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30 % Discount Flyer for my new book, The Public Insult Playbook: How Abusers in Power Undermine Civil Rights Reform (California University Press 2021).
As we face a state-sanctioned assault on the lives of so many disadvantaged members of our community, we need to better understand the arguments that are used to harm them. The disability justice movement has emphasized how entities can use specious “overmedicalization” arguments to further these harms. The term “overmedicalization” refers to the tendency of entities to reduce people’s experiences to a purely medical explanation without hearing them share their full understanding of their lived exper- iences in whatever communicative style best suits them.
This Article applies an overmedicalization critique to seemingly distinct areas of the law: gender marking, gender-based participation in sports, ac- cess to contraception, and access to abortion. It demonstrates how even pro- gressive arguments challenging injustice in these areas often rely on overly medicalized claims that are not respectful to people’s full personhood.
If our goal is to respect one’s full personhood, this Article argues that the solution to overmedicalization is not a complete removal of medical con- siderations (“demedicalization”). Abortion access is a perfect example. In Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court defined access to abortion as exclu- sively a medical right—that of an attending physician to determine whether to terminate a pregnancy. And then, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court went in the opposite, although demedicalized, direc- tion by treating the pregnant person as merely a uterus that the state could mandate to carry a pregnancy to term. Both discourses left out women’s equality-based interests in respect for their full personhood.
As people should not have to demonstrate a life-threatening medical reason to terminate a pregnancy, they should not have to plead gender dysphoria to attain an appropriate gender marker, undergo physical exami- nations to play a sport that aligns with their gender, or have a medical reason to use contraception or terminate a pregnancy. We should understand these rights as basic to their full personhood as they self-describe them, rather than mediated through an overmedicalized discourse.
This Article argues that disability misappropriation is a systemic problem that undermines movement toward disability justice. By disability misappropriation, this Article refers to the tendency of the political right to assert a false concern for disability issues in service of a political agenda that actually harms the disability community. This tactic has influenced the adverse treatment of disabled people in the educational, institutional, and reproductive arenas. From birth to death, it has often had an adverse influence on the lives of disabled people as they receive inadequate and coercive health care, poor education, and limited housing options. While federal law has sometimes sought to provide some legal protection against this coercion, judges have been too willing to accept limitations on those rights in the purported name of protecting disabled people. This Article argues that the disability slogan of “Nothing about us without us” must mean that disability is not appropriated merely out of service to a political agenda that harms the disability community.