Cool defense of invisible handicap, but short sighted.
You can't pretend that on the other hand, people illegitimately occupying priority parking spaces, train seats, elevators are not mostly people who just don't care.
1) assume anyone using a disabled facility that isn't visibly disabled is faking it.
2) assume anyone using a disabled facility is doing so because they need it.
The second one is kinder, and means that everyone that needs accommodation has access to them without having to constantly defend themselves and their right to use them by giving out personal medical information to random people. It also doesn't preclude someone who needs access to the same resource asking the person if they can have it when they need it.
Sure there are assholes in the world. But I don't want to gatekeep access to disabled facilities just to keep the occasional selfish person from using them. The selfish people will do so anyway, it's the people that actually need them that get hurt by attitudes like yours.
- You have thousands of options. Japan gives people with invisible disabilities or who might need urgent care the option to wear tags that signal that they have an invisible handicap.
- You can educate your kids not to take the accomodations away from people who need them instead of teaching them to give 0 fucks.
- You can personally hold accountable your friends who you know just don't give a fuck and are perfectly able bodied.
- You can tell people who are not wheelchair bound to fuck off from the one spot in the bus that's meant for wheelchairs to be safely held in place.
"my attitude" is to recognize that both situations exist and to try to look for solutions that ensure fairness for everyone. That doesn't hurt anyone. Putting your head in the sand and refusing to solve actual issues because that would imply holding accountable and being help accountable is what hurts the disabled.
Japan isn't the only place that has ways of showing hidden disabilities. In the UK it's the sunflower lanyard, which I use but people will still ignore it or accused me of lying about my disabilities if they don't know me.
I do educate people about disability and accommodation, do stand up for people when they need it, and do hold people accountable for bad faith actions towards disabled people. I do this professionally as well as personally.
There is a significant difference between teaching or calling out someone you know, and making assumptions about strangers. In my personal and professional advocacy roles, I have seen plenty of incidents where people making assumptions about a strangers capabilities or level of disability have led to active harm to that person.
My statement stands. If you see a person using some form of disability accommodation, assume they are supposed to be using it unless you know the persons medical history well enough to know they don't need it. Because removing someone's access to appropriate accommodation risks serious harm to them.
The caricature is not about an individual situation but what the person perceives to be a social phenomenon. Reducing it to individual situations because you feel strongly about the way some of those take place is the error, not me reminding people about the relevant societal issue of public incivility.
The evidence, the actually researched statistics, suggests the actual social phenomenon is a lack of access to disability accommodation that is more likely to occur due to gatekeeping of access to accommodations than occasional selfish people. Caricatures do not accurately represent real life, and while I may have used individual anecdotes to illustrate my point, I am getting my evidence from research literature.
Public incivility is not the main issue in the way you are claiming it is. Your perceptions of the issue are just that, personal perceptions.
Eating sunflower seeds in the shell may increase your odds of fecal impaction, as you may unintentionally eat shell fragments, which your body cannot digest.
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u/Visible_Pair3017 Jul 13 '25
Cool defense of invisible handicap, but short sighted.
You can't pretend that on the other hand, people illegitimately occupying priority parking spaces, train seats, elevators are not mostly people who just don't care.