Disability Issues

I thought about this recently when I went to a meeting about the coming day of action in April. The meeting was held upstairs in a rather nice old pub, but one of our number couldn't come because she couldn't manage the stairs. She is classed as a disabled person, although I didn't know that until quite recently - I just thought she was a small person with wonky hips.
This led me to wondering what a "disabled person" actually is.

Tai Chi
A couple of years ago I used to teach a beginners' class in Tai Chi. One of my students was also a student activist on disability issues and asked me if I could teach a disabled person to do Tai Chi.
I couldn't answer her.
The reason is that she wanted a simple yes/no answer and there wasn't one I could give. From the point of view involved in teaching Tai Chi there's no such thing as a "disabled person", there's just a person. That person may or may not be able to do certain things, and the teaching would therefore take that into account on an individual basis.
To explain a little more clearly: If a person can't touch their toes, is stone deaf, has only one arm or has balance problems from cerebral palsy then I can probably teach them Tai Chi. If a person is blind or confined to a wheelchair then I probably can't - although I'd give it a good old try first!

Car Parking
I understand the usefulness, from a governmental perspective of considering certain people with certain difficulties as "disabled". It's useful for someone who can't walk very well to have some kind of guaranteed car parking near to where they want to go. It's also useful for a governmental agency to be able to classify people by their ability to earn a living, or need for state benefit. This sort of thing is, though, surely as far as the classification needs to go.

Pigeonholes
Regular readers of my rants will probably have guessed what I'm getting at by now: Pigeonholing! The necessities stated above notwithstanding, I've noticed a tendency amongst people to consider "disabled" as a category of person. This is what my, supposedly politically enlightened, Tai Chi student was doing.
It's probably a linguistic thing - we tend to categorise things into simplistic types so that we don't have to think about them properly. Reactionaries and activists rely on this tendency a lot - it dehumanises the enemy and makes them easier to throw things at. Most people do it. I've heard men talk about women and women talk about men as if they're all the same. I've heard whites talk about blacks, pakistanis talk about jews, and cleaners talk about caretakers - all using that same unthinking group categorisation.

A "Disabled Person"
Is it possible to say, then, that people with a blue parking pass for their car are all the same? My friend who didn't like the thought of the stairs probably would say not, and I think she'd be right.
To think in terms of a "disabled person" (and I'm as guilty as anyone else) as opposed to a person who can't perform a particular activity, or has a bit missing, belittles the person. It puts them into a little box labelled "disabled" - one might as well put them in a box labelled "broken" and have done with it.

I'm thinking about the many, many people I've met over the years and a lot of them have been considered disabled, officially that is. My mother is disabled, as is an ex-lover and my friend mentioned above. I know a deaf artist and a one-handed artist. A good friend has schizophrenia. I've known drug and alcohol addicts and a woman who lost a leg in a motorbike accident.
That's just a select few. The question is what, apart from governmental categorisation, have they all got in common? The answer is, frankly, sod all - except one thing.

They're all people.

Let's keep pigeonholes for pigeons.

Love,
Seán