"Disability is Natural"... or is it?

(now edited to include a link to a relevant Jim Sinclair article, which i had in mind but somehow forgot to link when posting this...)

In a comment on another disability blog someone recently mentioned the website "Disability is Natural", so "naturally" i went to have a look at it...

I had actually seen someone wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Disability is Natural" and the red and green apple logo at 2 different disability events (i believe it was the Liberty Festival in London, either in 2005 or 2006, and the protests against the Welfare Reform Bill at the Labour party conference in Manchester in 2006), but hadn't realised it was a website. At the latter, i think i tried to argue with him about the slogan, but didn't get very far with it...



I see the point that the slogan is trying to make - that disabled people are a natural part of human diversity, and deserve to be accepted and accommodated rather than "cured" or eliminated, and of course I wholeheartedly support that - that's the basic foundation of the social model of disability. But the use of the slogan "Disability is Natural" betrays a clear lack of understanding of what the social model is truly about.

Under the social model, a clear distinction is made between impairment and disability, which the medical system and the individualised models it promotes conflate into one thing. Impairment is a physical or mental difference which prevents a person from being able to carry out daily activities considered "normal" for humans to be able to do - eg. standing/walking, seeing, hearing, feeding oneself, reading and writing, understanding verbal and non-verbal forms of communication as used by most people, etc. Disability is the lack of equality in society caused, not by impairments themselves, but by the failure or refusal of society to accommodate people with impairments - eg. by not making buildings accessible to wheelchair users, not providing information in formats accessible to people with visual or hearing impairments or learning disabilities like dyslexia, not allowing people who need help with personal care to have choice and control over what support they recieve, assuming that everyone "should" be able to understand all forms of communication in the same way, etc.

(It's worth noting that, while impairment is therefore something with a "concrete", outside-of-society existence, and disability something that exists because of and depending on social factors, what is and isn't an impairment is still contested, especially in the neurological area, where the distinctions between, for example, preferring one method of communication over another, and actually being unable to use one form of communication, get kind of blurred - and what constitutes an impairment still depends to some extent on what is considered "normal" for people to be able to do - eg. dyslexia wouldn't have been an impairment for many people in societies without widespread literacy. But this is a tangent...)

Physical and mental diversity is natural. Impairment is natural. But the social model states quite emphatically that disability isn't natural - it's socially constructed, and can be socially deconstructed. (It's also worth noting here that being socially constructed, despite what a lot of people seem to think, doesn't necessarily mean that something "isn't real". It's very real, but it's society and not nature that makes it real.)

Several quotes from the disability history page of the website make it clear that, when the author says "disability", ze actually means "impairment":

From the beginning, mythical perceptions and stereotypical attitudes have portrayed individuals with disabilities as different, aberrant, deficient, incompetent, and more. But like gender and ethnicity, a disability is simply one of many natural characteristics of being human... There have always been people with disabilities and differences in the world, and there always will be.

...

Some people are born with conditions we label as disabilities; others may acquire a disability through an accident or illness; and, if we live long enough, many of us will acquire a disability through the aging process. Disability does not discriminate!

...

But the problem never has been the disability; the problem is (and has always been) society's beliefs about disability. People with disabilities are not broken, and they don't need to be fixed!

Old attitudes and perceptions—not the disability itself—constitute the greatest obstacle facing people with disabilities. This attitudinal barrier may not always be visible to the naked eye, but it rears its ugly head across all environments and results in children and adults with disabilities being socially isolated, physically segregated, and excluded from the mainstream of American society.

Of course, in a social model understanding of the term "disability", "attitudes and perceptions" are "the disability itself"...

(edit: the author is Kathie Snow, who wants quotes to be attributed, and who is the non-disabled parent of a disabled son. I was kind of curious as to whether the author was a disabled person...)

Another article on the site is "People First Language" (note that to read the whole article you have to click another link, which leads to a PDF, so if you don't have Acrobat or equivalent, or if PDFs crash your computer... don't). There's a lot of stuff in the article that i agree with, and its intent is clearly, unambiguously good - but, IMO, the usages it advocates are highly problematic - arguably even more problematic than many of the "offensive" usages they are supposed to replace.

(This and variants of it are also advocated by other disability campaigns and organisations, such as People First, the UK organisation of people with learning disabilities... of which I also have criticisms, some of which are language-related, but i've gone off on enough tangents already...)

Several of the recommended changes in language usage are about particular words, which i don't really want to get into a discussion of in this post, as for every word which has been used to describe a group of people, you can guarantee that there are some people within that group who support "reclaiming" it as a positive identifier, and others within that group who believe that it is inherently offensive, cannot be reclaimed and needs to be removed from the language - but the major change pushed for by advocates of "people first language" is a grammatical one, the replacement of phrases which use the impairment/disability as an adjective ("disabled person") with "person-first" phrases such as "person with a disability", and of the use of "to be" in phrases such as "she is disabled" with "to have" in phrases like "she has a disability".

This, again, while commonly advocated by people who think they are being anti-discrimination and pro-equality, is actually not a social model approach to disability. "Person with a disability" is not simply a more "courteous" or "polite" way of saying the same thing as "disabled person" (and, in any case, it wouldn't matter much to me if it was, as the concept of "politeness" really is pretty much meaningless to me) - it actually has a different meaning.

"A disability", stated as a noun, is a "thing" which a person "has" - simultaneously both belonging to the individual, and not directly relevant to who the person actually is. As has already been said, while impairment belongs to the individual, disability "belongs" to society - but, assuming that "disability" is simply being used to mean "impairment" again, impairment is an intrinsic part of the identity of an individual - so the phrase is incoherent. On the other hand, "disabled", when used to describe a person, is not really an adjective, but an adjectival use of the past tense of a verb ("to disable")- a disabled person is someone who has been disabled by society.

(With regard to individual impairments, i usually would say "person X has CP/muscular dystrophy/Down's/Asperger's/whatever"... but that's mainly because those terms don't really have adjectival forms, and where the adjectival form is commoner - eg "blind", "autistic", "dyslexic" etc - i would use it, because an alternative form such as "person Y has autism" just seems to be... not "natural" English syntax. I wouldn't criticise someone for using it, since their meaning would be clear, but i wouldn't consider the difference to have political meaning...)

(I'm aware that, in the US, it seems that the preferred usage in the disability rights movement, despite its recognition of the social model, is "people with disabilities"... i'm not quite sure why, but i'm guessing it might be by analogy with other phrases more commonly used in the US than in the UK, such as "people of colo(u)r". I'd be interested in any US-based bloggers' thoughts on this...)

EDIT: to include a link to Jim Sinclair's article Why I dislike "person first" language, which puts the social model argument against person-first language better and more clearly than i could...

Some would probably say that this is all just nitpicking, and that it doesn't really matter what form of language is used, as long as meaning is clear... but I'm one of those people who think that language matters, because the terms in which people refer to things shape their understanding of those things, and i think that terms need to have clear definitions, because otherwise people who are on the same side end up saying apparently opposite things, and people whose intent is good end up being dismissed or co-opted because of the unclearness or linguistic incoherence of their arguments.

Has anyone read the "Disability is Natural" book, or seen the video? What was your opinion of it?