A common barrier faced by many women with disabilities is finding a gynecologist with an accessible office and the knowledge and flexibility to work with complications associated with various disabilities. Some time ago GimpGirl members got together to start a list of gynecologists that they had personal experience with and knew to be accessible. Not surprisingly, the list was not very long because of the relative rarity of accessible gynecologists.

However, we are constantly looking for more feedback to expand this list to include other states within the United States and other countries. This information is a vital tool to help other women finding doctors and facilities that they can work with. If you have personal experience with a doctor or facility you would recommend, please take a few minutes to anonymously fill out the Accessible Gynecologists Survey so we can make that information available to everyone!

If you don’t personally have anyone to recommend, consider passing on this information to your friends. Thank you to everyone who has helped gather this information!

The following article was written by volunteer and member Ricky Buchanan. In the process of learning to meditate, Ricky ran into some complications in terms of instructions geared towards an able-bodied audience and wanted to share the lessons learned in the process of adapting those instructions.

Guided meditation tapes often have directions that can be hard for some people with disabilities to follow. Does this mean you can’t use those tapes, or can they be adapted?

Mostly the only thing that matters in meditation, honestly, is your state of mind. All the rest – physical position, breathing, and most of the things you’re asked to imagine in a guided meditation – is all there to set up an environment that encourages your mind to be meditative.

Here’s some suggestions for adapting guided meditations:

Most guided meditation tapes want you to sit on a straight backed chair with your feet on the floor. This is completely optional – you can sit or lie in whatever way feels best for you, regardless of what the tapes say. It can help your brain if you have a specific position that’s just for meditation because your mind will get used to “I’m in this position so I should feel meditative now” but you don’t have to. If you have a tendency to fall asleep during meditation then sitting up might be easier for you because it’s a lot harder to fall asleep sitting up, but that’s the only advantage to sitting rather than lying down.

If the tape says to pay attention to how a body part feels, or to move it a little, and you don’t have that body part or you can’t feel or move it, then just pick a different part of your body. Something close by will probably work, depending on the guided meditation. Alternatively, try just *imagining* what it might feel like, if you prefer. This might mean slightly moving your knee joint instead of wiggling your toes, or paying attention to the muscles in your shoulders instead of feeling your fingers tingle. Or it could mean imagining your toes relaxing, even though you can’t actually feel them.

If the guidance says to take deep breaths and you can’t control your breathing or it’s inadvisable to take deep breaths then you can just pay attention to your regular breathing. Similarly, any instructions on breathing in or out a certain way, such as “in through your nose and out through your mouth” can just be ignored or you can just breathe more slowly or deeply. You’ll find out what works for you fairly soon.

Instead of paying attention to, say, your tummy rising and falling for breathing you can pay attention to any different place in your body where you can perceive your breath moving – whether it’s your nose, your throat, your chest. Or you can even just put your attention on the synchronised sounds your vent makes, if that works for you.

If the guidance says to pay attention to your whole body, for example to feel yourself sinking into the mattress as you relax, again you can just pick a part of your body that works for you or you can imagine in. You could pay attention to your neck relaxing and your head sinking into the mattress, or you could just imagine your whole body sinking into the mattress and what it might feel like.

One guided meditation series that I’m following started asking me to look at something for the first minute or two of the session, so I’m just “being aware” instead of actually using my vision. This wouldn’t work for a guided meditation that was specifically focussed on looking at things but for one like mine where it’s just a passing section of the introduction it works well.

If you have a lot of pain in a particular part of your body then you might just include that in your meditation or you may want to ignore that part of your body and work around it as described above. Or you might use some combination of these techniques – there are specific meditations which are great for those with chronic pain but it’s also fine to just adapt any other meditation.

If the guided meditation is asking you to imagine a scene and that doesn’t work for you then just adapt it. Most specific things in most guided meditations don’t have to be exactly-as-described to work – if your guided meditation includes a scene of you walking down the beach but you’ve been a long-term wheelchair user it might work better if you imagine wheeling down the accessible promenade right beside the beach. If your guided meditation says to watch the sunset but you’re blind then by all means imagine the setting sun warm on your skin.

You’ll know by the end of the first time you listen to that meditation whether your adaptions worked OK and if there was any issues you can imagine differently. I once mentally “changed” a guided meditation that asked me to imagine carrying a heavy ball by imagining the ball was very light, but the meditation went on to say the heaviness of the ball represented something important. So the next time through I just imagined a heavy ball and a trolley to transport it – imaginations is wonderful like that!!

Most importantly, don’t stress about it! You pretty much can’t do guided meditations “wrongly” no matter how your movements and thoughts do or don’t match what’s on the tape. If something doesn’t work for you then change it around or find a different guided meditation tape, that’s cool too.

Today marks the 14th anniversary of GimpGirl Community! We have taken many forms in the last 14 years, but our mission has always remained the same: to bring together women with disabilities in the spirit of mutual support and positivity. That single mission brings together individuals with many different disabilities from a variety of countries and backgrounds to share our commonalities.

