Progressive Indiana Network: https://progressiveindiana.net
HoosLeft: https://hoosleft.us
Sharon Wight: https://www.electsharonwight.com/
Tabitha Zeigler: https://tabithazeigler.com/
SUMMARY:
In this Disability Pride Month conversation, Scott sits down with two longstanding friends of the show: Sharon Wight, statehouse candidate for HD-81, communication scholar, and disability advocate from Fort Wayne; and Tabitha Zeigler, former congressional candidate, autism advocate, and mother of three autistic children. What begins as a personal conversation about how each guest came to disability advocacy — Sharon through a deaf Girl Scout leader, a master’s degree in sensory processing, and her own invisible disabilities; Tabitha through COVID babies, three autism level 3 diagnoses, and a battery of tests that put herself on the spectrum — quickly becomes a reckoning with the Trump administration’s active dismantling of disability rights. From the June DOJ opinion reversing the Olmstead integration mandate to Indiana’s ABA therapy cuts to the Medicaid work requirements hitting disabled parents, the conversation traces a through-line from Indiana’s own eugenics history (mandatory sterilization laws on the books from 1907 to 1974) to the present-day push back toward institutionalization — and closes with a call for mutual aid, bolder Democratic candidates, and the recognition that building a society where no one is expendable is the most pro-life position available.
WHAT’S INSIDE:
00:00:23 Introduction: Disability Pride Month, the ADA, and Tonight’s Guests
- Scott opens with Disability Pride Month, which marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act signed July 26, 1990, and credits the Gang of 19 protest in Denver in July 1978 as foundational groundwork for the ADA.
- He notes that while conservative attacks on Black civil rights and the Voting Rights Act have drawn attention, the Trump administration’s dismantling of disability protections has gotten less.
- Guests: Sharon Wight (HD-81 candidate, Fort Wayne) and Tabitha Zeigler (former congressional candidate, autism advocate) — both with disability advocacy at the center of their political work.
00:02:20 Support the Show
- HoosLeft and Progressive Indiana Network don’t paywall content or charge candidates — support at progressiveindiana.net ($5/month or $50/year) keeps it going.
- Social handles: @hoosleft.us on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads; @HoosLeft on Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube; PIN is @PINIndiana on Bluesky and TikTok.
00:03:38 Welcome and Scott’s Personal Connection to Disability Advocacy
- Scott thanks both guests for stepping in on short notice after a scheduled interview with Greg Ballard fell through.
- He shares that disability advocacy is personal to him: his son was born disabled, and the ADA allowed him to live a full life — go to school, graduate, do things with other kids. Scott gets briefly emotional.
00:05:18 Sharon Wight: From Girl Scouts to the Inclusion Institute
- Sharon’s path started with a deaf Girl Scout leader in elementary school and continued when she took American Sign Language in college.
- In 2020, with extra time at home, she began analyzing her own sensory issues — which led to pursuing a master’s degree focused on sensory processing disorder.
- She got involved with Fort Wayne’s Inclusion Institute, a part of The League — Northeast Indiana’s Center for Independent Living — that trains people as disability advocates. She also lives by the motto that anyone can become disabled at any time — something she experienced personally after major surgeries in 2022 and a ruptured disc that had her using a cane through most of 2023 into 2024.
00:07:52 Sharon Wight: Invisible Disabilities, the Cane, and “You Don’t Look Disabled”
- Sharon has two invisible disabilities: a blood clotting disorder and fibromyalgia. There are days she simply cannot get up and do what she wants to do.
- She also developed aphasia after COVID in 2020 — a communication disorder that causes difficulty finding words, deeply distressing for someone who studies communication.
- Managing her conditions requires monitoring stress, sleep, and triggers to avoid flare-ups during a political campaign. She’s heard “you look fine” even from friends in the disabled community — invisible disabilities require visual proof before many people believe them.
00:08:03 Tabitha Zeigler: COVID Babies, Autism Levels, and Getting Herself Tested
- Tabitha had children during COVID and initially wondered if developmental delays were mask-related — kids weren’t seeing mouths and couldn’t develop speech normally. Turns out that wasn’t it.
- Her first child was diagnosed with global developmental delay and then autism level 3. Once she knew one child had autism, she learned siblings are statistically more likely to have it as well; both twins also came back autism level 3. (The autism “levels of support”)
- Watching her kids, she recognized behaviors from her own childhood. She got tested: on a 10-point scale where 5 and above indicated autism, she scored an 8. Her response: “So I’m super autistic then.” She leans into things with humor — though right now there’s a lot that isn’t funny.
00:11:13 Scott and Tabitha: Are We All on the Spectrum? Why That Framing Is Problematic
- Scott admits he’s said “we’re all on it” and been told that’s problematic — he asks Tabitha to explain why.
