Applause! But first, context and backstory

We did it, everyone!! Hooray! Everything is cleared up, and no one will inadvertently offend disabled people with their journalistic coverage ever again!

Wait. You already knew about most of the things I marked as offensive? And you don’t know why some things went into different categories?

Exactly the point. What the lists miss is context. I'm a journalist, writing for journalists, and none of us has time to cover

• the entire history of the disability-rights or the disability-justice movements
• the centuries-long history of French and North American Deaf culture
• the history of eugenics and who is associated with those beliefs
• the history of rehabilitation
• the exact medical definition of every disability that has ever existed
• all the intersections between sex, gender, race, class and disability

I don't know all of that stuff myself, and there are multiple academic disciplines dedicated to those studies, but the Annexes, the sources cited in the Selected Resources, and selected source noted in end notes for each section provide a starting point if you come across something you want to learn more about.

I cannot teach the mindset that comes with a lifetime of living as a disabled person, and the only things I can teach related to my personal experiences involve just that: my personal experiences. Mine is not the only, the most comprehensive or the most important perspective on disability, nor is my lived experience of disability comprehensive enough to describe the experience of living as a disabled person in all circumstances.

 
What I can do is provide you with just enough context that you will be able to ask your own questions and have some idea of where to look for the answers. Because our profession deals with language, whether we are working primarily with text or images, and because people are generally very concerned with knowing the appropriate language to use, this section does go over the following:

• reasons some linguistic conventions are the way they are
• some tropes that have caused harm or have implications that many writers do not think through
• more to flag, including some concepts and literary and linguistic devices that are so common when it comes to disability that you don't notice them until you start looking for them
• naming conventions
• about diagnoses
• abbreviations and acronyms

The purpose of this section is to help you figure out where to start looking for answers, and how to notice things that you might otherwise have let slip by.

 
Let's start with considering the words and phrases on the list that I labelled “no one asked for.” In his 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote that, when he considered people's response to what he termed “spoiled identity,” there were certain things they always did no matter the source of the stigma[1]. Stigma is a remarkable book, not only because of its brevity and clarity, and the way it makes connections with, between and among all sorts of what we would now call marginalized groups, but also because it was written prior to the rise of the civil rights movements in North America. (Readers should be mindful that some of its language is quite antiquated and some is guaranteed to be offensive to a contemporary reader.)

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Stigma is how relevant it remains today. Goffman was interested in relationships between people, so the book is not only about how people respond to others whom they see as stigmatized and how stigmatized people feel about themselves, but also about how people manage relationships and encounters between those who are stigmatized in a given context and those who are not. Goffman’s thesis is that both the stigmatized person and the person who is not stigmatized make certain efforts to “manage” this encounter and mediate between any discomfort that the other has.

According to Goffman, one of the first things that happens is that people generally outside the stigmatized group will attempt to soften the language used to refer to the stigmatized group. This is where we get things like the word “deaf” softened to “hearing-impaired.” “Deaf” is (or was, depending on the context) seen as a slur, as too offensive to be said in polite company, so we instead choose a more-polite euphemism. However, what is really found offensive is the deafness itself (or, for deafness, substitute any other stigmatized identity). This euphemistic language softens the reality of the stigmatized identity and allows people who share the identity to claim that they are not like the others who have the identity; people who don't share the identity can say that a person they like is not really like “those people.”

 
What happens then is that words that used to be seen just as expressions of fact turned into slurs and insults. For example, “lame” was used to describe someone who walked with a limp or unsteady gait or could not walk at all, but “lame” has turned into a synonym for uncool, annoying, generally unpleasant or out of touch. “Dumb” was used to describe someone who couldn't speak. Now “dumb” has pretty much lost its original meaning and is now used almost exclusively as a synonym for stupid.

Critics of what was once called “political correctness,” and now what those critics might call “wokeness” related to diversity, equity and inclusion, tend to say that any sort of specialized language used for marginalized groups is an example of this softening of reality. There may or may not be some truth to that. The terms that I put in the “no one asked for this” category seem to me to be examples of it. People in general are aware that there are certain ways to refer to a disabled person that many people find offensive; if some people don't wish to offend, but there is a part of them that finds the disability in and of itself offensive, frightening, scary and less valued, by using this language, they are trying to shield themselves and the person they're referring to from that fear or devaluation.

 
We can see this when somebody says to a disabled friend that they don't think of that person as disabled. It's likely that they're intending to pay the disabled person a compliment; they see that person as someone who is capable, strong and worthy — not attributes the speaker associates with disability. But this renders disability a trait to be devalued or something that automatically makes people less worthy. The disabled person who is thought of as “not disabled” is granted a kind of rhetorical overcoming, as Mary Johnson observes in Make Them Go Away[2]. The cognitive distortion goes like this:

• Disability is bad. Valuable people are not disabled. Sarah is valuable and not bad. Therefore, Sarah has overcome disability, even though she still can't walk.

