George Muniz Gund
December 29th 2022
In this piece, I attempt to unpack our preconceptions of what disability is supposed to look like, trying to show that in reality disability doesn’t have one single look, because disabled people are all different from each other and can present in many different ways
Many people in our society have a very stigmatized idea of what disability is supposed to “look” like. Even I used to carry some of those stigmatized ideas, until quite recently. When we speak of disability, most people will automatically picture a disabled person as someone with glaringly obvious differences or support needs. They may think perhaps of someone in a wheelchair, someone with a debilitating injury or perhaps someone who does not speak or has a significant speech impediment. These are definitely common types of disability and are most certainly valid. The problem, however, is that thinking only of these more obviously “visible” disabilities while picturing disabled individuals, excludes many other disabled people (including myself) that don’t necessarily present with the more obvious stereotypes of what a disabled person is supposed to look like (the kind of disability that we are used to seeing portrayed in movies and television shows).
Certain individuals may have disabilities that might not seem apparent to you until you have an actual interaction with them, or even a few interactions. Even then, you might still be quite surprised if they disclose to you that they are disabled. This is because disabled folks are often conditioned to mask traits of their disability throughout their life. This is unfortunately very common in Autistic individuals and people with ADHD, and most therapies out there actually teach and force autistic and ADHD individuals to mask their traits in order to appear more “neurotypical,” (or, in essence, less disabled). I speak of this with more detail in my article about ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) therapy, check out that article here if you’d like: https://differentnotbroken1293.com/aba-therapy-and-its-roots-in-systemic-ableism/
A lot of us (disabled folks) feel pressured by society to mask our disability traits from a very young age, in order to essentially keep our differences and disabilities out of the way and not be a nuisance to anybody. As a consequence of making such an exhausting effort to hide our disability traits in order to feel more accepted by society, we become quite good at it and may have a harder chance getting people to believe that we are in fact disabled. This is because they don’t see all the stress, intense planning, overwhelm and subsequent exhaustion that goes in to masking our traits. When non-disabled people see someone well spoken and composed, which doesn’t match the ableist preconceptions of what disability is supposed to look like, which is what they have been told and conditioned to believe their entire lives, they are automatically bound to question or be deeply confused by the (masking) disabled person disclosing that they have a disability. Whenever I speak of masking, I make a point to acknowledge that despite the negative impacts it can have on mental health, it is in fact a privilege that not all disabled people have the ability to do. Disabled people that do not speak or have higher support needs (and are therefore may be less able to mask their disability traits) are subject to greater levels of systemic harm than disabled individuals like myself that are able to mask. To read more about the concept of masking and my lived experiences with it, check out this article I wrote on it earlier this year: https://differentnotbroken1293.com/autistic-masking-as-a-trauma-response/
One of the huge problems that many disabled individuals (or their parents depending on the situation) continue to face to this day and struggle immensely with is being denied support because they don’t fit the stereotypical molds of what their school or employer believes that disability is supposed to look like. This greatly affects the lives and the mental health of these individuals being denied support and accommodations and this most certainly needs to change. Sadly most of the (non-disabled) people that are in charge of these schools and companies are still simply not well versed on how different kinds of disabilities may manifest and affect the lives of the disabled individuals. Plenty of these things are clearly visible to other disabled folks. There needs to be better (more accurate and less stigmatized) representation of different types and flavors of disability in mainstream television and movies so that people can have a better understanding from an early age of the fact that disabled people are all different from each other and disability does not always present in the same ways.
The non-visible disabilities associated with certain diagnoses, neurotypes or conditions like Autism and ADHD, such as impaired neuromotor function, executive dysfunction and sensory processing disorder, are only considered “invisible” because of a social construct reinforced by ableism. Many people will unfortunately continue to refuse to acknowledge certain disabled people as disabled because they actively choose not to unpack their ableist perceptions of disability because to them, disability seems too horrible for so many of us to have. If we started viewing disability as something that is not inherently ugly, horrible and undesirable, the world would be a much friendlier place because people would start to recognize what different types of disability look like in different people. We as a society need to accept non-visible disabilities instead of creating categories of visible and invisible in order to determine or justify who deserves resources or support. Ableism is what continues to keep certain disabilities hidden.
Some of the best things that non-disabled people can do to be true allies of the anti-ableism cause are to keep listening to people with lived experience of disability, reading articles like this one, spreading the word to more people and, more importantly, calling people out and educating them if they say something that represents an inaccurate or stigmatized view of disability, even if it makes you uncomfortable. If we don’t open ourselves to having these uncomfortable conversations, we won’t get anywhere as a society in terms of challenging systems of oppression like racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia and etc…
I hope that you enjoyed reading this and was able to take something useful from it. If you enjoyed this piece, please share it with friends and family as awareness of these issues related to systemic ableism is still deeply needed in order to challenge the oppressive ableist system we live in to a larger scale.
Comments