This is exactly my shit because disability activism was so important in shaping me into the person I am. I’m neurodivergent, but also physically disabled; I have congenital birth defects in my hands and feet that fuck me up more than you might expect, I’m mobility impaired, and now live with chronic pain. My life is way better when I don’t have to take the stairs, I can only work about four hours a day, but I don’t meet my government’s definition of “disabled”.
Disability has been an intense battleground. For centuries society has had a very narrowly defined view of disability, and treated disabled people in a very particular way. The Disability Rights Movement, meanwhile, has involved disabled people getting together and saying: The way we are viewed and treated sucks! We don’t like it! Things need to change!
So one major key to things is the social vs medical model of disability. The medical model views disability as when someone has a serious impairment or illness that prevents them from being normal and healthy, and needs to be medically treated or cured. The social model views disability as the result of society failing to accommodate the full range of variation in human ability, which fails to allow the disabled person full inclusion.
Like, if someone cannot walk and uses a wheelchair, and therefore cannot get into a building, the medical model says we should focus on making them able to walk. The social model says that we should focus on making the building accessible for people with wheelchairs. A major issue here is universal design, the belief that our buildings (and by extension, our institutions and society) shouldn’t just be set up for abled people. It should anticipate the presence of disabled people, and plan to include and accommodate us so that we can enjoy an equal level of autonomy and inclusion in society as everyone else.
Disability is really complicated partly because it’s really diverse. There are so many different ways of being disabled. Neither of these models is 100% right or 100% wrong. Some people love what makes them different from the norm and don’t believe it should ever be taken away or cured; others hate their disabilities and want them to go away yesterday. An operative issue to keep in mind is when the medical and social models are useful.
Under the social model of disability, people who wear eyeglasses are a perfect example of an impairment that’s socially accommodated so that it isn’t normally debilitating. Society doesn’t have huge narratives about how it’s tragic or pitiable when someone wears glasses; it’s not generally seen as heartbreaking for parents to take their child to the optometrist. Glasses are generally affordable to the everyday person. It is, in fact, solid evidence that we can and do treat some kinds of physical differences as routine and unremarkable.
So at the base of it, here’s the reality about the definition of disability:
Abled society has historically had a lot invested in keeping “disability” as a very narrowly defined category. Only the most truly deserving get the special resources that make up for the fact that they’re excluded from employment and public life. There’s only one elevator, so you’d better make sure that you really need it before you use up that scarce resource.
Disability activism, meanwhile, benefits from making the definition of disability as broad as possible, to argue that we aren’t rare exceptions, we’re 1/5 of the population and shouldn’t be excluded to begin with. Literally anyone could be hit by a bus tomorrow and become disabled. Excluding us and denying us our civil rights isn’t acceptable. If too many people are using the elevator, maybe the building shouldn’t rely so much on taking the stairs.
This ties into what the disability community calls “the curb-cut effect”. When a space is made more accessible for people in wheelchairs (by putting in curb cuts, for example), a whole lot of other people benefit: Parents with strollers, delivery people with hand trucks, travellers with luggage, and ordinary pedestrians who just found them easier to walk across. The design feature made life for everyone so much better that it became adopted everywhere, and demanded as a standard piece of urban architecture. Wheelchair users benefited because everybody wanted the kind of space they could travel in.
When you use a resource or accommodation intended for disabled people, you reinforce the idea that disabled people are common and should be routinely included. Although this sometimes puts stress on a system when multiple people are using the resource at once, the solution should be to increase that resource’s availability, not to decide who needs it less and kick them out.
(This topic reminds me that hey, I’m disabled and don’t make a lot of money because of it. This week I’m trying to find an apartment that doesn’t require taking the stairs, but those are literally twice as expensive in my city. So if you want to support me for the work I do, here are my Patreon and Paypal!)
