A discussion on how difficult it is to write "The Other" even when you ARE "The Other"

This started with a simple question from trouble:

(quote)

In my experience (such as it is), I've only heard the term "differently-abled" used recently by people who don't know anyone with a disability. (And I mean in the past couple of years.)

What is your experience?

(unquote)

This prompted yours truly to wonder aloud whether any of us count ourselves as "people we know who are ____" (It's a such a common motif in folklore, it has its own catagory: "The fool never counts himself"). And I wrote:

(quote)
(From capri0mni: I was thinking about this, the other day. All my life, I've written fantasy stories (well, all right, not all my life -- I didn't start until I was about 4 or 5). And even though I've had a strong desire to see disabled characters in my fiction, I've never been able to write any without being terribly self conscious.

It didn't occur to me until just the other day -- it's because I base my characters on the people I see around me, rather than on myself. And being a member of the first generation of kids to be mainstreamed in school, I was always the only kid in my class in a wheelchair. The only times I saw other kids with disabilities is when I'd go to the hospital for surgery or outpatient PT, and neither of those situations are condusive to thinking like a protagonist, if you know what I mean.
(unquote)

Then lindra jumped in. She wrote: (quote)

I agree with this comment. I feel the same self-consciousness! It just feels strange to write people like yourself as disabled protagonists. There's this cultural sense of 'oh, no, I didn't mean you' that sort of filters into everything.(unquote)

And the intellectual ping-pong game bagan. We've been going back and forth on this topic for four days straight, now, filling up poor trouble's inbox, while the text boxes get skinnier and skinnier to the point of ridiculousness.

And lindra has been bringing up many awesome points about the intersectionality of all sorts of privilege, and how that effects who we can accept to be the heroes of our stories, that I thought a fair number on LiveJournal friends list would also be interested.

So here's the conversation so far, behind the cut:

( Long conversation is long (so tangents have been edited out*); each new comment is prefaced with the account name of the person who's writing )

[end of this conversation, so far, to be continued, probably]

*the full conversation thread is here, including discussions of different sign languages, and the learning of the same