Cuts, Intersectionality, Disability

I've just started tweeting as Orpheus Uncut. I'm a youth
worker/educator and disability arts facilitator, with hidden
disabilities and mental health problems of my own, for which I have
never attempted to claim DLA, although I had DSA as a student, because
the extra hidden costs that I face in my life have never been
acknowledged by DLA.

I'm angry about disability cuts for the same reason that I'm angry
about education cuts, for the same reason I'm angry about arts cuts -
because they disempower the already powerless.

Education cuts are aimed primarily at subjects like history,
literature, philosophy: the subjects which allow people to develop the
thinking and communication tools to express their oppression; the
subjects out of which queer studies, feminism, and disability studies
have grown as academic discourse, being discussed in language which it
is harder for the powerful/conservative to dismiss.

I work with young people with profound and multiple learning
disabilities. These teenagers often have no formal ommunication skills
at all. Their most basic needs are extremely easy to ignore; their
more profound needs are exceptionally easy to dismiss. Needs such as
acknowledgement of shared humanity. Such as opportunity to succeed and
excell and be seen as succeeding and excelling by those around them.
Such as the opportunity to rebel, to express anger and have that anger
acknowledged and taken into consideration.

Even if we meet the basic medical needs of these young peoplem, even
if they have enough to live, and survive, even if they have food and
heat and clothes, we are failing them if we give them nothing to live
for, to strive for, to look forward to. In the same way as we are
failing other young people if we keep them in school until they are
eighteen and then deny them access to university or worthwhile
employment.

It is more difficult and expensive for these kids to access arts,
communication, protest than their non-disabled peers. One young man I
work with needs support with him at all times to make sure his
colostomy bag does not break while he participates in music and dance.
I am trying to find some neat phrase to express the fact that this is
close to a literal choice for him between art and excrement; I cannot
quite find the right comparison or metaphor to express what I want.

And it's about that inability to express. Not only is the government
not listening to its people, but it is cutting of the means for people
to learn to communicate in ways which it might find easier or more
acceptable to listen to. It is denying disabled people enough money to
live on, leaving people without the means, financial or emotional, to
participate in the struggle to improve accessibility. It is denying
the creative outlets which turn impotent rage into powerful art. And
it is kicking out the ladder for those who wish to learn to express
themselves in academic discourse; to argue with the powerful in their
own language.

Solidarity is a simple sentiment to start with - my struggle is your
struggle, and it's about the right to be heard. But it quickly gets
into complex issues of intersectionality and I've spent this whole
essay so far trying to avoid the word kyriarchy even though it means
what I want to say. And... I don't think I can express that clearly in
fewer words, and I'm scared the language I'm using sounds elitist and
offputting, and I'm not sure it's quite what you wanted as a piece of
writing. But... it's what I think needs saying.