Our community’s administrators and facilitators have always been women with disabilities who volunteer their time because they believe that our community should be strengthened from within by people who understand the lived experience of being a woman with a disability.

We have also grown through the support of many others. Indeed, it is through volunteerism, in-kind donations of services, creative management of available resources and the use of open source and free to use online tools that we have survived and flourished.

Do you have any stories, anecdotes or favorite memories of your time with GimpGirl? We would love to hear from you on your experience of the last 14 years!

Every now and then we like to spotlight organizations other than our own that in some way support the voices of women with disabilities. Check out Sins Invalid!

What is Sins Invalid?

Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility (aka “Sins”) is a San Francisco/Bay Area based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. For the last five years, our performance work has explored themes of sexuality, embodiment, and the disabled body to sold-out audiences.

What people say…

The world of enforced and embodied norms constricts all of us, regardless of where we identify on the spectrums of sexuality, gender, or ability. In this project, people with disabilities are engaging in the wholeness of our bodies and our sexualities. When people experience our shows they are deeply impacted:

“I am moved beyond words, moved to an emotional state that I can’t quite explain. Thank you for making this space possible!” – audience member 2011

“You are brilliant and beautiful and help me remember that so am I.  Thank you.” - audience member 2011

“What makes Sins Invalid so powerful is that it thoroughly succeeds artistically and erotically, separate from the impact of its political message. Sins Invalid challenges its audience to think about sexuality, beauty, and disability in new and expanded ways. But Sins Invalid is also, quite simply, a hot, arousing, sexually charged evening of thought-provoking, imaginative sexual entertainment that only happens to be entirely by and about people with disabilities.” - David Steinberg, SFGate

Want to support Sins Invalid and their upcoming movie project? Visit their Kickstarter page and help them reach their goal by February 14th! Can’t donate? Just help by spreading the word to friends!

One of the focuses of GimpGirl Community is to spotlight the work and voice of women with disabilities. Below is three amazing poems from Margie Suarez. Want your work featured? Contact us and let us know!

My name is Margie Suarez. I am working towards a Masters in creative writing.  My favorite poet is Maya Angelou. I would like to thank my family and friends for encouraging me to continue writing.

I’m not a Lovey-dovey Girl

I’m not a lovey-dovey girl.

That’s why,
when he agreed to be my hands
that first time I shooed away the butterfly infestation in my stomach.

When I revealed that cutting up food was a lost cause,
I didn’t let our hands touch when he passed the plate back to me.

When we eat,
he’s become expert at tucking a napkin in my shirt without
grazing what’s underneath.

Him in jeans and a grubby sweater is art.
I don’t look up anymore when he leaves (I promise).

Our dogs are both named after Yankees.
We agree that I’m the loud one.
The one thing we can’t agree on

is whether I’m worthy of his love.

At Becco

If I asked, would you feed me?
No. You’d let me starve
before seeing my mouth open,

watering for something
I thought I’d never have again.

There’s nothing to be scared of.
Don’t worry, it’s just spaghetti.

Rocking in Limbo

My hands tremble if I hold a book open for too long.
I bend paperbacks so that I can easily pick them up
when they decide

to jump.

My binders are filled with the
handwriting of others because the only thing I can write
with any speed or clarity is

my name.

I’ve given up on spaghetti.
It refuses to twirl around my shaking fork.

The only thing I can’t work around is the back spasm
that has changed into a knot.
It is a slight but persistent reminder.

I’ve been sitting too long.

I lean forward, back.
The embarrassed bridge of my hips are out on display.
My legs jump at the rustling of paper.

They search for a way out of the position that they’ve been put in.

In our previous article, Caregivers and Relationships, we gave a very broad overview of managing paid caregivers¹ and various other relationships. Relationships are more than just managing caregivers and other people in your life. In long-term romantic relationships, particularly, there are many factors involved in creating a healthy and safe emotional space to help the relationship to continue. People with disabilities have long been unfairly characterized as being a burden to society, and this characterization carries over into any relationship where there is an expectation of equality. Even individuals themselves struggle to find their own worth and sense of equality within this relationship dynamic.

…

Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.

Since the launch of our new website earlier this month, many of you might be wondering how to engage with our awesome community of women with disabilities outside of this website. Take a moment to look to the right of this post (on our website), where you will find a collection of icons (under “Follow Us!”) for various social media and online tools that GimpGirl uses. Each of these icons link to our specific group or page. They are a great way to find us around the Internet!

On Facebook, we have an amazing, active forum for posting links, sharing stories and ideas, and discussing various relevant topics. Outside of our weekly meetings on Second Life and our Chat Room (IRC), our Facebook group is probably the best way to connect with other women with disabilities.

