Ableism protects us from the most brutal truth: that our bodies will disobey us, malfunction, deteriorate, need help, be too expensive, decline until they finally stop moving, and die. Ableism is what lets us believe that this doesn’t have to be true, or at least, that we can forestall it, keep it at bay, and that this is based entirely upon our own will. Ableism and its fantasies allow us to operate as if our abilities, our bodies, are always at our command, under our control, and that they will function when and how and for as long as we want them to, as we need them to. Of course, we’d
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