Why The Crip Chronicle Exists

Disabled people are often treated as passive participants in decisions that shape their lives—in healthcare, in policy, in education, in work, and even in personal relationships. Decisions about disability are routinely made without disabled people being meaningfully included in how problems are defined, how solutions are designed, or how harms are understood.

This is not because disabled people lack insight.

It is because disability is frequently misunderstood, individualized, or reduced to diagnosis, charity, or compliance, rather than examined as a matter of rights, access, and public responsibility.

The Crip Chronicle exists to challenge that pattern.

This publication is grounded in the belief that disability becomes clearer—not more complicated—when it is examined through three lenses at once: rights, policy, and lived experience. When any one of these is missing, disability is misrepresented. When they are brought together, patterns that are often treated as personal failures or unfortunate exceptions become visible as systemic issues.

Our aim is not to catalogue grievances, nor to speak on behalf of all disabled people. Instead, we document how disability is actually experienced and governed in practice: where rights are unclear or unevenly applied, where policies fall short of their intent, and where access breaks down in predictable ways.

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What We Publish

The Crip Chronicle publishes three kinds of work:

• Issue briefs that examine disability-related rights and policy questions in plain language
• Community testimony that documents lived experience as evidence, not anecdote
• Resource-oriented pieces that link readers to existing laws, organizations, and tools relevant to the issue being discussed

Each piece is edited with care, context, and purpose. Community testimony is not included as decoration or inspiration; it is treated as essential knowledge about how systems function in real life.

We are interested in clarity, not outrage. In documentation, not performance. In making disability legible as a public issue rather than an individual burden.

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What This Is (and Is Not)

The Crip Chronicle is not a support group, a comment forum, or a crisis service. We cannot provide legal or medical advice. What we can do is help make issues visible, traceable, and understandable—and point readers toward existing resources where appropriate.

We also recognize that disability is not a single experience. The Chronicle does not aim to produce a unified narrative, but to hold space for difference while remaining grounded in shared rights and responsibilities.

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An Invitation

The Crip Chronicle welcomes submissions from disabled people and others writing carefully about disability-related rights and access issues. Contributors may write under their own name or a pseudonym. Not every experience needs to be resolved to be worth documenting.

If you are navigating a system that claims to support you but does not, noticing a recurring barrier, or trying to understand how policy meets reality, your perspective may belong here.

Disability does not need to be simplified—but it does need to be understood.

That is the work this Chronicle sets out to do.