[S]ome/many of us live in the “cliffhangers,” as Patty Berne puts it, of the disability rights movement—the spaces where a white-dominated, single-issue, civil rights approach that depends on the ability to use lawsuits to achieve disability liberation leaves many of us behind. Some of us are disabled folks who are able to access care attendants to help us live that are paid for by the state, Department of Health, or Social Services. Some of us are disabled people whose disability the state never approves of—so it’s not “real.” Some of us fear that letting anyone in to care for us will mean we are declared incompetent and lose our civil rights, so we guard the houses where we can be sick. Some of us know that accepting care means accepting queerphobia, transphobia, fatphobia, or sexphobia from our care attendants. Some of us are in the in-between of needing some care but not fitting into the state model of either Total and Permanent Disability or fit and ready to work—so we can’t access the services that are there. Many of us are familiar with being genuinely sick as hell and needing some help but failing the official crip exams because we can still cook, shop, and work, only slowly and when there is no other choice. Some of us are not citizens. Some of us make twenty bucks too much. Some of us will lose our right to marry if we go on state disability, or our access to work or housing. Some of us belong to Nations that will not accept state money. Some of us—always, and especially post-Trump, with the rise of fascism calling for the end of Medicaid, the ACA, and the ADA in the US, and socialized medicine and human rights lesgislation throughout the world—are continuously worrying about what happens when our precarious right to state-funded care goes away, and what our survival strategies will be then.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice