The New York Times Attempts to Bully Elderly People Into the Disability-as-an-Identity Worldview

shut up and accept that you're defined by your weakness, olds!

(you would find this horribly condescending too)

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. If only the elderly would embrace the capital-D Disability identity, we’re told, everything would be better - their health care would run smoother, their interactions with institutions would be less demeaning, their sense of community would blossom. Maybe they’d even be happier! The Times treats this as self-corroborating common sense, like, well, everything else argued in the New York Times.

What this kind of thinking actually represents is the natural endpoint of a cultural project that has turned medical pathology into a personality type. It’s the codification of a worldview where suffering is not something to address, treat, alleviate, or recover from, but a new kind of boutique identity, complete with community membership, branded discourse, and moral status. It turns vulnerability into a form of social currency, rewarding performance over authenticity and turning genuine suffering into a spectacle for peer validation. In doing so, it erodes the very possibility of meaningful treatment, because the focus is no longer on recovery or well-being, but on cultivating a carefully curated self-image that fixates on impairment. And what I think, as I read this person tut-tutting senior citizens for not embracing that new ethos, is “Maybe they just feel like they’re too fucking old to take part in such nonsense?”

The piece insists, without evidence or even really argument, that treating disability as an identity will improve access to accommodation. Disability accommodations matter; of course they do. But what this article is concerned with is patently not getting older adults the practical support they need. The piece is instead fixated on the idea that the real issue here is that people don’t want to be disabled in the metaphysical, self-defining sense, as though the reluctance of an 84-year-old to call herself Disabled-with-a-capital-D is some retrograde psychological failure rather than a perfectly sane human impulse born of a lifetime of struggle. Span frames this as a story about insufficiently enlightened seniors who need to be ushered into the disability “community.” But maybe the reluctance they’re describing is the whisper of something older and much wiser: the understanding that disability is not a polity you join, not a club whose membership conveys special epistemic authority, but a condition of life that you endure and attempt to mitigate. These older people don’t identify as disabled because they remember, stubbornly enough, the distinction between having a problem and being the problem. They treat disability as a practical reality, not an existential category. And they’re right to do so.

What’s infuriating is that the disability-as-identity movement now demands not only recognition but participation. It doesn’t merely want a world that accommodates impairments; it wants people to embrace their impairments as the core of who they are, to reorganize their sense of self around deficit, to declare disability a positive good rather than an unfortunate reality that any reasonable society would want to minimize. So we get this bizarre spectacle in which experts scold older adults for not calling themselves disabled, as though the great social failing is insufficient uptake of a label. When you tell people that disability is a proud identity, that it confers membership in a community, that it’s a site of resistance and empowerment, you create a perverse incentive structure: you reward pathology and make recovery, adaptation, or improvement look like betrayal. You create cultures where people compete for diagnostic prestige and moral authority through the performance of malady. You make suffering… sticky, existentially sticky. The NYT wants you to believe the problem is that older Americans “don’t want to look disabled.” Is that really the problem for that 84-year-old in chronic pain who can barely walk? I think her problem is that she’s in chronic pain and can barely walk, and “identifying as disabled” won’t make the slightest fucking difference in her life. Meanwhile, our problem is that we’ve built an intellectual ecosystem in which more and more people want exactly that, a label, because being disabled has been reframed as a kind of sacred political laurel.

This derangement has cruel consequences. Because behind all of the airy rhetoric about community and identity is a simple material reality: disability is bad. Disability is physically bad, emotionally bad, financially bad. It reduces freedom. It causes pain. It limits horizons. That doesn’t mean people who are disabled are lesser or that their lives lack dignity or value, obviously. It means that which afflicts them actually afflicts them. My controversial, offensive belief is that disability disables! But the new orthodoxy insists that saying so is taboo. The Times piece rattles through endless quotes about how older people need to feel empowered to call themselves disabled, yet never once confronts the obvious possibility that they don’t want to because they don’t want their lives defined by deficit. They want to soldier on, insist they’re that fine, preserve some continuity of self. Is that denial? Sometimes, sure. More often, I suspect, it’s a vestige of self-respect, a refusal to surrender one’s entire identity to the slow attrition of age and disease.

This identitarian approach infects our institutions. Notice how the experts in the piece talk about “the disability community” as something you join, something you ought to join, something whose boundaries are policed by academics and nonprofit administrators. The message is unmistakable: you’re doing something wrong if you refuse to conceptualize yourself through the lens we have chosen for you. To me, a man who has been ordered to love his crippling disability more times than he can count, this sounds a lot less like empowerment and a lot more like conscription. No one stops to acknowledge the enormous gulf between a 22-year-old disability-studies major proclaiming disability as liberation and that 84-year-old with chronic pain who just wants to manage her household. The Times collapses them into a single category because their ideology requires it.

The result is a world where we no longer know how to distinguish misfortune from identity, circumstance from essence. And that confusion warps incentives and policy. A movement that treats disability as an identity category must also treat increases in disability diagnoses as increases in representation, as political gains! That is an absolutely inevitable aspect of this relentless medicalization of everything: its advocates will never admit to it, but they want more people to be disabled. The disabled population is no longer something you want to shrink through medicine, prevention, and good social policy but something you want to grow, because it yields a larger, louder political constituency. If smoking cessation or obesity reduction or better environmental conditions reduce the number of disabled people, that is now a potential blow to a valued political bloc. This is the exact opposite of a sane approach to public health.

The older Americans described in Span’s piece, in their stubborn refusal to identify as disabled, embody a kind of wisdom, maybe accidental but definitely profound. They recognize what our culture, in its terminally online identity frenzy, has forgotten: that suffering is something you address, not something you enshrine. That impairment is something to work around, not a badge to display. The goal of a humane society should be to reduce disability wherever possible - through medicine, prevention, accessibility, and material support - not to reimagine it as a cultural lifestyle. The resistance of seniors is not the problem. Indeed, that resistance might be the last flicker of common sense in a contemporary American culture that has lost its mind.