you love dark so much why is the text medium-grey?! The fonts are so thin! Fonts are the thing that shouldn't be light even in light mode! (Wow that link is from 2016, read it when it was new, I've been referring to it ever since, and the problem still exists!))

D kindly emailed EMF to ask about a light mode for the website at that time. He never got any response.

Yesterday and today we've been sent emails with a much more detailed schedule and a request to sign up for things by Wednesday. I idly clicked on the link and when I saw the website open I panicked at the sight of it and quickly closed the tab again. That's when I asked D if he'd had a reply to his email. He hadn't, so he opened am issue on their github, explaining that the lack of a light mode means I'm unable to engage with or contribute to EMF. This quickly got a reply, but not an encouraging one.

Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately adding a different colour theme is quite a lot of work - we certainly won't have time to add it for this event, and I don't think we can really commit to maintaining two colour themes in the long term at this point either.

For what it's worth, the website does meet the WCAG guidelines for minimum contrast (with one or two exceptions I just spotted and will try to get fixed). Not trying to diminish your partner's experience here, but we do take this seriously.

Personally I think the light-on-dark design is getting a bit tired and my preference is to try and move towards a dark-on-light theme for our next redesign. So we will definitely take this into account then.

Neither of us know anything about web development, but I'm not used to hearing that it's prohibitively difficult to have light and dark modes...and indeed an online pal has confirmed for that it shouldn't be, for what that's worth.

It all seems overly defensive to me. Mentioning the WCAG standards for color contrast felt off; I never mentioned problems with the contrast. It does actually matter what the colors are, as well! Combined with "not to diminish [my] problems, in the midst of absolutely diminishing my problems, it was just not great.

I'm sure from this person's perspective it looks like "someone waited until the last minute to complain, we can't overhaul everything in a few days..." which I get makes me sound like an asshole. Especially when this is all done by volunteers. But it's frustrating because a few days before the event is when I've been asked to interact with the website. Previously I'd sort of ignored it and gotten my information through the sighted person I'm going with. Which is not great, but that kind of thing all disabled people will recognize because that happens a lot!

D, bless him, was willing to brush off his rudimentary CSS skills and bodge something together that I (and anyone else who wants a light mode and doesn't care about the aesthetics too much) can use. He had a briefly frustrating but apparently educational afternoon figuring out how to make that happen!

For years now, diffrentcolours has been saying he wants to take me to the Isle of Wight to see the WWII bunkers whwre British space rockets were tested in the 50s, because he knows I love space history. He'd been to this site with mother_bones previously, so he knew that while cars ordinarily don't have access to it, blue badge holders can drive up to and park at the site.

So today we woke up early to get the ferry (I'd never been on a ferry before! and despite learning most of what I know about ro-ro ferries being on a podcast about engineering disasters, I had a great time), at what his mum warned us was prohibitive cost (it really was eye-watering), drove to The Needles, and found a sign at the car park that said "no unauthorised vehicles can go this way, call this number to get authorised for accessible parking." The person in the ticket booth said the same: we had to call that number because there's only one accessible parking space up there. So it was just a matter of logistics?

D tried calling the number, no one answered. He tried again and couldn't get through. I didn't do any better trying on my phone. He was really upset by this point because the other option was paying for parking here and paying for the tour bus that is allowed to go up to the New Battery as its called (WWII is new if the old battery is from the Napoleonic War), or walking a mile uphill which he was assuming my ankle wouldn't be up to.

I was so angry at this -- why make everyone call once they get there? why can't the person who's dealing with parking down here also make these arrangements via landline? -- that I was more than sure enough I could walk. I didn't want to wait half an hour for a bus.

And I did enjoy the walk, though it was very windy. (Apparently we're having another named storm; I can hear the wind howling outside the window now and I guess it's worse at home. I'm glad it doesn't seem to have bothered Gary; wind often does because he doesn't understand where the noise is coming from and it clearly unsettles him. But MB has said he's been good all day and took himself off to bed at a very reasonable hour this evening.) But I did not enjoy the terrible inaccessible system that made it necessary.