- Tabitha uses the gay analogy: saying you’re “a little autistic” is like saying you were “gay in college.” You either are or you aren’t — it’s not something you switch off. Autism has triggers and presentations, but you can’t be a little autistic.
- Her advice: ask questions, lean in, have meaningful conversations with the disability community. Very few people will be offended; most will be flattered you care enough to ask.
00:13:40 Scott: Invisible Disabilities, MS, and the Disability Pride Flag
- Scott describes the Disability Pride Flag that’s serving as his background: five stripes on black. The black represents mourning for those who’ve been victims of neglect, abuse, ableism, and misunderstanding.
- The five stripes: red (physical disabilities — what most people picture); gold (neurodiversity — Tabitha’s territory); white (invisible and undiagnosed disabilities, including fibromyalgia); blue (emotional and psychiatric disabilities — mental illness, anxiety, depression); green (sensory disabilities — deafness, blindness, auditory processing disorder, like Sharon’s Girl Scout leader).
- He notes that about 80% of all disability is invisible, per Tabitha’s figure — and that the things we build for the disability community (ramps, curb cuts, closed captions) benefit everyone.
00:15:08 Sharon Wight: Blood Clotting Disorder, Fibromyalgia, COVID Aphasia, and PIN as Accessibility
- Sharon elaborates on her invisible disabilities and their day-to-day management, and notes that Progressive Indiana Network provides an accessibility service — even on days when she can’t canvass or be in public, she can talk, which is her strongest mode of engagement.
- She connects the broader principle: whether it’s someone saying they’re gay, disabled, or anything else you can’t outwardly see — don’t question it. Lean into learning what’s important to them rather than arguing with their identity.
00:20:04 Tabitha Zeigler: Autism Is an Invisible Disability — and Why She Started Putting Her Kids Online
- Tabitha adds that autism is itself an invisible disability — her children look “normal,” and kids without visible markers get far less grace from the public. Neurodivergent kids are called bad kids; Sharon notes they were called “emotional.”
- Tabitha had resisted putting her children on social media, but recently decided the current political climate made it important to show what autism actually looks like — to give people better vocabulary to be allies.
00:21:57 Scott: The Community Is Larger Than People Think — and Under Sustained Attack
- Scott frames the political stakes: the disability community is much larger than people realize, and the solidarity of that community and its allies is urgently needed right now.
- Progress since the Gang of 19 and the ADA has been real — wheelchair ramps, bus ramps, bathroom handles, closed captioning, curb cuts — but the current administration is actively rolling it back.
- Sharon adds the key point: becoming disabled is the only protected class anyone can join at any time. Everyone ages into it eventually. Attacking the disability community is attacking our future selves.
00:24:44 Scott: The DOJ Opinion, Olmstead, and the Push Back Toward Institutionalization
- In June, the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion arguing that neither the ADA nor Section 504 requires states to provide community-based care instead of institutionalization.
- Principal deputy attorney general Lanora Pettit’s opinion admits this reading is out of step with the common understanding of the Olmstead Supreme Court decision, which mandated home and community-based care.
- States like Texas are arguing the integration mandate itself is unconstitutional. Scott: this administration is trying to send people back into institutional settings.
00:25:51 Tabitha Zeigler: Indiana’s Eugenics History, 1907 to 1974
- Tabitha reads from her notes: by the late 1800s, Indiana authorities believed criminality, mental problems, and poverty were hereditary. In 1907, Governor J. Frank Hanly approved the nation’s first state eugenics law, making sterilization mandatory for certain individuals in state custody.
- Sterilizations halted in 1909 under Governor Thomas R. Marshall; the Indiana Supreme Court struck down the 1907 law in 1921 as a violation of 14th Amendment due process. A 1927 law reinstated sterilization with court appeals. Approximately 2,500 people in state custody were sterilized total.
- Governor Otis Bowen repealed all sterilization laws in 1974; related restrictive marriage laws were repealed in 1977. Tabitha’s point: institutionalization leads to sterilization. The Nazis got their eugenics playbook from the United States.
00:28:18 Scott: Eugenics, Elon Musk, and the Unhoused Community
- Scott connects Tabitha’s history to the present: Elon Musk talking about repopulating the species with his seed is the same thinking, dressed up differently. The irony: Musk is likely on the spectrum himself.
- He connects the “bad kids” language Sharon raised to how the unhoused are described as adults — both reflect untreated and undiagnosed disability being labeled as moral failure.
