I’ve been thinking a lot lately about whether disability has somehow become cool, which is a strange sentence to write after spending most of my life watching disabled people fight to have our lives treated as anything other than tragic.
A recent article in The Telegraph about disability becoming “trendy” sent me down a rabbit hole, and my first reaction was complicated. If trendy means disabled people are finding community online, talking openly about chronic illness, embracing mobility aids and refusing to be ashamed of any of it, I’m all for it. I didn’t become a full-time wheelchair user until college, despite being disabled my entire life, and only then realized how much physical and mental energy I’d been spending trying not to fall, scanning for trip hazards and navigating environments on foot. If somebody sees a disabled creator on Instagram or TikTok, tries a cane and discovers their life is easier? Yahtzee. Good for them. I genuinely don’t care how they got there.
There’s a difference between making disability visible and making it desirable. People who genuinely desire disability, including people with Body Integrity Dysphoria experience a persistent desire for an impairment they don’t have. That’s far more complicated than someone deciding wheelchairs look cool, and I don’t pretend to understand what living with that feeling is like. Still, my gut reaction is: be careful what you wish for. There are no takesy backsies.
What’s difficult to capture from the outside is everything that comes attached to disability. The accommodations and bureaucracy, the assumptions about your competence, inaccessible spaces, explaining what you need and sometimes having to explain it again to someone who has the power to tell you no. It can be exhausting.
A The New York Times interview with disabled actor and filmmaker Kyla Harris explores how having to understand and communicate what her body needs has made her more creative, more attuned to herself and, as the headline rather wonderfully puts it, made her sex life hotter. I recognized something in that. Disability has made me a better communicator and problem-solver because I’ve spent a lifetime figuring out how to exist in a world that wasn’t designed with me in mind.
That’s probably why “disability pride” means something very different to me than believing disability itself is desirable. I’m proud of what I’ve built and who I’ve become when the world wasn’t built for me, while also wanting to remove those barriers so the next person doesn’t have to work quite as hard.
I didn’t choose disability. I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not even sure I’d erase it tomorrow if I could. it’s inseparable from how I understand myself and move through the world. Still, I wouldn’t recommend it. I want a world where someone can look at a wheelchair and see a life instead of a tragedy. I’m just not sure celebrating the life and desiring the disability are the same thing.