To top it all off, two cars came past us on their way down as we were walking up, and when we got there, there was one car parked in enough room to have held four cars. We would have been fine. It would've saved me a lot of energy I could've used on more of the area. My ankle is still healing, and I'm lucky to have felt pretty good the rest of the day (and extremely glad for my all-terrain cane, which was perfect for this situation), but I'm still very definitely only given a certain amount of walking spoons a day and I shouldn't have had to spend them all on this.

D and I had a lovely day together, as we reliably do no matter how we spend the time with each other, but it was a new way for accessible routes/parking to be completely inaccessible, and that's never fun to discover.

The other day I was interested to read that, at least in the U.S., self-checkout machines may actually get less common in stores.

While self-checkout technology has its theoretical selling points for both consumers and businesses, it mostly isn't living up to expectations. Customers are still queueing. They need store employees to help clear kiosk errors or check their identifications for age-restricted items. Stores still need to have workers on-hand to help them, and to service the machines.

The technology is, in some cases, more trouble than it's worth...

Retailers may continue to rely on the technology, but many aren't putting all their farm-fresh eggs in the self-checkout basket. Instead, they're increasingly giving customers the option to choose between human and machine.

For the customers that do choose to do the labour themselves, there's one thing Andrews believes won't change. However ubiquitous the technology is, and however much consumers get used to using the kiosks, shoppers are likely to find themselves disappointed and frustrated most of the time.

"It was part of a larger experiment in retail in trying to socialise people into using it," he says. Simply, "customers hate it".

I am glad to hear that a mix of human and machines is likely to remain available at checkout because I know some of the customers who not only don't hate it but prefer it: Andrew was always delighted when he could get through a trip to Asda without having to interact with another person at all. The touchscreens and practically-hidden bar code scanners on those self-checkout machines mean I avoid them whenever possible, but the best accessibility comes from having options, because whatever's a nightmare for one person is going to be essential for another.

Almost as soon as I'd read this, I was reading takes on how this phenomenon could apply in other areas. Of course I was thinking about accessibility; people who work in tech were thinking about tech.

Some of those takes overlap; like number one here is "The user is always inexperienced." People who just buy groceries have never scanned groceries as much as someone who's done that job. Also, independence is a myth. They word it differently; this is how I am wording it because some disabled people and groups speaking for them emphasize "independence" and it drives me up a wall, because none of us are independent.

If you scan an item twice, select the wrong payment method, accidentally get charged for a bag when you brought your own, forget to scan your discount card at the right time, or make any other trivial mistake, you are now at the mercy of someone else. When a problem does occur, a staff member has to notice it, come to your aid, figure out what happened, and correct it. You were promised self-service when, in fact, you are so disempowered that you can't troubleshoot or correct a single thing that might go wrong.

This makes me think about the campaigning against closing almost all the train station ticket offices in England. Apart from all the ways those machines are inaccessible, machines contribute to the unnecessary expense of train fares, already a particularly complex racket that is expensive at the best of times and ensures people pay too much when they buy the tickets themselves. You have to be an expert to understand how to buy appropriate, never mind cheapest, fares, sometimes even making an journey regularly doesn't leave people confident in their ability to get the best price and not get treated like an illegal immigrant by the train guards.

The particular disempowerment of waiting for someone who looks sixteen to determine that I'm old enough to buy ibuprofen is something that occurred to me recently. The need for humans to intervene every time the machine thinks you've scanned an item twice when you haven't, doesn't think you've put it in the bagging area when you have, and vice versa means the few staff who are employed expect to be called over for false positives as much as any actual needs. I've been age-verified by people who didn't even seem to glance at me. Trying to split the checkout tasks into those that can be done by shoppers and those that must be done by staff hasn't really proven to be very effective or fun for either group, in tasks that mostly weren't all that fun to begin with at least there's a smooth process when the person who's processing the rest of my groceries is also making one extra gesture when they get to the beer.

