By Victoria Freeman
In 1960, my twenty-month-old sister Martha was admitted to the Rideau Regional Centre, an institution for people with developmental disabilities located on the outskirts of Smiths Falls, Ontario. For the next thirteen years she would live in this isolated and overcrowded complex of 50 buildings that at its peak housed 2,600 inmates.
I use the word ‘inmate’ deliberately to highlight the forms of incarceration and unfreedom that this form of institutionalization represented, though at the time my entire family believed it was the best available care for my sister. Only two years older than Martha, I was deeply traumatized by the stigma associated with her Down Syndrome as well as by her removal from our family and our infrequent visits to the frightening alternate reality we referred to as the “hospital-school.”
These experiences profoundly shaped my life as well as hers, including my ability to live confidently with my own difference, as a bisexual and gender-queer person. As philosopher of science Ian Hacking has said, the word “normal” was “one of the most powerful ideological tools of the twentieth century.”[i]
Attitudes to disability and difference began to shift in the mid 1960s and early 1970s. My sister was discharged from the institution to live in an Approved Boarding Home in another city, and then in the caregiver’s family home, when the Boarding Home closed. Martha would flourish in the care of this loving woman for 29 years. Meanwhile, I lived with unacknowledged survivor’s guilt. Only through therapy and new connections forged decades later with people with intellectual disabilities did I begin to understand the ways I had been haunted by the injustices experienced by my sister. Continue reading
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