What if you just want to keep track of blog posts or events? Twitter is our largest group, and is a great way to keep track of links to relevant news topics and GimpGirl’s events. You can view our Google calendar to see upcoming events, as well as subscribe to the calendar to see the event times in your time zone and sign up for notifications when events are getting close. If you use an RSS blog reader, you can add our RSS feed. If not, you can also follow our various groups and communities on FriendFeed or our blog posts on LiveJournal.

Our Flickr community is a must-see, with member pictures, event snapshots, and various works of art. On LinkedIn, you can network with other women with disabilities on employment and other professional matters. If you would like to buy various items with our logo on them, visit our Zazzle store (hosted by NoPityCity).

So, what are you waiting for? Connect with us and join the conversation!

We here at GimpGirl have a 14 year history of showcasing compelling, original stories that are the direct personal experiences of women with disabilities, as well as curating the best material to support our members in leading their kickass lives.  We get to tell innovative, creative stories that no-one else is telling.

If SOPA/PIPA passes, it could genuinely become too expensive and too much of a potential legal problem for us to be able to continue our curation practices, or even to tell stories where women say things like “I saw a movie and it inspired me to change my life.”  Or worse, it could mean that Google considers this too much of a risk to index our site, so we won’t be able to be found by women looking for information.  Under SOPA/PIPA, ANYWHERE that people express themselves – our site, our LiveJournal, our Facebook group, our Twitter, our Second Life – could become too much of a legal risk or get shut down.

Please support SOPA/PIPA actions today to keep the Internet free and safe for everyone – especially rarely heard voices like women with disabilities.

Here are some links on PIPA/SOPA:

Clay Shirky gives a 10 minute speech on the topic (video, not
subtitled) – http://www.ted.com/talks/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Fight for the Future
http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa
(Subtitled version of video here:
http://www.universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/5A31ep7v6HFd/)

Google’s Take Action Page
https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Huffington Post on the blackout:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/01/18/sopa-blackout-internet-censorship_n_1211905.html

Mashable on the blackout:
http://mashable.com/2012/01/18/sopa-dark-ages/

When most people think of New Year’s resolutions, they picture easily made and easily broken promises. I like to think of the New Year as a time for reflection and self-guidance — a time to look back on the year behind us and what we have learned from those experiences, and a time to look forward into the new year to see how we can use those lessons to get closer to our goals.

Most of the GimpGirl regulars know that, for me, the last year has been one filled with a great deal of difficulty. The summer saw a sudden end to my long-term relationship, which sparked an interstate move and an endless cascade of problems with arranging social services and dealing with various other issues, on top of continuing school and my work here at GimpGirl. It has not been easy, to say the least. At times it looked as if I would end up in a group or nursing home on a long-term basis, something I fight very hard to avoid. It has been soul crushing, heartbreaking, and has tested every ounce of my somewhat renown tenacity.

As a disabled disability advocate, I feel it is important to share this experience. Sharing experience is a big part of how our community learns from each other. I often encounter assumptions that advocates don’t experience the same kinds of struggles and barriers that many other people do. We do, and it is just as difficult for us. We also know that what we do for ourselves affects those that come after us.

I have learned so much in the last six months. More than I ever thought possible. I have learned even more about navigating the system, what housing options are available to people with disabilities, what specific terminology to use when being assessed for caregiver funding, federal laws and statutes, and a multitude of other things. What I was reminded of more than anything was to stick by who I am as an individual. I am worthy, and the goals I set for myself are worthy. It was a reminder to not let anyone change me, because who I am is pretty awesome even if not everyone thinks so. It was also a reminder of how vitally important having a community is. Without my GimpGirl family – all of you amazing women who understand what facing these struggles is like – all of this would have been unbearable. When I was tired, these reminders would echo through my mind, keeping me from giving up when everything was telling me to.

As I go forward into the new year, I will take those lessons with me into my own life and in my work with GimpGirl. I am already seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but I know that in order to fully realize what I want from my own life I will face many obstacles in the months to come. However, having looked back at the previous year, I know that I can face it. I know that the struggle is worth it. I know that I am worth every bit of energy I put into myself and my dreams. I believe in myself, probably more than I ever have after facing all of this.

I look forward to the year ahead. I look forward to working with other volunteers to make GimpGirl an even better community, with more community-created content and outreach. As we begin our 14th year together, I look forward to getting to know all of you even more. I am grateful for every one of you.

– in solidarity… Jennifer Cole

Disability activists and advocates have been trying to frame disability and surrounding issues using a social model of disability since at least the 1980s in an effort to distance discourse from the (still) predominant medical model that rules many of our lives. This switch in models was to frame disability in a way that made it clear where many people face barriers and how those barriers can be addressed. However, the vast majority of people have still never heard these terms or understand the implications of these thought frameworks. Of those who have, even within the disability community, there is a sense of division between those who embrace the social model and those who don’t feel it is an accurate description of their reality. So, what are these models and how can we bridge the gap?

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Read the entire article on Yahoo! Accessibility.