00:29:56 Tabitha Zeigler: Disability, Homelessness, and the Pipeline From Cuts to the Street
- Without a caretaker, independence, or family support, disabled people become unhoused. The connection is direct and documented — friends of Tabitha’s who run Indianapolis unhoused nonprofits confirm it.
- She invokes “ugly boxes” — wooden enclosures from the late 1800s and early 1900s used to confine disabled children — as a historical analogue to the current direction.
- The institutions that would receive people are mostly closed; reopening them costs more than community care. In 1997, a major incident in New Castle (Tabitha said New Albany) led Indiana to shut everything down and discover that empowering family caregivers was cheaper. Now that progress is being rolled back. Institutions, Tabitha says, always lead back to killing people. That’s the end of the eugenics process.
00:33:20 Sharon Wight: The Asset Trap — How the System Engineers Poverty for Disabled People
- People receiving disability services are not allowed to build up assets above a very low threshold — meaning they’re at dramatically higher risk of becoming unhoused if anything falls through the cracks.
- As Medicaid becomes harder to qualify for, more expensive, and more bureaucratically burdensome, disabled people are being incrementally pushed toward homelessness — and then treated like dirt when they get there.
- Sharon connects this to the broader living wage problem: the system sets people up to fail and then blames them for failing.
00:34:38 Medicaid Cuts, the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the Fraud That Goes Unpunished
- The One Big Beautiful Bill Act cut roughly a trillion dollars from Medicaid, with cuts now going into effect. The mechanism: requiring people to prove their eligibility more frequently — twice a year instead of once — through complex paperwork processes.
- This is sold as fighting waste, fraud, and abuse. But in Indiana, there’s currently roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in Medicaid fraud perpetuated by hospitals — which the state won’t touch because the hospitals are major political donors.
- Scott recalls navigating these systems for his own son: it’s a full-time job even for well-resourced people, and now they’re multiplying the burden.
00:37:04 Neurodivergence, Paperwork, and Being Beaten Down on Purpose
- Sharon speaks for herself: as a neurodivergent person, paperwork is genuinely difficult — she lives, as she and Scott have joked, on vibes. The complexity isn’t incidental; she believes it’s intentional.
- Making the process overwhelmingly difficult beats people into giving up. The goal isn’t efficiency — it’s attrition.
00:37:52 Tabitha: ABA Cuts, Three Kids With Autism, and No Summer Resources
- Indiana’s April 1st Medicaid changes led Tabitha’s ABA therapy providers to announce drastic service reductions. She had to pull the twins in May and her older son shortly after — leaving her with three autistic children all summer, no ABA, still waiting on the Medicaid waiver.
- Her older child is having extreme behavioral issues; she’s trying to get him into a specialized charter school despite being philosophically opposed to charters, because she’s not certain public school can accommodate him.
- The work requirement trap: she can’t hold a full-time job because schools call her in for behavioral incidents. You can only be called away so many times before you’re fired. And after termination, a bad reference can follow you. These parents aren’t unreliable — they’re doing the work of three full-time jobs caring for high-needs children while the state pulls the rug out.
- Sharon adds the other side: people in their generation are also beginning to care for aging parents, with similarly limited options.
00:42:02 Mandating Poverty: Right-to-Work, IEPs, and the Road to Reinstitutionalization
- Indiana’s right-to-work environment means workers can be fired for a small number of absences, making it nearly impossible to both hold a job and care for a disabled child.
- The public school system — with IEPs and mandated accommodations — is the educator and caregiver of last resort for disabled kids. But its funding is being siphoned off to charter and private schools that can select their students.
- The logical conclusion: the only kids left in public schools will be the highest-need kids, with ever-fewer resources. Universal vouchers and fully privatized education is just a longer route to reinstitutionalization.
00:44:07 Sharon: Have Babies, But Not Imperfect Ones — the Impossible Standard
- Sharon, as a childless woman who didn’t necessarily choose it, calls out J.D. Vance directly: not everybody chooses not to have children.
- The contradiction: constant pressure to have babies — but don’t have a baby that isn’t perfect. If you don’t have children, you’re a villain. If you have a child with a disability, you’re a villain. If you struggle to raise them without adequate support, you’re a villain.
- None of it makes sense. It’s by design.
00:45:32 Tabitha: With What Help? The Pronatalist Contradiction
- Tabitha has one child with her on the call: pronatalists want 10 children from everyone, but with what resources and what help?
- Connection drops briefly. When she returns: the forced-birth position combined with the elimination of support systems is about subjugation — of women, children, and everyone else who doesn’t fit the desired profile.
- Scott: in the 1850s, disabled children were thrown in the river. The current direction isn’t toward 1953 — it’s toward 1853.
00:47:03 What Does Rebuilding Look Like? What Should We Be Aiming For?
