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. Frankly, it’s as repugnant as Donald Trump and his MAGA goons starting to wear feathered headdresses and wave around tomahawks, calling themselves ‘Native Americans’ and structuring their entire politics around the notion of being ‘native’. 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!
The Ill-Informed Ramblings of a Cripple 
Have you ever asked on the powerchair users you object why they are using such a chair? They are not inexpensive and imagine the NHS does not hand them out like sweeties.
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A) yes I have spoken to them a few times, and their reasons seem ever more tenuous. B) powerchairs are becoming cheaper and cheaper (and thus more fragile) largely due to this very trend.
I know what I’m talking about here.
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Maybe they experience extreme pain from walking? Being able to do something and being able to do it without pain or consequences like a flare up aren’t really the same? I don’t use a wheelchair and I do actually get very annoyed by the very vocal dyed hair, boasting about being Autistic or trans brigade. I recently got diagnosed with hypermobile EDS and I’m furious at how annoying so many of the other people with it are! However I also think if walking causes someone extreme pain then they have every right to avoid that, no one will be looking at someone with obvious CP who is using a communication aid and thinking they have the same level of need and entitlement if you like as the dexterous verbal person who also uses a wheelchair. Maybe sometimes a paraplegic who cannot walk or stand at all but has perfect upper body dexterity prefers to use a power chair for reasons of comfort or convenience, it wouldn’t be funded by the NHS as they’d be assessed as being manual wheelchair users so yeah it would be cheap, but if it makes their life easier or comfier then that’s their choice. Also even people who desperately need powerchairs with similar disabilities to yourself seem to be stuck in a stupid waiting list, just recently there was a fundraiser for a teen girl with severe quadraplegic CP who had outgrown her current wheelchair but was struggling to get an NHS one (don’t remember why, I’m going to say wait lists), so she was in a cheap one that was very bad for her posture, didn’t support her or meet her needs etc. Yet I assume you would see her disability as meeting your criteria of being genuine. So just because someone’s chair is a cheaper one clearly that doesn’t mean their disability is automatically not severe. And if you are assuming anyone who requires a powerchair will have obvious signs on their body, spasticity, limb differences etc then that rules out a lot of people, maybe someone with MS who has balance issues but too little arm strength to use a manual chair for example.
Ultimately you only know and understand your own disability so to look at someone and make a snap judgment that they must be going to the inconvenience of using an aid that makes access challenging and which their friends and family would eye roll at if they were known to be able to walk fine, purely for attention…. that’s a bit weird tbh. Yeah their disability may not be as severe as yours but why should someone cause themselves severe pain or a flare up of their condition or risk falling purely because it doesn’t pass your vetting system? If anything the more of those annoyingly vocal “look at me, I’m special” gang there are, the better access will become?
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