What Do People with Disabilities Need?

The Americans with Disabilities Act is flawed, as any legislation of its scope will necessarily be, and you can find examples of those flaws if you look around a bit. Occasionally you’ll find a scenario where the overzealous application of the law has led to some less than ideal outcomes. But the Act remains one of the most powerful and important pieces of legislation in our country’s history, and its biggest problems are matters of underenforcement. The law established a basic principle that’s an essential element of a free society: a legally-enforceable social commitment to helping those with disabilities live their lives with the least obstruction and difficulty possible. This help can never be complete or perfect, and we are very far from a truly accessible society. (I once spent a summer pushing a wheelchair for a disabled student in Boston and lemme tell you, many places are still profoundly inconvenient for the disabled.) But the justification for the law lies in both equality and liberty: accidents of nature should not deprive anyone from fully participating in society, to the degree that’s achievable.

Of course, there will always be limits to what can be achieved. These limits are both literal and practical - blind people cannot be extended the ability to drive conventional vehicles no matter how much we might want to, and while people with permanently-compromised cardiovascular-respiratory systems can sometimes live on ECMO units indefinitely, at present the costs of such an affordance makes this impossible for anyone but the wealthy. Etc. Such limitations exist and will always exist. But it’s precisely here that the elegance of the ADA is most evident. The law requires that we extend any reasonable accommodation to those with disabilities, not any conceivable accommodation. The ADA acknowledges that there are limits to the types and degrees of accommodation that we can provide in a functioning society. Of course, well-intentioned people will disagree in good faith about which accommodations are reasonable; those disagreements have to be hashed out, typically in the courts, and there’s rarely any obvious rubric we can use to settle them. But the law, for all of its inevitable excesses and failures, is a wise and humane one, and it’s better to live in a society with elevators and braille signage than to live in one without. The difficult part is to remain vigilant about which accommodations are helpful, which are reasonable, and which are neither.

The claim I want to advance today is pretty simple: the more that accommodations are specific, limited, and (most importantly) material, the more effective and socially useful they are. And a core problem is that contemporary disability rhetoric is so often general, boundless, and immaterial. It’s a move away from ramps and grab bars and closed captions and towards vibes. It’s not that the only necessary or important accommodations are for physical limitations; as someone who suffered through several years in an office job while on medications that damage focus and short-term memory, I certainly understand the need for accommodations that are more behavioral in nature. The point, though, is that the more immaterial we get, the harder the conceptual questions are and the less and less likely it becomes that accommodations are actually going to do what the ADA is intended to do. For example, I do support giving students with certain learning-related disabilities additional time to take exams. But at least a dozen high school and colleges educators in the past few years have told me that they have had classes where more students receive such accommodations than don’t. Sometimes it’s as many as three out of four. Such a scenario, I would argue, muddies the line between an accommodation for some and a penalty for others.

Part of the trouble is that the ratchet only ever seems to go in one direction - because disability accommodation lies at the intersection of legal liability and progressive norms, the pressure is always to give way to greater and greater accommodation. Which is how you get situations like that of an elite small liberal arts college where I have some connections, a college of less than 3000 undergraduates that, despite its size, as of a few years ago not only had authorized dozens of emotional support dogs and cats but also several emotional support rats and an emotional support snake. For the record, emotional support animals are not legally recognized service animals, but when people demand their recognition, the arguments they make are right out of disability rights activism and coated in a patina of legalese. And even in these vibe-shifted United States, many institutions perceive the risks of lawsuit and bad optics to be sufficient that they’ll roll over. And this, in part, is a consequence of the vibes accommodation.

With emotional support animals, at least, what’s being requested is an actual formal accommodation, one that can be debated with legal specificity and real consequences. What’s grown tremendously, in the 21st century, is a much more dubious form of social accommodation, or “accommodation.” Where disputes about legal accommodations can eventually be resolved in a courtroom (and, to be clear, those asking for accommodations are routinely denied them in court) many of us live in spaces that have adopted a fundamentally emotional approach to disability, an approach that has metastasized in the past several decades. It’s a broad, vague sense among progressive people that a person speaking about their disability must be “honored,” in some strangled way, and certainly not disagreed with on the topic of disability. None of this is restricted to just disability issues, obviously. American progressives have fallen into this maze of good vibes and meaningless positivity for all manner of issues; show me a room full of white liberals and I’ll show you a lot of people who are inordinately concerned with demonstrating that they think Black people are groovy. It’s deference politics. But with disability, the identity shoe fits even less comfortably, given that being disabled is not an identity, and the immediate stakes are higher, for reasons I’ve explored in this space for going on four years.

I have been on the receiving end of the “honor disability” stuff in two ways - I’ve been the recipient of condescending deference because I technically have a disability, and I have been repeatedly told that I have no right to weigh in on issues pertaining to disability in a way that contravenes the beliefs of the disabled. Of course, I am the disabled, as uncomfortable as I find that term and designation, but the tie always goes to the person claiming the most victimized status, and I’m no victim; of course, the concept of a unitary disabled experience or perspective is absurd on its face, but these are the wages of confusing the moral and legal right to practical accommodation with an all-encompassing attitude of “I’m not getting in trouble over this, whatever you say.”

