Take a second to picture a doctor or nurse. How do they look in your head?
Now, most people have a specific image for a public-facing professional. They are not usually
disabled. This is an issue. We have been conditioned to think about public facing professionals
in a specific way, but it is a very exclusionary way to anybody who has a disability. Ordinary
people with disabilities need representation at the highest levels of society, and this includes
public facing individuals who can deliver a tangible service.
This idea doesn’t just extend to the world of medicine. Think about lawyers or judges or police
officers or therapists. There are a lot of people in the world who fulfill very vital roles in our
society, but they don’t have a disability. They are able bodied and this means that the image we
associate with these people is that of an able bodied individual. This is not great, for a multitude
of reasons.
Obviously, the first problem that you have is that when your entire worldview is composed of
able-bodied people, it creates an unspoken implication that people with a disability cannot
participate in these roles, and can’t get an equal footing with people who don’t have a disability,
which is not true. There are many people who could be amazing doctors or lawyers with the
right training, but they may be denied these opportunities due to the fact that they are disabled.
The other big problem is that disabled people need strong role models to encourage them to
push their physical and mental prowess to the limit. If there are no role models in society who
are seen to be in a public role, but don’t necessarily have any disability, then disabled people
don’t have that representation in the world around them. The knock-on problem with this is that
disabled people have more empathy and understanding for other disabled people than those
who are not. A doctor may sympathize with the struggles of a disabled person much more than
someone who is able-bodied, and this means that the level of care that person might receive
could be different.
Obviously, we are not using this as a platform to condemn able-bodied professionals in public
rules, because many of them provide vital services to society at large, but we are suggesting
that it would be quite nice if they were people who had disabilities. Also within these roles.
Perhaps a doctor that has a mobility issue or a lawyer who has a disability that impacts their
speech. These ideas may seem slightly trivial to some people, but to those who do have
disabilities, it’s a vital piece of representation.
Ultimately, this is just our thoughts on the subject. We believe that there should be
representation in every part of society, because this is the only way we can create a society
which is not only considerate of everybody, but also helps everyone to grow and succeed,
regardless of who they are, and what disability they might have.