DISABILITY IS NOT A BAD WORD

Mel Kennedy

For a week, I was the host of a Twitter account called We Are Disabled. The account is a project which started in early 2017 and allows people to share their experiences and tell their stories.

It all seemed to be going well, but then I spotted a tweet by a mother talking about her ‘special needs’ children, which then caused an argument about disabled people not liking person first language. She began lecturing a disabled person about the issue and I decide to write a simple six-word tweet on the page: disability is not a bad word.

For those not in the know, person-first language means to place the person before their disability. For example, ‘I am a person with disabilities’ in comparison to an identity first approach of ‘I am a disabled person’. You may wonder why this is important – it’s only swapping around words, right? Well, saying I’m a disabled person solidifies my identity. My disability is not my only feature, but it is one which plays a key role in shaping who I am, the same way I would say ‘I am a woman’ not a ‘person with a gender opposite to the male one’. I’ve seen definitions of these two types of languages, one which described person first as ‘the choice recognizes that a human is first and foremost a person: They have a disorder, but that disorder doesn't define them.’ (Northeastern University, 2018). If you need to use this language to remind yourself that ‘we’re people’ and ‘human first’…well, they don’t pay me to write these things, so I won’t bore you with a dissertation length rant about this. For years, I was told I was wrong when I said ‘disabled person’, made to feel ashamed for not using ‘person with disabilities’, but I refused to back down. Many of us feel no shame in saying the stark truth – we are disabled people. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, our disability experience is part of our identity and impacts the way we interact with the world. We shouldn’t need to hide it or change our language to make people feel more comfortable.

Such a small thing, that tweet, written in a moment of frustration, was liked over a thousand times, retweeted over two hundred and fifty times and had eleven quote tweets. This wasn’t meant to be a revolutionary statement and yet, suddenly, my six words was travelling through the Internet.

It struck a nerve.

Stunned, I decided to ask a question which has been bothering me since reading the argumentative tweet. Perhaps in the wider community, person first language was disliked (I personally prefer identity first, I don’t need reminding that I’m a person). There was lots of debate, personal experiences and opinions shared in a respectful environment. Then someone reminded me that Twitter allows users to make polls (shaking my head) and I used the polls.

Out of 62 people, 62.9% preferred identity first language, 12.9% preferred person first language and 24.2% preferred either. Of course, 62 people is not enough to get a scope on the entire disabled community, but it’s an interesting start. Some of the comments were particularly interesting, some people used them interchangeably based on which condition they were referring to, something I had never really thought about.

We can only begin to raise issues across communities if we communicate.

We’ve been left out of the societal debate for too long – communication is key.

It is not our responsibility to change our language to make you feel comfortable. Learn to adapt, just like we’ve had to adapt in a non-disabled society.

Doesn’t feel so great now, does it?

References

Northeastern University (2018) ‘AUTISTIC PERSON’ OR ‘PERSON WITH AUTISM’: IS THERE A RIGHT WAY TO IDENTIFY PEOPLE? [online] Available at:https://news.northeastern.edu/2018/07/12/unpacking-the-debate-over-person-first-vs-identity-first-language-in-the-autism community/#:~:text=For%20people%20who%20prefer%20person,something%20to%20be%20ashamed%20of. [Accessed on 29th March 2021]

Twitter (2021) Poll for We Are Disabled [online] Accessed at: https://twitter.com/WeAreDisabled/status/1375461922196361216 [Accessed on 29th March 2021]

We Are Disabled (2017) We Are Disabled [online] Accessed at: https://wearedisabled.wordpress.com/ [Accessed on 29th March 2021]