Good news for a change (at least to begin with...)
There has been some lovely visible success for Disabled people in TV and film recently, as Sophie Morgan was named as a contestant for this autumn’s season of Strictly Come Dancing. That’s Sophie Morgan who uses a wheelchair, rather than Sophie Morgan who is a wheelchair – as the Sun’s front page would have had it, announcing ‘first wheelchair contestant’ rather than first wheelchair-using contestant. We are wheelchair ‘bound’, or ‘in’ a wheelchair if you believe society at large. Whereas if you talk to us, actual Disabled people, you’ll find out that we use mobility aids. We are wheelchair users , crutch users , scooter users . It’s a simple, but important shift of language, which takes us away from being seen and conversed about as objects, into being fully formed and functional humans, which of course we are.
Also not a wheelchair is Paralympian Abby Cook, who joins long-running CBBC show Blue Peter as its first wheelchair-using presenter, hired not for her chair, but for her ‘unstoppable can do’ according to Blue Peter Editor Ellen Evans, which is exactly as it should be.
