Our class discussion from the other day has me thinking. How do we talk about the US’s responsibility in producing disabilities through wars abroad (both in our own veterans and in residents of the countries that serve as the battlegrounds) without implying that disabled people are undesirable or useless?

I think most people understand death, disability, starvation, torture, rape, and displacement as among the horrors of war. But the discourse around it often seems to take for granted that being disabled is a tragedy that ought to be avoided, in a way that seems to promote the erasure of disabled people.

I’m not sure how to untangle this. I want to draw parallels to the use of prenatal testing + abortion as a tool to avoid having a child with Down’s Syndrome? Or trans people responding to the question “would trans be a thing if we didn’t have gender roles?” with “stop trying to theorize us out of existence.”

I think it’s reasonable/ethical to want to avoid causing suffering, and violent injury in a war zone is indisputably traumatic, and in that sense I understand the desire to hold a nation accountable for military actions that produce suffering, trauma, and injury. But from my understanding of disability politics, much of the suffering of living with disabilities comes from living in an ableist society that refuses to arrange itself in ways that would make disabled people’s lives easier as a matter of course, and that views disabled people as worthless. In that sense is it actually the forcible transfer of a member of a privileged class into a marginalized class that we are seeking accountability for, without acknowledgement or examination of how those categories are structured in the first place?

I guess I don’t know how to talk about war causing disabilities being “bad” without it following that disabled people are “bad.” Or is the “common sense” understanding that “war causing disabilities is bad” inherently ableist because of that connection? In which case how do we talk about the physical (and mental) damages that typically result from war?

Is it a bodily autonomy issue like rape? Where the offense is the violation of someone’s bodily integrity itself, so arguments over the emotional/material effects and how/whether they coped with the event/aftermath are at best secondary? In which case I’m not sure how to extend this to things like PTSD (unaccompanied by lasting physical injury). Is/ought there a right to, I guess, psychic autonomy? Inasmuch as progressive communities care about things like trigger warnings and microaggressions, that might be so.

Maybe thinking about it in terms of humanitarian harm, rather than capitalist harm? The humanitarian harm would be the physical pain of the original injury and the healing process, the psychological pain of being in a war zone and having one’s image of oneself violently altered. I’m not sure how else to word that last bit—not in the sense of internalized ableism, more so that there’s a certain kind of suffering that comes from a mismatch between your actual body-self and your mental body-map that has nothing to do with the social or personal value attached to either (gender dysphoria in trans men doesn’t come from misogyny, although the two can certainly coexist in a person), and that entails some emotional processing in itself. The capitalist harm would be the loss of value status based on the disability affecting your ability to work and contribute to (ableist) society, therefore an increase of the disabled population is a social/economic negative.

Especially in light of our recent reading about Margaret Sanger and Charlotte Perkins Gillman using eugenics rhetoric to distance themselves from disability, advocating eliminating the “weak” and “unfit” while relying on their privilege in other areas to exempt themselves from those very categories, I’m wary of getting anywhere close to that suggestion.

An earlier version of this post was published on my tumblr.