I’ve spoken on this subject on a number of occasions recently and in the past.

Most recently, here:

[...] I have had my own contact with disability issues as already documented on these pages – and am well aware of how language affects perceptions and what people think is possible.  Whilst living in Spain, towards the tail end as I began to suffer from mental ill health myself, I did translations for a Spanish university on texts relating to what they called “people with support needs” (“personas con necesidades de apoyo”) – never did they choose to call them “disabled people”; quite the opposite.  If I remember rightly, please correct me if I am wrong, there was even a moment in Spanish legal history when what we Anglo-Saxons still call the “disabled” were actually called “inútiles” – that is to say, “useless”.  Certainly, in a Spanish context much has been done to remedy that state of affairs.  But what it clearly teaches us is how language frames our perception of reality and what we can do with it.

Sue, meanwhile, has suffered a most complex and clever attack on her own sense of purpose in the comments thread to this post of hers.  I’m not going to quote the comments in question here, as the only way to do them justice – if that is the right terminology – is to read them all and their progression one by one.

Suffice it to say that it involves the following strategy: make Sue guilty for being able to do things despite her condition; make Sue doubt her continued right to the support she needs to overcome it; make Sue ashamed of her writing as a fantastic campaigning tool; and, finally, make Sue feel anxious about making public statements in the future in case she commits the occasional incongruence.  As she’s just tweeted:

It feels like ppl must feel when they have a stalker. They know everything you say, everything you’ve done. And they twist it all to filth

There are, of course, simple things she could do to protect herself from online bullying.  As I tweeted not a minute or two ago:

@suey2y No. You can post-moderate, with a clear comments policy which explains why and when beforehand. That would work, *and* protect you.

But the recognition of the need to protect can create a situation of creeping fear in itself.  No complete solution, then – even as it might seem attractive as a first step.

I’d suggest two longer-term strategies that we might wish to take up.  Firstly, as I touched on in my most recent post, already linked to above, language frames how we see the world and edit its reality.  Those who judge themselves disabled – and wear their disability as a badge of courage – may not appreciate this next suggestion, of course.  I will respect them for not doing so.  I would, however, beg we considered whether the term “disabled” is the best one to use.  As alluded to earlier in this piece, a “person with support needs” is all of us sooner or later.  Indeed, as I recently argued, it’s more than likely that the reality of our existence on this planet means most of us are going to be delayed “people with support needs” than energetically resistant supermen and women of zero infirmity to the very happy end:

We shouldn’t be trying to make disabled people like the rest of us – but, rather, be bringing the rest of us closer to the realisation that, sooner or later, we all will need the support the disabled are generally accustomed, quite rightly, to demand.

To not be able to do everything easily for yourself should not serve to define yourself in infirmity but simply form part of what life eventually throws at everyone – except, of course, the very very lucky few who may end up dying on their feet, playing a round of golf, with a full set of their own teeth and 20/20 vision.

But exceptions to the rule should not define how we run or contemplate our societies for the vast majority.  For to say that people as able-bodied as the paralympians competing over the next few days should be defined by the rest of us … well, this is as wrong-headed in its approach as anyone, or any society, could get.  It is, rather, the rest of us – individuals of varying ages whose ways of living generally choose to ignore approaching support needs, especially when, in our relative good health, we vote selfishly for governments, welfare systems and health services – who need to accept we should instead be defined by the disabled.

But whilst tinkering with the language of disability is always going to help, this is actually getting much bigger than unpleasant and aggressive name-calling on the web.  The government’s own attitudes, as exemplified by the way they frame the debate and contract out disabled services, is feeding down into a wider miasma of perceptions.  Essentially what we’re getting is the following thesis: if you can do anything with your life, you’re not disabled – and thus deserve to be thrown to the wolves the rest of society is already being thrown to; meanwhile, if you are disabled, you have no right to do anything with your life – and must sit depressedly and inactively on your benefit-scrounging sofa.

Well, I’m sorry.  This I cannot contemplate.  Since 2003, my doctor tells me I am paranoid schizophrenic, on top of epileptic from childhood; and so it is that I have had to battle with presumptions from bemused and worried family members; from society; and from those – even perhaps myself – who would end up underestimating my skills.

But not only that – I have also had to fight the assumption, outside my own self and person, that my perceptions are bound not to be accurate.  A terrible thing for a man who would choose to be a writer about politics, the world and the slow decay of society.

How those – who would undermine the right of the physically and mentally weak to fight back – assiduously gnaw away at our attempts to achieve tranquillity.

Sue, you are lucky – in a way, yes you are.  The cruelty which has been inflicted upon you is visible to the outside world.  Mine was registered nowhere, except in a brain whose ability to make judgements even I doubted.

Which is not, in your case, to underestimate its power over you; no, I’m not saying that at all.

All I suppose I am saying is that you have a real audit trail which you can use to track your reality and usefully share it with others.  And that is a truly valuable tool and defence against the arguments of the cowards.

But it’s time to move on from that: time to believe fervently that everyone who considers themselves disabled has not only this right to recognise their state, and a corresponding obligation to bear public witness to their recognition, but also the freedom to do the very best they can with the lives that fortune and fate has awarded them.

Only when the bullies in society and government cannot make us cower out of fear will the fear that these bullies use simply disappear.

So time to be proactively disabled?  Well, yes.  Of course it is.  But also time to ensure that we argue being disabled is nothing out of the ordinary at all.  The ordinary is about as special as it gets.  The ordinary is being human.

And after writing this in about an hour of contained fury, I really don’t know if I should post or not.  I tell you what, though, I do now know what it feels like to be hiding in a closet from which I have no intellectual alternative but to come out.

From civil and disability rights – to the language of governance.  Yes.  The challenge is much bigger than ever.

Whilst the injustices now being committed against the disabled rank right up there with the most unhappy battles of the LGBT movement, the solution must lie in a much bigger radius of action: it’s not just the language of disability we must change – it’s the whole industrial and mechanical language of government which is now bearing down on us.