Changing the language without changing the underlying attitude is probably useless — that's something both proponents and critics of social-justice movements can agree upon. But changing any of the language is not the same as simply making stuff up. A lot of the terms in the “no one asked for this” category were simply made up; they were used by service professionals, by well-intentioned reformers or by parents, and they are not preferred by the people they refer to.

The terms that disabled people have chosen for themselves generally have some sort of meaning or principle behind them, and they come out of the deep knowledge that can only be attained through lived experience. Consider “people with disabilities” versus “people with accessibility needs.” Someone who uses the latter might be aware that accessibility is generally associated with disabled people but may not wish to use the word “disabled” because they aren’t sure whether it's offensive. Oh, he thinks, maybe I can use “people with accessibility needs” — everybody knows that's what disabled people have, right?
Not exactly. Everybody has accessibility needs. What makes disabled people's accessibility needs different from other people's is that disabled people's accessibility needs are not met in most environments and are seen as exceptional. Johnson has framed this in the following way:

• Our wrists hurt from using a non-ergonomic keyboard. But those disabled people are always asking for special accommodations, like using an ergonomic keyboard for their carpal tunnel syndrome. Why do they always need these special things?

Which brings us to a consideration of the word “special.” People tend to use it as a euphemism for disabled, but most disabled people don't want anything to do with the word “special,” nor do we want special extra services.

 
Generally, we disabled people want to access things in the world in the same way and at the same time as other people do. But advocating for equal access leads to backlash and the suggestion that there should be special things for these special people. So, while “special” may seem like a helpful term and one less stigmatizing than “disabled,” it’s really just an excuse for paternalism and bigotry.

 
There are basically two acceptable uses of “special”: the Special Olympics and special education — the latter only because education as a specialty hasn't caught up with the times yet[3]. (“Special needs” is not a noun or an adjective that can describe a person. Such language is one of many, many ways people try to get away from saying “disabled.”)

As philosopher Ashley Shew notes in Against Technoableism: Rethinking Who Needs Improvement, the word “disabled” was actually chosen by disabled people as a way to describe themselves and as an alternative to “handicapped,” another offensive term.
Many people believed that “handicapped” referred to “cap in hand,” evoking an image of someone with their cap out, begging. This was actually not the case: handicap, handicapping, and handicappers are terms used in professional sports (such as horse racing and golf) and for betting on those sports; a handicap is a condition given to an athlete to try to make the odds of betting fairer. In horse racing, for example, a horse that is perceived to have an advantage will often be given the handicap of extra weight.

 
But the image of begging and looking for handouts or charity seemed so appropriate that it just became part of common usage, seeming almost self-evident. In contrast, many leaders of the disability-rights movement chose to use the word “disabled” because it accurately reflected the fact that disabled people were lacking in some abilities — but not all. Disability is not inability. The word “disabled” was used to assert both personal and group identities. It was a way to tell the truth about our circumstances without making us feel lesser or like burdens.

But what about people who may have disabilities or impairments but don't identify as disabled[4]? Great question. (And I’ll refer to Goffman here to address the question.) That's known as internalized ableism. These people recognize that many people see them as disabled and know that the world generally sees disabled people as having less value, so they repudiate the identity for themselves. Goffman describes this as one of the early phases of coping with coming to an awareness of your own “spoiled” identity. As people grow and evolve, they often get rid of this way of thinking[5].

 
Unfortunately, when it comes to disability, the people who are heard the most are generally those who were not born with disabilities and are therefore in the early stages of this process. People who have been disabled for longer and have come to a certain state of acceptance are often dismissed as not understanding the true reality of things, when really it is newly disabled people who have not come to an understanding of themselves and their circumstances or processed the grief that comes with this change.

 
Of course, people don't have to identify as disabled if they don't find that helpful to them, but they may be in for a surprise when they realize the rest of the world identifies them as such anyway. What such people do not have a right to do is insist that any consideration of disability is offensive or that anyone with a disability identity, anyone who accepts their own disability, has somehow given up or doesn't understand reality. Be suspicious of a source who acts or argues otherwise.

 
Other people who do not have the right to decide whether disability identity is appropriate include service professionals who are not disabled but work with disabled people, and parents of disabled people who do not identify as having disabilities themselves. (I use “identify” here deliberately, as many disabilities that are diagnosed in children end up getting diagnosed in their parents later on.) Allied professionals are useful for their expertise in their given field, but they do not know better than disabled people how disabled people should be referred to or refer to themselves. The ones who are respectful do not try.

Here's a fun linguistic exercise you can try. Over the next few weeks, look at the news to see whether you can find any stories about disability. Try to count all the awkward euphemisms that are used to mean “disability.” Are there any that are not on the lists in this section so far? Are there some stories that, by rights, should mention disability but do not, such as stories about long-term care facilities? What euphemisms are used in those news stories, if any?