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When I was younger I used to work in the restaurant business, for my uncle’s restaurant, and my uncle used to say, ‘little girls need to stay out of a grown man’s business.’ I was 13 and was doing prep chef stuff. He had accused one of his employees of stealing something. I had been around his employee the whole time and said, ‘that’s not what happened.’ So he yelled at me, like I was supposed to stay out of it. So I got in trouble for standing up for somebody, he got mad at me for it. Granted I was young, but he brought both my gender and my age into it to discount me. I said, ‘I’m just telling you what happened.’ I was just like, this makes no sense.
But honestly, it’s hard for me to tell when it’s gender discrimination, or if it’s race or disability discrimination. I’ve gotten a lot of disability discrimination, especially going into job interviews. And they try to do it slyly because it’s illegal to ask about disabilities in job interviews. They’d ask me, ‘So how’d you get here?’ And I’d say, ‘Oh, I took the bus!’ It was a question about how I’d get there in the future. And they’d look at me and say, ‘No, no, how did you get HERE. You took the bus, but the bus is like…’ they couldn’t put together in their minds how a disabled person could do [something like that], and their whole conversation became centered around it. They didn’t ask me about my skills, my degree, or anything. They just focused on my disability.
Half the time you don’t even know it’s happening. I’ve never been one of those people who reacts quickly to things when they happen—I’ll reflect on something later on and be like, ‘oh yeah, that was pretty jacked up,’ but I rarely realize it in the moment.