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HomeMy WebLinkAbout07-31-26 Correspondence - Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings - We Don't Gaslight Our FriendsFrom:Disability Rights Montana - Growth Rings To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]We Don"t Gaslight Our Friends Date:Monday, August 3, 2026 7:34:33 AM CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Every paid subscription supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is nowhere near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! We Don't Gaslight Our Friends What a new Psychology Today article on autism reveals about disabilityrights, power, and who gets to define reality, and an announcementabout an upcoming event READ IN APP Last week, Ludmila N. Praslova published an essay in Psychology Today titled Epistemic Injustice: The Great Gaslighting of Autistic Lives. The article explores a simple but profound question: What happens when society consistently dismisses people’s own understanding of themselves? Epistemic Injustice The phrase “epistemic injustice” sounds academic. But the experience is anything AUG 3 but. It simply describes what happens when someone is treated as an unreliable witness to their own life. Does that sound familiar to any of our neurodivergent readers? How about those of you with other disabilities? As Praslova argues, autistic people are routinely told that their experiences, needs, perceptions, and self-knowledge matter less than the judgment of professionals, institutions, or people in authority. The result is a pattern of being told, repeatedly, “We know you better than you know yourself.” For many disabled people, that idea will feel immediately familiar. Not because it happens only to autistic people. Because it happens throughout disability culture. One point from the article struck me especially strongly was that after years of being interrupted, corrected, doubted, or disregarded, people can begin questioning their own judgment. I thought back to the hundreds, if not thousands, of people I have served over the years in different settings and thought about how this shows up in their advocacy for basic human rights like dignity and autonomy. Anyone who has navigated disability systems can recognize this dynamic. After enough IEP meetings, medical appointments, eligibility reviews, encounters with agencies, people understandably begin to wonder: Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I don’t understand my own experience. That is one of the hidden harms of epistemic injustice. It doesn’t just prevent people from being heard. It teaches people not to trust themselves. For years, I have summarized this principle with a simple rule: We don’t gaslight our friends. And unfortunately, disability policy is often built on exactly that kind of gaslighting. By that I mean, even when we try to reach out broadly to inform people who have not yet made up their minds about disability issues, we never word our arguments in a way that would make someone who already holds the same values and positions as us wonder if they might be wrong and have to move to some The Cost of Constant Doubt theoretical “middle” because that’s where they think we are based on how we are messaging an issue. There is no virtue in pretending that every position is equally supported by evidence or equally compatible with human dignity. There is no middle if one policy approach hurts people with disabilities and another one helps. And our friends need to hear us say that and see that we believe them when they say they need more, they need better. A child says a classroom is overwhelming. Adults say they’re being difficult. A person with a disability says they need support to live independently. Someone else says they would be safer in a facility. A psychiatric patient says something is wrong. Their concerns are dismissed as anxiety. A student says they learn differently. They are labeled a problem. A person applying for services describes a need. The system responds by explaining why that need doesn’t count for the artificial constraints of their program. Different disabilities in different settings, but the same basic pattern. Someone with less power speaks. Someone with more power decides their version of reality matters more. This is frustrating, but it goes beyond that. When done enough times it shuts people down, it locks people out, and it starts to shape reality, and it impacts lives. Many people think disability rights is primarily about ramps, accommodations, benefits, or services. And while all of those things matter quite a bit, there is still more we need to grapple with when advocating for disability rights. Buried underneath many disability rights conflicts is a deeper struggle over authority. The Long History of Not Being Believed Disability Rights Is Not Just About Access Who gets to make decisions? Who gets to define reality? Who gets to decide whether an experience is real? The history of disability is full of examples where experts, institutions, and governments assumed with great hubris that they knew what disabled people needed without ever asking disabled people what they wanted. This produced many horrors, from ineffective services, forced sterilizations, deaths, involuntary psychosurgeries and forced medication, segregation, and rampant abuse. These abuses were not driven by mistake, they were driven by a lack of humility and curiosity about the humanity and lived experiences of people with disabilities. This is what happens when you do not believe disabled people are reliable narrators of their own lives. When you believe your degree, your elected position, you job as a bureaucratic gatekeeper gives you access to a special understanding of reality those who live their own lives don’t even have. One reason disability culture matters and why I keep coming back to it as a theme each week is that it helps people rebuild trust in themselves. After years of being told their perceptions are wrong, disabled people meet others who have lived similar experiences. Suddenly things that felt deeply personal or shameful begin to make sense. It creates spaces where disabled people can compare experiences and realize they are not alone. It creates opportunities to hear someone describe a challenge you’ve never had words for. It creates communities where people can be recognized not as subjects of services, but as sources of knowledge. One of the most powerful moments for many disabled people is not receiving a diagnosis, a service, or an accommodation. It is meeting someone else who says: “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” That moment restores credibility, confidence, and a sense of self. The solution is not abandoning expertise. The solution is pairing expertise with What Disability Culture Offers Building Systems That Listen humility. We need teachers, doctors, researchers, policy makers, lawyers, and advocates. But we need them to be humble and look to the experience people with lived experience bring to the table. A healthy system combines professional knowledge with lived experience. An unhealthy system treats lived experience as irrelevant or perhaps even worse pats people who bring lived experiences on the head and patronizes them right to their face. When disabled people tell us what works, what hurts, what helps, and what barriers they face, we need to listen. Not because disabled people are always right about everything. Because no one is more qualified to describe the experience of living a life than the person living it. I encourage readers interested in these issues to read Ludmila N. Praslova’s thoughtful article, Epistemic Injustice: The Great Gaslighting of Autistic Lives, in Psychology Today. The essay focuses on autism, but the questions it raises resonate across the disability community. Who gets believed? Whose knowledge counts? And what would change if our institutions trusted disabled people as experts in their own lives? Epistemic Injustice Perhaps the most important question raised by Praslova’s article is not whether autistic people should be believed. It is whether our institutions are capable of recognizing disabled people as producers of knowledge rather than objects of expertise. The future of disability rights may depend on our answer. I would like to invite all of you who live in and around Helena to join me at a free Read More Crip Camp at the Myrna Loy movie event on August 18th. Disability Rights Montana, Montana’s Centers for Independent Living, and the National Federation of the Blind of Montana have worked together to bring the documentary “Crip Camp” to communities to around Montana. Over the summer we have gone to 34 towns across Montana, from small towns like Lame Deer, Scobey, Harlowton, and Choteau to larger ones like Butte, Great Falls, Whitefish, and Missoula. We have had great community conversations about disability identify and what it like to live with a disability in Montana generally and in each town specifically. The summer tour is coming to a conclusion here in the state capital on Tuesday, August 18 at 7:00 PM. Please come to the Myrna Loy Theater to see this powerful movie on the big screen, hear some of our takeaways from the conversations we have had across the state, and contribute to the conversation yourself to share your thoughts on disability identity and what it is like to live here with a disability. Get your free ticket here: Crip Camp @ Myrna Loy I look forward to seeing you in-person on August 18th! In solidarity, David David Carlson, J.D. Executive Director Disability Rights Montana You’re currently a free subscriber to Life Beyond Compliance. Upgrading to paid subscriptions supports Disability Rights Montana’s work across Montana. Federal funding is no where near sufficient to meet the advocacy and culture change work that is needed. You can help fund the future you want to see! Upgrade to paid LIKE COMMENT RESTACK © 2026 Disability Rights Montana1022 Chestnut Street, Helena, MT 59601 Unsubscribe