You Don’t Get to Decide Who Is Disabled Enough
Disability isn’t always visible and it’s never yours to verify.
I recently wrote about Paul Castle, an author and micro-publisher who claimed he was being discriminated against in publishing. After looking into the facts and speaking with professionals in the industry, it became clear that wasn’t true.
(You can read about that here.)
In another part of the conversation, on TikTok, thousands of people chimed in sharing their dislike of Castle’s marketing tactics, framing himself as a marginalized creator while bending the truth about how the industry works and what actually happened.
But what I want to talk about today is the darker, more disturbing part of that response. Though it was a very small portion of the conversation, some decided to send me “proof” that Castle wasn’t really blind. I guess they thought I would like to nail Castle for yet another thing, without realizing how uneducated they were on disability. One person shared, “[Castle] can’t illustrate if he’s blind.” Another sent me a screen recording claiming it showed Castle reacting to visual cues.
I took the painstaking time to either publicly educate or delete every one of those comments, BECAUSE THAT’S FUCKED UP Y’ALL.
Could Castle mislead people about his disability? Yes.
Would I be surprised if he did? No.
However I have seen nothing to indicate this so far.
Since a lesson is needed (and I’ll remind those folks that they are literally holding a computer when they write those comments), most blind people don’t live in total darkness. Blindness exists on a spectrum. Some can see light. Some can perceive motion. Some have peripheral or central vision loss, or vision that fluctuates depending on their health. And disability doesn’t come with a consistency guarantee. There are good days and bad days.
Take me, for example. I have a neurological disability. Some days, I can work and write and function fairly well. I have to limit myself and take naps so my brain can reset, but I can usually do one big fun activity per day. Other days, I can’t get out of bed, can’t even read a book. I don’t even have all my language skills available. The fact that I can do things sometimes doesn’t make me less disabled. Just like Castle has tools as a blind person to navigate his life, doesn’t mean he isn’t blind.
So if you ever find yourself sending me “evidence” that someone isn’t really blind, or really disabled, because you caught them doing something you didn’t expect, please kindly take a hike. Preferably to a library.
Let me be very clear, my dislike of Castle’s “boy who cried wolf” routine is because it makes it harder to talk about the real discrimination that is happening to queer, disabled, and BIPOC authors who are being shut out, underpaid, under promoted, or never published at all. But being mad at an author seeking pity sales is not the same thing as questioning his disability. No one is questioning his queer identity in this equation, so why are we questioning his blindness? Why are we choosing ableism?
Branding oneself as a queer disabled author is not the problem. The problem is spinning oppression into a false narrative to sell books. That’s where the damage happens.
Even if Castle exaggerated the severity of his disability (and I’m not saying he did, but I am saying it would not surprise me if it happened), we are not going to use that as a spring board to start erasing people’s identities. We’re not going to say he’s not blind enough or not gay enough. That’s oppression.
Do we understand the difference? Good. Let’s move on.
Once more if you’re moved to support queer, disabled, BIPOC, and otherwise marginalized authors, please do! Just make sure your support is going where it matters. Here are a few trusted organizations and resources doing the work:
Instead of falling for viral pity marketing, consider donating, amplifying, or buying books from actual marginalized authors and organizations where it will make a real difference.