When I was in my 20s I went out for quite a while with a man who had a disability that affected his ability to walk, and who had a son severely disabled by cerebral palsy – he communicated non-verbally and would never be able to live independently. To go out with them was to have your eyes opened to just how much of disability is socially constructed. Which is the fancy way of saying that there wouldn’t be half so many problems for loads of disabled people if shops would just bother putting ramps and lifts in, and if non-disabled people would stop staring in either disgust or fascination at anyone who deviates even slightly from the physical norm. And a special shout-out, even 20-odd years on, to the lady who advised us from a position of unassailable entitlement and fury to “Stop breeding”.
On the other hand, we – as a group, and my boyfriend and his son as individuals – were, for the bulk of the time, met with great kindness, generosity and practical help from the non-staring demographic. But it is inescapably the case that to live with any condition that marks you out from the herd is to live, to some degree, in a different world from most.
