This week I was asked by my friend, the writer and advocate A.H. Reaume, to read her medical records and attest to the reality of her disability.

She is trying to counteract the impact created by someone who is circulating a rumour that her disability is a fraud.

I support my friend. And I felt deeply uncomfortable about the requirement to view her records—not uncomfortable at her request, but rather at the fact that a targeted and ongoing form of ableist maligning had meant that she felt compelled to make it.

I thought about credibility and authority and legitimacy. I thought about voice. I thought about oppression.

I thought about paperwork.

What forms of truth was I being required to validate and to whom? What is the history and function of such truth? Who has the power to tick which box? What are the effects of this power?

In this structure, the disabled person is not apparently able to be a reliable or trustworthy witness to her own body’s challenges and pain. She is compelled to prove herself—in this case via a friend to a stranger—by showing the correct form and signature.

The call of disability fraud is a familiar enough strategy used by those attacking people receiving disability benefits.

This questioning of a disabled status—spoken in savvy or contemptuous registers—is also used by some in medical professions and beyond to dismiss those with conditions not yet diagnosed.

I had so many thoughts. I had too many thoughts, not sequential or bound in identical logics or horizontal importance or even similar relations to historical power, but associations arising unbidden and disorganized like some injury someone forgot to document.

I thought of a friend whose trembling and exhaustion didn’t solicit care or accommodation or even acknowledgement until her eventual diagnosis for early-onset Parkinson’s, the ongoing symptoms now real because they were on paper and not just in her body.

I thought of another friend accused of faking his Muscular Dystrophy because on his good days he doesn’t need a wheelchair.

I thought of people with invisible disabilities who must prove their persistent misery in order to signify their status as disabled and therefore warranting of financial support or workplace accommodation, as if disability permanently contradicts accomplishment or release or joy.

I thought of students who must negotiate labyrinths of medical validation in order to request an extension on an assignment or time in an exam or the help of a note-taker, and how the process can distract and exhaust them while also positioning disability as deficit.

I thought of the pain my friend is experiencing, the devastating impact and fear of not being believed, especially about an experience that has so radically disrupted her life.

And my friend is a white woman who faces ableism without the compounding intersections of racism and poverty.

Poor Americans cannot afford to pay for a medical assessment.

Indigenous people have been delayed or denied emergency care because the medical record somehow knew their symptoms without a need to examine their bodies or hear their concerns.

Black people facing anti-Black medical systems struggle to get their physical suffering recognized and treated.

The logics used to harm my friend can be used against others’ bodies with more force and effect.

So many people would not have the privilege of the paperwork.

My friend could provide her proof. Consider those who cannot.

I thought too of other logics, reversed yet linked: the constitutive power of medical files when people are cuffed or secluded or otherwise held in a locked ward or refused the ability to consent to drugs because documents labels them as, by definition, lacking insight.

I thought of those whose serious physical complaints are institutionally ignored because their medical file notes a psychiatric assessment.

I thought of disabled people I know who fear their diagnosis will be discovered by their employer.

I thought of those whose children are taken away from them, even placed for permanent adoption—I have been in the room to witness this event—when a medical file plays the role of deeming who is fit to parent and who is not.

I thought of my repeated experiences of brutal unfreedom that we call ‘hospitalization,’ when my 2007 medical file said I seem to believe I’m a writer who has won a visiting fellowship in England.

When my 2013 medical file said I am wearing bright, mismatched clothes.

Am I wearing bright, mismatched clothes? Who is to determine if they match or what their brightness signifies?

Am I a reliable witness to my friend’s medical documents? Who is to sign such an authorization?

If I told you I have read my friend’s medical file and that it corresponds precisely and specifically with how she describes the struggles and needs of her own body, would you now require yet another medical document to tell you whether or not you can trust what I thought?

Who are you and how did you assume this power and at what cost?