Borrowing Disability
How Ableist Language Turns Disabled People into Everyone Else's Metaphor
In November 2015, Donald Trump stood before a campaign audience and mocked Serge Kovaleski, a reporter for The New York Times who lives with arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting the movement of his arms. The moment was unmistakable. One might reasonably have expected it to end his candidacy. Public figures have seen careers cave in for remarks less conspicuously cruel than publicly ridiculing a disabled person before millions of viewers.
It did not.
The remarkable fact is not that one politician behaved callously. Politicians have done that. The remarkable fact is how many people either persuaded themselves they had not seen what they plainly had, or decided that mocking disability simply did not rank very high among the sins a public figure could commit.
Trump would go on to win the presidency the following year — aided, that first time, by the peculiar arithmetic of the Electoral College — and later returned to office in 2024 having won the popular vote outright. The electoral history is less important than what the episode revealed.
That response says something uncomfortable about the place disability occupies in our moral imagination.
Over the past half-century, Western societies have become steadily more sensitive to language and conduct that demean people because of their race, religion, sex, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Imperfectly and unevenly, we have come to understand that reducing entire groups of people to caricatures diminishes both the target and the speaker.
None of this means the old prejudices vanished. They learned to dress differently. A congresswoman agrees on air when a host says a Black colleague should keep his “cotton-picking hands” off her state, then insists afterward she meant only the underlying point about him staying out of state politics — as though a phrase steeped in slavery’s imagery could be that easily separated from what it summons. A president’s account posts a video rendering the first Black president and first lady as apes, deletes it by morning, blames a staffer. A congressman calls Latino farmworkers “wetbacks” and rides out the news cycle. A comedian opens for a presidential candidate by calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” A sitting representative posts that “homosexuality has no place in America,” deletes it hours later, blames a staffer. The world’s richest man calls his own transgender daughter “dead,” “killed” by something he terms the “woke mind virus.” Racism and homophobia went underground more than they went away — coded and deniable when convenient, avowed openly when not.
Disability has not even been granted that cover, and remains, in a sense, the one exception to that reckoning: acknowledged in law, occasionally commemorated in awareness campaigns, but occupying remarkably little space in our ethical imagination. We often notice disability only when it inspires us or furnishes us with a metaphor.
That is an odd blind spot, because disability is neither rare nor remote.
We tend to imagine disability as belonging to a small, identifiable group of people: someone using a wheelchair, someone signing in American Sign Language. Those images are real enough, but they barely scratch the surface. Disability includes blindness and deafness, certainly, but also autism, cerebral palsy, intellectual disabilities, traumatic brain injuries, chronic pain, epilepsy, dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and countless other conditions, many of them invisible to the casual observer.
A 2023 study using World Health Organization survey data found that roughly half the world’s population will experience a mental health disorder by age 75. Millions more live with physical, neurological, developmental, or sensory disabilities. Taken together, disability is not a marginal phenomenon. It is one of the defining features of the human condition.
Those of us not yet touched by disability flatter ourselves by imagining it happens to other people.
It does not.
We are an astonishingly fragile species. A fall from a ladder, a microscopic clot, an inattentive driver, an unlucky gene, an infection, a degenerative disease, or simply the accumulation of years can redraw a life in an afternoon. Disability is not an exception to humanity, but one of its constant possibilities.
More than that: disability is unique among minorities. Ethnicity does not change. Religion and even, for some people, gender may be renounced or reconstructed — chosen and unchosen in ways the others are not. Disability is different still: it is the one minority nearly everyone joins eventually, not by choice but by attrition, since aging itself is a slow accumulation of disability by almost any clinical definition. It is less an identity than a forecast of what the body and mind do to nearly everyone who is spared an early death.
Perhaps that helps explain another curious fact.
Did you know that July is Disability Pride Month?
Many people do not. Every July, someone posts a reminder commemorating the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and someone else expresses mild surprise, having spent the month thinking July belonged to blueberries, grilling, National Ice Cream Month, or one of the dozens of other observances competing for public attention.
The confusion is understandable. Awareness months are not decreed by any central authority. They emerge through advocacy, institutional memory, corporate sponsorship, and sustained public attention. Some become cultural fixtures. Others quietly disappear beneath the weight of better-funded campaigns. Disability Pride Month has never enjoyed the visibility of Breast Cancer Awareness Month or Black History Month, despite representing a population that touches virtually every family.
That, too, is revealing. Disability remains strangely easy to overlook until it becomes impossible to ignore.
It is overlooked in another way as well.
Ours is a culture that routinely borrows disability whenever it wishes to express contempt: ideas dismissed as “stupid,” arguments as “lame,” meetings as “crazy.” These expressions have become so habitual that most speakers no longer notice what gives them their force.
Yet their force comes from somewhere.