The first thing I heard about my physiotherapy referral is that I had been discharged

( The saga! Has a happy ending though: tl;dr I got my first appointment today. )

So anyway, today the very kind diffrentcolours came with me because I was convinced I'd get lost finding the part of the hospital I needed, and indeed we did get pretty lost (the signs were terrible, but luckily people were nice about directing us) but it was also good having him there for the appointment. He took notes of the exercises I was told to do and we ended up in a funny routine where the physio asked me a question, I answered it, and then D and I went off in some kind of familect-laden or generally confusing-af tangent while the phsyio took advantage of this time to type up notes on whatever I'd just told her.

The phsyio had a ponytail and was named Becky and was in all ways exactly what I thought a physiotherapist would be like...except she was awesome about blind stuff! When she called my name of course I bonked my walking cane into something in the process of walking towards her, and then did it again in the short trip down the corridor. She seemed surprisingly (to me, but I guess that's being a physio!) alarmed at this even when I brushed it off as normal for me (and I wasn't hurt at all; it was the cane that bonked into things, my squishy human body was untouched) and said "would you like me to guide you?" and stuck her arm out just slightly in exactly the perfect way for this. She was so proactive and so skilled and so casual about this that I was actually confused -- I do not expect any of this from the general public! -- and figured she had pretty close contact with someone visually impaired. Sure enough: her mum (she later told me that she was pleased at getting to tell her mum that yesterday was World Braille Day because she saw it in a work email and her mum didn't know about this even though she's a braille user; that was cute).

The appointment was reassuring on a number of levels. For one, she told me that all they can do when someone still has foot-jail is get them to like wiggle their foot around a little. The real work starts at the stage I'm at now. I did tell her I'm only unofficially at this wearing-both-of-my-shoes stage, since my followup fracture-clinic appointment was delayed by the holidays and then canceled by the junior-doctor strike, but she seemed totally unbothered about that and basically assured me I wasn't doing anything wrong by abandoning foot-jail based solely on vibes.

She measured my range of motion which has gotten surprisingly good (one of the big reasons I abandoned foot jail is that it was actually hurting me more to not be able to move my ankle than it does to move it) and is now only slightly less than my other foot. She also found that ankle to be weaker than the other one to the expected extent ("otherwise why would you be here?"), nothing to worry about. She showed me the exercises to do, gave me the resistance bands for them, and I'll see her again in two weeks!

She even said I can go back to the gym (very carefully of course!), and said a few minutes a few times a week on an exercise bike with low to no resistance would be good for my ankle, as long as it doesn't cause me any pain. So that's exciting. My trans gym class doesn't start up again until next week so I'm looking forward to doing a super-careful version of it then.

I'm glad I didn't really miss much in practical terms from not starting this a month ago. But I do wish it had happened for the sake of my mental state; I've been feeling confused and abandoned to my own devices, which aren't very good! Having no experience with this kind of injury, and finding that I wasn't in pain at the time if I overdid it but only that night when I couldn't sleep at all meant that I was always conscious of the possibility of overdoing it and setting myself back without knowing it at the time. But also I didn't want to be too driven by avoiding pain and fatigue because that would set my recovery back too. But without help I couldn't know which kinds of pain or fatigue to avoid and which to induce!

She also reminded me that ice and ibuprofen are still a good idea even trough I'm not in pain because I still have swelling (and to be fair sometimes even soreness) on the inside of my ankle where there's a ligament the surgeon didn't fix because he said it doesn't make a difference to people's recovery. So I did both of those things yesterday evening too.

So I'm feeling so much better now, mentally. Physically, I was totally exhausted by the longest trip out I've made since I broke my ankle (which is why this entry is going up late). Just talking to someone I don't live with felt new! It made me laugh just how much D and I were caught up in our own in-jokes and references and stuff; listening to us and imagining what we must sound like to strangers in the physio department was so funny to me. I am just not suitable for human company these days.

I came home and barely got through the rest of the work day, when it was done I immediately went to bed and slept so hard afterwards that when D woke me up to tell me dinner was ready I didn't even know where I was or what day it was.

I broke my ankle and dislocated it. It needs surgery but that can't happen for some days yet. I finally got to go home late this evening.

( gory details...mostly not gory )