Confusion abounds. Look at this essay in Time. The author, Jessica Smith, is a Paralympian and disability accessibility consultant. In her piece, she asks many of the right questions but seems trapped in the confusion of disability as identity, of feelings as accommodation. She laments the decline of DEI as a challenge to the disabled, which is strange, as the ADA at least theoretically provides the legal muscle to demand accommodation that no DEI department could ever provide. She understandably laments the “checklist approach” to diversity issues but calls for a reinvigoration of the very bureaucracies that invented it. Still, this is fine:

not all organizations get it wrong. There are companies, institutions, and leaders who are doing the work—who have committed to making accessibility an ingrained part of their policies and culture. These are the organizations we should be championing—their methods, their stories, and their successes. They prove that true inclusion is possible, but only when it is done right.

I don’t see much to disagree with here, provided that we understand that accessibility refers to practical affordances that actually alter the lived experience of people with disabilities in real (read: not communicative or emotional) ways. Finding organizations that proactively extend reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities and seeking to replicate their methods is a fine goal and profoundly pragmatic. And then, next paragraph, we’re in the complete opposite end of the pool.

Disability remains shrouded in stigma. The perception that disabled people are “less capable” or that accessibility is a burden rather than a right is still deeply ingrained in many aspects of society. And the worst part? It’s incredibly hurtful.

When I walk into a room, I know that some people will see my disability first. They will make assumptions about what I can and can’t do before I even open my mouth. This isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s exhausting. People with disabilities shouldn’t have to prove their worth over and over again.

The monomaniacal focus on stigma has been a terrible development for our understanding of disability. It’s a perfect metonym for 21st-century progressivism, the gradual replacement of the actual problem with how people feel about the problem. Injustice becomes a postmodern object, only as real as its perception, incorporeal and inaccessible beyond someone’s experience. A person in a wheelchair certainly will face judgment from others, unfair judgment that reveals poor character on the part of the people judging. But this problem is not addressable by policy, and more importantly there’s the wheelchair itself, the need for a tool to improve accessibility and the righteous demand for a built environment that makes its use possible. Of course I want others to be kind to people with disabilities, but stigma is not among the top one hundred problems for most people with real disabilities. At demonstrations demanding the kind of law that eventually was realized in the ADA, disability activists rode their wheelchairs up to the stairs of the Capitol and threw themselves onto the steps to crawl on their hands up towards Congress. The message was the medium: they needed the practical ability to move as the able-bodied move. These days disability activists make Instagram infographics about “othering” language.

And I’m afraid I have to really piss off the disability activist types here: of course people with disabilities are less capable; this is the very definition of disability. A dis-ability means a lack of ability, and a lack of ability is synonymous with being less capable. That’s why we have to provide accommodations. If the disabled were no less capable, what would they require accommodation for? People in the disability rights world advocate for the “social model of disability,” which holds that a disabled person is not lacking in any capability, but rather that the human-built world was not made to accommodate that person; the problem isn’t the runner in the race but the designer of the course. This is of course sophistry, and I strongly suspect that even most of its explicit adherents don’t really believe it. You could start with the fact that many disabilities are just as disabling in a state of nature as in the modern environment. A person without arms cannot climb trees to evade predators, and those trees grew with utter indifference to human norms and culture and biases. And indeed there are disabilities so grave that there is no conceivable environment in which they would not prove disabling. There is no honest way to argue that being born with Huntington’s disease is just an equally-valid mode of existence, as you need your neurons to keep functioning if you want to keep drawing breath on this planet.

If I go off my meds I will sooner or later fall into a vicious cycle of crushing depression and psychotic mania, a state of affairs that can result in me ruining my life, has compelled me to engage in serious acts of violence, and which dramatically increases my risk of suicide. What would it look like, exactly, to build a society in which that condition is just an equally-valid way of being? I have survived because of the sympathy and forgiveness of many people, and you only need sympathy if you’re hurt and only require forgiveness if you’ve actually done something wrong. What I require, to put it another way, is reasonable accommodation. As I’ve pointed out again and again, contemporary liberal sensibilities about disability and personal responsibility are incoherent, with patience and understanding handed out according to no ethical criteria. But even setting that aside, I’m left with this claim that the obviously broken parts of me are not really broken because a society could exist where they are… benign? Actively helpful? I have no idea what the construct of bipolar disorder as equally-legitimate lifestyle could ever do to help me.

More to the point, the reality of a human society where accessibility is not the default renders the hypothetical dream posed by the social model meaningless. We live in a society in which it’s very difficult to be blind or paralyzed or schizophrenic, and whether I’m right or the social model advocates are right about disability theory isn’t particularly meaningful. Perhaps the social model doesn’t need to be refuted, but simply set aside while we concentrate on the nature of actual lived reality. And the news there is good: the disability activists and I agree about 98% of the time when it comes to the demand for specific accommodations, the kind that actually help real disabled people lead happier and healthier lives, the kind that were fought for in the effort to pass the ADA. Maybe we can focus on that, and set the cloud of obligatory supportive vibes aside. There’s enough work to be done building ramps.