- Scott asks both guests: assuming the sane and compassionate can retake power, what does a caring society for disabled people actually look like? What are we aiming for?
- Sharon: In a perfect world: universal closed captions on everything (Sharon has auditory processing disorder), and accessibility that goes beyond the legal minimum.
- The image of a ramp that’s two-thirds of a mile long to avoid putting it next to the front stairs — that’s minimum compliance without care. The goal should be what’s actually good for people, not what keeps you out of trouble.
- Most fundamentally: people showing care and compassion again.
-Tabitha: Near-term: mutual aid. If we don’t proactively take care of our people without depending on the government, things could get very bad very fast.
- Long-term: replace every politician who is against humanitarian values. It doesn’t matter whether it’s disability rights, gay rights, trans rights, immigrant rights, or women’s rights — if you’re not a straight white man right now, you’re not being looked after.
- The specific frustration: Democrats are too cautious. They’re sitting on a wide open lane and not taking the layup. While they wait for Republicans to implode, Tucker Carlson and his ilk are doing what Democrats should have been doing from the start. When you have an open lane — give the fastest kid the ball and let them make the layup every single time.
00:51:02 Scott: Republican Extremism Has Made Democrats the Conservative Party
- The ongoing emergency has turned Democrats into defenders of what already exists — and what already exists has been whittled away to almost nothing.
- What’s needed isn’t protection of the current system — it’s something far better.
- Democrats are betting that Republicans are so bad that people won’t vote for them. Tabitha, coming from a very red area, calls this political suicide.
- If Democrats give Republicans too much room, Republicans will eventually do a strategic layup of their own — throwing a well-timed moderate-sounding gesture to capture softening opinion. Tucker Carlson is already doing it.
- Candidates need to be clear, specific, and bold on disability rights, LGBTQ+ rights, immigrant rights. These aren’t losing positions — they’re what people want. Say the thing. Speak to your people.
- Scott warns about the encirclement: the far right co-opts leftist language — anti-corporate, anti-war, pro-worker — but intends to turn capitalism up to 11 and use people as expendable.
- Capitalism already views certain people as expendable. The goal is a society in which no one is expendable. That, Scott says, is the most pro-life position one can take.
00:55:07 Where to Turn
- Tabitha is working with a group to fill the gaps Indiana is leaving open for the autism community — the Unique Needs Alliance, currently forming.
- National landing pages: Autism Society of America and similar national organizations are good starting points to find local resources.
- Sharon highlights the League for the Blind and Disabled in Fort Wayne — an authorized Center for Independent Living serving 13 counties, where she got her disability advocacy training.
- She closes with a personal value: a world of diversity — racial, cultural, disability — is better than one where everyone is the same. Her own public education was enriched by that diversity, and it’s part of why she’s running.
00:58:06 Closing: Where to Find Sharon Wight and Tabitha Zeigler
- Sharon Wight: electsharonwight.com (translated into 13 languages); Facebook at facebook.com/electsharonwight. This Saturday: a live Dungeons & Democracy fundraiser stream — tune in for a look at a slightly sillier Sharon.
- Tabitha Zeigler: find her on social media @tabithazeigler; podcast and resources at tabithazeigler.com/staring-down-the-storm. Email at staringdownthestorm@gmail.com
- Programming note: HoosLeft This Week on YouTube will now broadcast live exclusively on the Progressive Indiana Network channel; replays still available on the HoosLeft feed.
- Sunday on HoosLeft This Week: Sharon Wight returns, joined by statehouse candidate Allen Miller (District 73).
RESOURCES:
Uniquely You Magazine: https://indy.uniquelyyoumag.com/
Allies for Humanity (Dignified Housing): https://www.alliesforhumanity.org/
HANDS in Autism (IU): https://handsinautism.iu.edu/
Autism Society of Indiana: https://www.autismsocietyofindiana.org/
The Arc of Indiana: https://www.arcind.org/
Connie’s Clubhouse Day Program: https://www.conniesclubhouse.work/
Noble Disability Services and Support: https://www.mynoblelife.org/
Tangram Disability Services: https://thetangramway.org/
Sycamore Services: https://www.sycamoreservices.com/
BeeFree Bakes (Bakery & Employment Services): https://www.beefreebakes.org/
For Parents w/ Kids on the Spectrum:
-Prana Play — A Sensory Haven (Carmel): https://pranaplaycarmel.com/
-Kids Gym Indoor Playground (Carmel): https://werockthespectrumcarmel.com/
Waves of Change Foundation for Neurodiversity: https://wavesofchangefoundation.org/
Ausome Indy: https://ausomeindy.org/
Quillo Connect (micro-learning app for I/DD): https://myquillo.com/
