Key Topics
I once had a conversation with a teacher, and had several others like it.
I don’t recall the details, but I casually brought up my disability, saying, “Because I’m disabled-“
I was cut off by the teacher: “You aren’t disabled. You just face certain challenges.”
I hadn’t even noticed I used “the word.” To me, it had always been a regular part of my vocabulary, just another adjective/noun, not really worth a second thought. It was simply the best word to describe my blindness.
So what was the teacher’s issue? Why did he feel the need to correct my use of a word I am perfectly comfortable describing myself with? And aren’t those so-called “challenges” brought forth by my disability in the first place?
In my 15 years of navigating the world as a disabled person, I noticed there is a significant amount of discomfort surrounding disabled people. I can’t even begin to list the number of instances where people danced around my disability fearing they might hurt me somehow.
People avoid the dreaded “d-word” like the plague. I’ve also noticed how they are scared to use blind to describe me, opting for less direct terms such as “visually impaired,” or “has low vision.”
I believe this discomfort around the use of these words sprouts from the assumption that the disabled person must feel bad about their disability, that they are insecure about it or feel they are less because of iT. The teacher likely thought I was degrading myself by using the word and wanted to make me feel better.
This resulted in sugar-coated terms, such as “differently abled” and “special needs” to arise. Terms created by able-bodied neurotypical people to make themselves more comfortable with our disability. This leads to us hearing responses from others saying, “You are not disabled. You are differently abled. You just have different abilities.”
But the fact of the matter is, that is 1. Condescending in various ways, and 2. Simply not true. I am blind. That is something that is disabling me from functioning in the same way as a sighted person in a world that was not built for me. And contrary to what popular media will lead you to believe, I have not developed super hearing because of that, or other unusual ability.
I am not differently abled, I am simply disabled. I as a person do not develop any new abilities. I develop skills to help me compensate for the lack of sight as much as possible.
Disabled is not a bad or offensive word. It’s just the most accurate descriptor for what we experience, since our impairments are disabling at times.
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And how are those terms condescending?
Secondly, terms such as differently abled by their very nature ignore the real struggles most of us face on a daily basis. By calling someone differently abled, you are ignoring the fact that, in my case for example, my eyes literally do not work. And this world was not made to accommodate that.
By using these terms we are ignoring the actual problem. Because if someone is differently abled, they don’t face any struggles, and so we don’t have to put any effort into making the world more accommodating for them right?
Well, no, all this does is imply that it’s not society’s responsibility to accommodate disabled people, because “they’re not disabled, they’re just differently abled.”
The key issue is that those terms are, more often than not, created by non-disabled people, in order to feel better about themselves while doing minimal effort.
If a disabled person wishes to use those terms then that is their choice, and they Have every right to choose what terms they wish to use. Those are my thoughts and my thoughts alone. But the vast majority of the disabled community dislike how those words are being forced on us by others, without any regard for our opinions.
So here’s my suggestion, let’s stop trying to make disability sound more pretty and start fixing the world so our impairments wouldn’t be so disabling in the first place.
