An Open Letter To Andy Richter
Hi Mr. Richter!
Let’s talk.
Recently, you were traveling at the airport. An assuredly unpleasant thing, regardless of who you are. You saw a person walking. You saw that person ask about disabled pre-boarding. You saw that person’s gait change somehow. You made the conclusion, as many uninformed people might, that this person was faking a disability for the purpose of pre-boarding. And so you shot off a quick tweet about it, as one is apt to do when they see something that they find baffling and no one is around to tell it to.
You may even think you’re doing a favor to Actually Disabled™ people by calling out this supposed imposter. They are, after all, taking away something from Actually Disabled™ people, these alleged fakers.
So here I am, an Actually Disabled™ person, asking you to not do that.
(Even my health insurance had to agree that I’m actually disabled. That’s how disabled I am. It’s real. I’ve got a shower chair and someone who comes to my home and everything. I have no formal certification to show you, and no credentials, but I present for evidence the former facts, and also my wheelchair, and also my adorable service dog in training.)
Here’s why.
You genuinely cannot see disability. It does not come with any sort of constant, visible indicator, like a large blue handicapped parking sign floating above our heads. Disability is not always immediately apparent. In fact, disability does not look like any one specific thing. It doesn’t even look like a dozen different specific things. Disability is as diverse as human biology is. This is to say, it’s very possible that this person was actually disabled! You’d really have no way of knowing. What you saw does not necessarily mean that that person is nondisabled.
Disability is not static. Limps and gaits aren’t static. Some days I cannot even walk, and other days you wouldn’t even detect a limp if you knew to look for it. Sometimes I’m walking fine, sit down and sublux my SI joints (slide my hips out of place), and when I stand up I’m suddenly walking very weirdly. I have an array of mobility devices: a cane, lofstrand crutches, a walker, two rollators, and a wheelchair. But if I’m leaving my house and need to be moving around, I have to take either my walker or my wheelchair. I’m very Visibly Disabled when I go out into public. My disabledness only gets questioned by the very occasional intrusive weirdo, and not by every suspicious onlooker who sees me asking for accessibility, like some of my less “visibly” disabled friends experience.
There’s also the whole question of performing able-bodiedness. So many disabled people feel pressure to hide their disability, and to “perform able-bodiedness”, as it’s been called. Everything from hiding a medical device (a cochlear implant, an ostomy bag, an insulin pump), to absconding a limp, to masking a facial expression that says “help me, help me, someone, please help me, my body is attacking me, holy shit, I think I’m dying, it hurts so badly”. It’s a constant, constant performance of masking disability for the comfort of ableds. Others may feel a need to “act the part” of society’s contrived image of what a disabled person “looks like”, and to exaggerate the visible aspects of their disability for fear of being denied accessibility. Disabled people are constantly forced into this balancing act of performing abledness and performing disabledness for the abled gaze. It’s fucking exhausting.
So, really, you don’t know if someone is disabled or not! Maybe that person has a limp and was hiding it before. Maybe they exaggerated their limp so they wouldn’t deal with someone questioning their less visible disability. Maybe they didn’t have a limp and sat down and their body did a weird thing and when they stood back up it was doing a different weird thing. How could a random onlooker possibly know? (The answer is: they couldn’t.)
It takes nothing away from me, someone who does pass the Random Onlooker’s test of disabledness, to let someone else who doesn’t pass that test have the accessibility they need, regardless of how visibly their disability manifests. If someone says they have accessibility needs, believe them. It’s far better to err on this side of things than to mistakenly deny disability accommodations to someone who needs them. It’s also better to not spread this mindset that disability is visible to your one million followers. You have a huge platform, and to quote Uncle Ben, “with great power comes great responsibility”. It’s kinda irresponsible to do this sort of thing. Not to mention, if that person happened to see your tweet (not totally improbable, given your one MILLION followers), it probably would make them feel like shit.
Flying is a miserable enough experience. It’s often even more of a nightmare for disabled people. I don’t know if you’ve ever been strapped into an aisle chair, but it really drives home just how narrow those aisles are as your buttcheeks spill over either side and you end up with bruises on your hips from bumping every single armrest that you pass on your way to your seat. A patdown in a chair is a whole adventure in and of itself. My own wheelchair has been broken twice in the last year while I was flying (no, dammit, I still don’t forgive you, JetBlue!). My point is, let’s not make flying any more unpleasant than it needs to be by failing to mind our business. No one deserves to be tweeted about by a famous comedian with (literally) a million followers, just because their disability didn’t present visibly enough for said comedian’s satisfaction. These comments ultimately promote a harmful mindset, regardless of that person’s disabledness. If they were just some Eleanor Shellstrop-type asshole, then we’re just going to have to trust that the universe will balance it out. Just remember: minding your business is probably the only thing in an airport that’s free, and we’re all going to get on the plane eventually.
Thanks for considering this,
Zipporah and Dovi
(@coffeespoonie on twitter)
