Introduction by Sarah Cavar – New NDY Intern!

Hello all, I’m Sarah Cavar and I use they/them/theirs pronouns. I’m proud and delighted to be Not Dead Yet’s first intern. I’m a person of several labels: I’m genderless (my preferred term is “neutrois”), a lesbian, Mad/disabled, and neurodivergent. I’m a full-time student, and when I’m not doing student-y things, I’m reading, writing (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and news), editing (zines and for my college’s newspaper), and working at my college (as a peer writing mentor and as an assistant to our office of disability services).

I’m nineteen and going into my junior year this fall; my major is a subject called “critical social thought.” Within the wide, varied collection of critical-theory related areas of study covered by this label, I focus on critical disability/mad studies and gender & sexuality studies. I marry these two in my focus on pathologization (how peoples’ minds and bodies are marked as disabled/deviant), biological essentialism (the reduction of peoples’ behavior, appearance, etc. to biological things like genes and hormones rather than social conditions), power relations, and the consequences of those things across spacetime.

I was first exposed to disabled community and activism through the internet, in a completely unintentional way. When I was twelve, I stumbled upon the then-recently-published, now-disability-internet-classic blog post Quiet Hands by Julia Bascom. From there, I fell down a rabbit hole of autistic blogs and bloggers –– all of whom resisted the stereotype that autistic people are “lost” to the world, an idea perpetuated by Autism $peaks and their ilk.

From the blogs I read, I gained access to critical analyses of dangerous, ableist content. I also began to read the similar blogs of otherwise disabled writers and activists. I remember where I was when I watched A$’s infamous video, “Autism Everyday.” I was at my dining room table, alone and overwhelmed. In the video, a mother of an autistic child discusses, in front of said child, the way raising an autistic person drives her to consider committing murder-suicide. I learned quickly that the shiny veneer of “tolerance” that some disabled people see is always moments from giving way to the true, deadly intentions of abled society.

Then, in 2013, after already having followed the writings of writer-activist-powerhouse (and genderless person, like me!) Amanda Baggs (who prefers sie/hir pronouns, which I will be using for this reason), I learned that there were a number of doctors who wanted hir to die. This awakened me to the logical conclusion of ableist “cure” and “quality of life” rhetoric: efforts toward the eradication of disabled people. NDY covered the case, as did many others. Today, Baggs remains happily alive, but I learned from following hir case that there are many unknown disabled people who would not be so lucky as sie was.

I carried Baggs’ case with me as I learned more about eugenics, and also as I myself experienced medical/psychiatric abuse and mistreatment. I read the work of Harriet McBryde Johnson (RIP). In my first year of college, I read the work of Dorothy Roberts as well as others, which discussed the intersection of race and class with dis/ability and who is permitted to live and die.

I learned that becoming-disabled is believed to destroy the possibility of a “good life” –– that is, a “productive life” –– instead of starting a life both unique and valuable. Given the social conditions that call devalued lives “disabled” and then call “disabled” lives worthless, I know that we cannot divorce “personal” decisions around assisted suicide from cultural ideas of worth that exclude disabled people.

Free choice –– including the choice to live or die –– is not possible in a society whose very culture wants some minds and bodies gone; a culture in which this idea permeates our institutions, language, and relationships. It is dangerous to assume any person’s thoughts of suicide to be separate from social and cultural factors, and this includes the thoughts of those considered “terminal”.

My opposition to assisted suicide also stems from my understanding that the medical/psychiatric system routinely denies its patients autonomy –– especially when those patients are marked as disabled, as racialized, as non-men, as a sexual minority, as migrants, and as poor. In the medical system, it’s easy and frightening to observe the state of power relations today, including the way “professionals” hold the ability to dictate who lives and dies. Assisted suicide itself rests on the notion that the figure of The Doctor should be the gatekeeper between life and death, and that we all ought to defer to them.

We as disabled people must resist entrusting our lives and deaths to those schooled to see us as less-than-human. For this same reason, I as a psychosocially disabled, neurodivergent person do not entrust my mental wellbeing to someone who wants to cure the world of my existence. As knowledge is power, we must also gain an understanding of the forces that shape who and what we are in this world, realizing that no one is worthless in and of themselves, but is instead marked that way by oppressive outside sources. For me, opposing assisted suicide is not only rooted in a love and acceptance of all bodyminds as they are, but also in a devotion to exposing and changing the norms that produce “worthless” bodies in the first place.

My academic work has given me a lens through which I can peer at experiences I and those I care about have had. I hope to help write and argue on behalf of all of those living these experiences daily, but not taken seriously in the academic arena. I hope to share my knowledge with a wider audience through Not Dead Yet, make connections and learn from others, and take on some of the everyday labor required to make NDY’s content available and accessible for all.

Thanks for reading!