Powerchairs are not toys. For many disabled people, powerchairs are essential to living their lives. In my case, I simply couldn’t enjoy my life without my powerchair. I would be stuck in my flat, unable to go out without someone to push me. More to the point, most of my friends at school were powerchair users, and being completely nonambulent would have been totally stuck without them.

As a disabled man my powerchair is part of who I am: it is part of my identity, just as my communication aid is. I couldn’t be who I am without it. Yet these days, when I’m out and about , I see more and more people using powerchairs. Their use seems to have shot up in the last couple of years for some reason. I don’t know why, but it seems to have suddenly become cool to use a powerchair, at least around London. Perhaps access to free public transport has something to do with it, but it’s as if people are using them for more and more tenuous reasons.

I have been getting angrier and angrier about it. Whenever I see such a person, I want to shout “It’s not a toy!” because that is honestly what using powerchairs in this way feels like to me. Something they have started using because they feel a bit fragile or infirm, have diagnosed themselves with one fashionable condition or another, or think it would be cool to ‘identify’ as disabled. I know I keep returning to this subject, but it really is getting to me: it feels as if an integral part of my identity is being usurped or even stolen.

A lot is now being said about identity and identity politics; it is a highly charged political subject. What exactly constitutes ones identity, and how do people identify as members of one group or another? Having had cerebral palsy from birth, I have always identified as disabled. I have always had friends with disabilities and been accustomed to the mise en scene – the powerchairs, expanded keyboards and dribble-absorbing teatowels – of disability. It is part of my very being, without which I wouldn’t be who I am. It has also always felt like a very niche thing to be; an identity shared by very few others outside of a small special school just outside Winsford. Now, however, many more people are adopting that identity, seemingly simply by starting to use that paraphernalia.

It is weird because I don’t think I would mind if they were using scooters – the kind with handlebars often used by elderly people. It is the increased use in powerchairs specifically which gets to me, perhaps because I associate them with the most profoundly disabled people I have known. Such friends needed their powerchairs to get around, and without their chairs they would have been confined to their beds. They had absolutely no choice; so to see other people essentially choosing to use powerchairs for sociopolitical reasons, whatever other bullshit they might tell themselves, frankly feels like my friends are being mocked.

I realise how bizarre this may sound, but I am struggling to come up with a decent analogy. I once likened it to when white actors used to paint their faces black in order to play black characters; but in a way it’s deeper and more hurtful than that. It is the reduction of something absolutely essential to one person down to a sociopolitical plaything by another. By choosing to start using powerchairs, it feels like these people are intruding upon a world they have no idea about. Powerchairs are not just toys which people can just begin to use when they start feeling sorry for themselves; they are vital facets of who we are. Essential parts of our everyday lives, now being wheeled around in like go-carts by people who think identifying as disabled is sociopolitically cool. Such increased adoption feels like a trivialisation; and such trivialisation feels like an insult.

Powerchairs are not fucking toys!