One of the barriers in fighting for disability rights is that a lot of people can’t get over the idea of “Isn’t disability a bad thing?”
It’s not like fighting for gay rights, or race rights, where we understand that being gay or being a person of colour is not a bad thing, having a disability is a bad thing, right? Sure disabled people aren’t to blame, but like… we should still be trying to stop disability and it still is a bad thing. I mean… no one wants to be blind, or deaf, or have cancer, etc. etc. etc.
I have said it before:
We as a society have this concept that people with disabilities, especially those receiving disability assistance are lazy, sad, and pathetic. That they are deserving of pity. There is an underlying current of society that holds the belief that the words “I am disabled” actually mean “my life is not worth living”. In a culture that prioritizes what any given person can do, how productive they are, it is not surprising that this is the case. Our worth is dictated by how useful we are, and people with disabilities are assumed to be useless to society as a whole.
There is active pressure from society to not identify as disabled, pressure to consider “being disabled” a bad thing. It is this same impulse that leads friends and family to say such patronizing things as “The only disability is a bad attitude” or “You’re not sick, you just need to think positive.” They cannot understand why we would do something so “negative” like be disabled or worse yet, talk about being disabled. For me finally admitting to myself and eventually the world that “yes, I am disabled” was incredibly liberating.
Most of our society subscribes to the medical model of disability that sees any and all deviation from the norm as something that has to be cured. Proponents of disability justice often point to the social model for disability instead, which suggests that the true problem with disability is not some flaw that needs to be cured but rather as an individual characteristic that happens to differ from the average, such as for example homosexuality differs from the average, etc.