Freeze frame of a TikTok video with the caption “The time me and my friends used wheelchair assistance so we wouldn’t miss our flight back into the U.S.”
Happy 2026. Feeling pumped?
Everyone’s doing their New Year reset. “We’re gonna be better.” And disabled people are waking up to TikTok's about how being disabled is a travel hack and The Wall Street Journal highlighting the miracle of ‘Jetway Jesus.’
Being disabled is not travel hack. Flying while disabled is exhausting. It’s dehumanizing. It’s expensive. And it’s layered in ways most people never have to think about.
When I travel, I don’t just show up with a boarding pass. I travel with a wheelchair, and a printed, double-sided one-sheet I hand to every gate agent explaining how to handle it. Because I’ve answered the same questions a thousand times, and I’m tired of watching people guess with equipment my body depends on.
I travel with my service dog, Canine Companions® Lovey. Which means paperwork. Digital copies. Physical copies. Backups for the backups. Because I never know who’s going to demand proof, or what form of proof will suddenly be “required” today.
That’s before I even get to my body. The pain, the fatigue. the logistics. Whether my girlfriend is with me to help. What if something breaks? Will anyone listen? Just how tired am I going to be by the time we land? How much longer am I waiting to deplane? I’ve been sitting for hours with non-accessible airplane bathrooms.
So when I see people openly bragging about faking disability for pre-boarding or using their platforms to call it a “hack”, my brain short-circuits.
This feeds a narrative disabled people have been fighting forever:
• we’re exaggerating.
• we’re gaming the system.
• we need to be watched.
And yes—non-visible disabilities are real. They are valid. We should never be policing people who need assistance but don’t “look disabled enough.”
This is people who know they don’t need it, saying so out loud, and monetizing it for clicks. And the fallout lands on us.
On the scrutiny when someone like me stands up out of a wheelchair.
On the unspoken question: Are you faking it?
So we over-perform legitimacy. We carry more documentation. We explain more than we should. We make ourselves calmer, nicer, because access feels conditional.
I don’t want to spend my energy explaining why basic decency is required.
I want to spend it reminding people that disabled folks matter. That we’re not inspiration. Not content. Not a punchline. Not a workaround.
We’re just people trying to get where we’re going.
If this is how we’re starting 2026? Arguing about whether disability is being “abused”—then yeah. I’m frustrated. And I’m not interested in pretending this is cute or funny.
So I’ll ask this instead:
Who gets believed?
Who gets blamed when systems fail?
And why is disabled existence still treated like an inconvenience people feel entitled to exploit?
Sit with that.