Many of these words were once clinical descriptions rather than insults. “Moron,” “imbecile,” and “idiot” were formal classifications in early twentieth-century psychology. “Lame” referred to impaired mobility. “Dumb” originally meant unable to speak. Over time, their medical meanings faded while their moral freight remained. The words survived because disability itself became the universal metaphor for deficiency. Long after society abandoned the classifications, it retained the assumption behind them: that disability signifies something less than fully human, less worthy of respect.
Most people who use these words harbor no conscious prejudice against disabled people. That is precisely why the habit is so revealing. Language often preserves assumptions long after their origins have been forgotten. We inherit expressions whose histories we no longer recognize, and in using them we quietly reinforce judgments we would likely reject if they were stated explicitly.
Consider how often political arguments rely upon this borrowed vocabulary. A commentator condemns a policy as “stupid” when what is really meant is that it is racist, dishonest, authoritarian, or cruel. The substitution is rhetorically convenient. “Stupid” expresses outrage without requiring precision. It borrows emotional force from disability while avoiding the responsibility of making the accusation one actually intends.
This habit is hardly confined to one political tribe. Conservatives and liberals alike employ ableist language with remarkable ease. It has become one of the few forms of casual prejudice that still passes almost unnoticed among people who would recoil from nearly every other variety.
That inconsistency deserves reflection.
We have largely accepted that racial identities should not serve as insults, that women should not stand as shorthand for weakness, that religious identities should not become casual metaphors for ignorance, and that jokes about sexual orientation carry a cost most people are no longer willing to pay. Yet disability continues to perform precisely that work. Even those who consider themselves deeply committed to equality routinely recruit disability whenever they need a convenient symbol for incompetence, irrationality, or failure.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer example of a prejudice surviving after its intellectual justification has disappeared.
Years ago I bought an old “joke” book in an antique store, published sometime during the 1940s. It was arranged in chapters, each devoted to a different class of people supposedly fit for ridicule. Because those kinds of books contained explicitly racist language and hate speech, they are rarely kept in print by modern commercial publishers. Reading such a book today would feel like examining an archaeological specimen. Most of its categories have vanished from respectable public life.
The chapter devoted to disability never entirely disappeared.
This is not an argument for linguistic purity. Language changes slowly, habits change more slowly still, and everyone — including this writer — has used words without considering their history. The purpose is not to police conversation or to demand impossible standards of verbal hygiene.
It is, rather, to encourage precision and, with it, a measure of moral imagination.
If a policy is racist, call it racist. If it is dishonest, call it dishonest. If it is cruel, call it cruel. Those words are not weaker than “stupid”; they are stronger because they identify the wrong that has actually been committed. They do not require borrowing disabled people as unwilling participants in someone else’s argument.
A civilization reveals itself not by how it treats the fortunate, but by how it regards those whose bodies or minds depart from whatever passes for normal. We have congratulated ourselves, often justly, for abandoning many ancient prejudices. Yet disability remains the one human difference we routinely recruit as a metaphor for everything we despise.
Perhaps that is why Disability Pride Month still arrives each July with so little notice. It is difficult to celebrate the dignity of people with disabilities while continuing to use disability itself as our most convenient vocabulary of contempt.
Until we learn to see disability not as a symbol of deficiency but as one of the ordinary conditions of being human, our language will continue to reveal assumptions that our principles insist we have already outgrown.
Outro: Luther Vandross - The Impossible Dream
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, Pub. L. No. 101-336, 104 Stat. 327 (1990).
American Association of People with Disabilities. “Disability Pride Month.” https://www.aapd.com
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Disability and Health.” https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Columbia University Press, 1997.
Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory.” NWSA Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–32.
Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Revised and expanded ed., W.W. Norton, 1996.
McGrath, John J., et al. “Age of Onset and Cumulative Risk of Mental Disorders: A Cross-National Analysis of Population Surveys From 29 Countries.” The Lancet Psychiatry, vol. 10, no. 9, 2023, pp. 668–681.
National Center on Disability and Journalism. Disability Language Style Guide. https://ncdj.org/style-guide/.
Nussbaum, Martha C. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard University Press, 2006.
Shakespeare, Tom. Disability Rights and Wrongs Revisited. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2018.
The New York Times. “Donald Trump Mocks New York Times Reporter Serge Kovaleski.” November 2015.
World Health Organization. Mental Health. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders.
Good to remind us about how we might casually overlook disability in our language and actions.
“Ableist” is a triggering word for many people. When I worked as a geriatrician for a large corporation they promoted a step competition as part of a wellness scheme for employees. I pointed out that was ableist since many of us couldn’t exercise by walking. I was roundly criticized by insecure people who should have known better. At the same place one of the doctors suggested a “Walk With a Doc” program for patients. It involved taking patients for walks. At a clinicians meeting I suggested that since many of our patients and some of our clinicians would not be physically able to participate, it would be ableist to robustly promote the program. I was nearly run out of the conference room.