once asked her if she was a genie, that vision of a genie coming out of the bottle with no arms and no legs. I think the worst thing a parent can do if a child is staring at someone who looks different is to tell them not to stare because that teaches them that difference is something to be ashamed of, and something we shouldn’t acknowledge or talk about. “One of my pet hates is when kids say, ‘What’s that? Why is she in that chair?’ And the parents say, ‘That’s a special buggy’, and it’s like, ‘No it’s not, it’s a f---ing wheelchair and I use a wheelchair because I can’t walk’. There’s no shame for me about a wheelchair but clearly you’ve got some issues going on, let’s not pass that ableism onto your children, shall we?” She says we’ve got a way to go in Australia. “When I was in the UK last year I really noticed [a difference] … It took me a couple of days to really put my finger on why I felt so different. And it was actually that no one was losing their shit that I was in a public space and I felt a real difference. “Everywhere I went had accessible toilets, every clothing shop I went into had accessible change rooms. Everyone looks so different there, it’s kind of a melting pot. But no one took sneaky photos on their mobile phones, kids didn’t freak out, everyone just goes, “OK, let’s just be cool, bro’, and it was fine.”
S “I lead this great, rich, messy life that I love and it is frightening to know that other people value that so little”
he says she was moved watching Julia Gillard be moved introducing the National Disability Insurance Scheme legislation. “The NDIS is a very big thing, but it’s also a very small thing in terms of addressing inequality for people with disabilities. What the NDIS is going to mean is that people can have enough showers in a week to hold down a job. We still have a really long way to go. “It was great to see Julia Gillard so moved by that because so many of us had told her stories about living with exclusion. I’m an incredibly privileged disabled person in Australia. I live independently, I’m employed, I’m educated. That’s not the case for a lot of people with disabilities.” She believes legislation around the right to die is dangerous. “I think in Australia we have not solved the problem of people having the right to live with dignity, so I think conversations about dying with dignity are premature … “I think that people think disability is a fate worse than death and I hear that all the time. People say, ‘That poor person had an accident, isn’t that terrible?’ even though that person is quite happy. Occasionally I overhear people sayings things. A few weeks ago I overheard a guy who looked at me and said to the person he was with, ‘Geez, you’d just top yourself wouldn’t you?’ Well, no, you wouldn’t, because I lead this great, rich, messy life that I love and it is frightening to know that other people value that so little. “And the assumptions that are made about how terrible our lives are are based on fear and hatred of disabled people in this ableist society that we live in. It’s assumed that able-bodiedness is always better and I don’t think that’s really the case.” Young lives in South Yarra and has just broken up with a long-term partner. She is as busy as ever. I ask her whether her parents are proud. “I think they think this has all worked out pretty well and I wasn’t the horrible, tough, burdensome child that doctors said I was going to be.” \ pwilmoth@theweeklyreview.com.au We Welcome your feedback @
www.theweeklyreview.com.au/interviews NOVEMBER 27, 2013 \ The weekly review 23