Disability Status Shouldn’t Have a Hierarchy

While someone’s disability may not be evident to you, it still affects their life—and how they’re treated within and outside the disability community.

During the First World War, a band of self-righteous women calling themselves the Order of the White Feather stalked the streets of Britain, looking for young men in civilian dress. Upon spotting a victim, the women would pounce and ceremonially present him with a white feather—a symbol of cowardice popularized by The Four Feathers, a turn-of-the-century romance/adventure novel.

The campaign utilized femininity-as-weapon to make snap decisions about men on the basis of their appearance. Being publicly confronted with a culturally recognized badge of cowardice would, the women hoped, shame men into enlisting. And, of course, provide a form of pleasurable catharsis for those who enjoy judging others.

The backlash was swift. What didn’t occur to members of the Order, you see, was that a man out of uniform might actually be enlisted in the military, or doing some other vital war work for the government beyond military service. Or an apparently “able bodied” civilian might be a disabled veteran. Or he might be a man deemed incapable of military service for any number of reasons, including disability. In a society where not “doing your bit” was already regarded as an intense source of shame, these public callouts made the situation even worse.

Eventually the Order’s work petered out, though white feathers were still handed out sporadically through the Second World War.

I think of the Order a lot because many people have taken up this mantle of toxic shaming, albeit in different contexts. As a culture, we love few things quite so much as being unpleasant to people who are not behaving as we think they should. In the world of disability, such behavior can be especially routine—as, for example, when nondisabled people vigorously shame people for using disabled parking spaces because they don’t “look disabled” or the disabled placard is clearly “someone else’s” and you’re “taking resources away from real disabled people.”

This kind of policing commonly—though not always!—happens to people who do not have evident disabilities and appear, superficially, to be nondisabled. Some people refer to this as having an “invisible disability,” a term I dislike for how it focuses on whether an impairment is “visible” to the casual eye rather than its effect on how someone interacts with the world. It is also, strictly speaking, inaccurate, because “invisible” impairments often result in nonnormative behaviors. Think about the “crazy” person screaming on the street corner, the TV character we all “know” is autistic because of their stilted speech and stiff movements, or the person with the pinched, introspective face who is clearly in pain. I prefer the term nonevident, reflecting the fact that while someone’s impairment may not be evident to you, it is very much affecting their life.

The policing of disability status is also becoming more—forgive me—visible, for a variety of reasons. Social media has created the opportunity to record and broadcast disablist abuse; spend any amount of time in disability spaces on Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms and you’ll start to see videos of people being screamed at for not “looking” disabled (enough) or for not performing disability in the way society expects, as for example when an ambulatory wheelchair user stands up to reach something on a high shelf at the store.

But we are also living in an era where increased awareness of disability has encouraged more people to seek out information, and sometimes a diagnosis. People are learning that the things they thought of as “normal” are actually signs of an underlying chronic illness or other nonevident medical issue, and that they do not need to accept symptoms as simply the way things are. And that means, in turn, that there are more people with nonevident disabilities active in the world, talking about their experiences, reclaiming ground.

As people with newly diagnosed disabilities have gained more confidence and found community, others have been quick to show them the white feather. Nonevident disabilities are mocked, belittled, treated as unreal. People are scolded for taking up space and gleefully denied accommodations, accused of making it up for attention or “seeing it on TikTok and thinking you have it,” like a case of conversion disorder by internet.

Within the disability community, a different current has emerged. The community itself has long been plagued by what some, such as activist Ed Roberts, term a “hierarchy of disability,” with various kinds of disability status “ranking” higher than others. Intellectually and developmentally disabled people are often placed at the bottom, which has big implications: “We are not like them,” say other disabled people, and they exclude their needs and voices from disability conversations. The hierarchy is an ugly, grotesque thing. The treatment of people with nonevident disabilities is part of that ugliness, which implies that evident physical disabilities are more “valid” than nonevident disabilities.

The sense of “who is more disabled” sometimes bleeds through in disability conversations. “Invisible” disabilities, people argue, allow others to pass as nondisabled, while people with evident disabilities don’t have that choice; a woman going to a job interview with her guide dog is immediately singled out as blind and faces discrimination on that basis. There is no time off from being disabled, no passing, when every move you make telegraphs your status. Whether you have endured a lifetime of that harassment or you were disabled last year, it is grinding and infuriating.

Ranking the severity of experiences serves no one other than the people perpetrating disablism.

But does an evident disability make someone “more” disabled, or does it simply reflect a different disability experience? There are things people with nonevident disabilities experience that are beyond the ken of those with evident ones, and vice versa. The disability community is large and not uniform, as we are fond of reminding people, so why should our experiences of disablism be identical, especially when it interacts with race, gender, and other elements of identity? And why should the way that we talk about that experience undermine and invalidate others’ experiences, creating a strange sort of arms race of oppression, rather than a set of related experiences that offer a starting point to build solidarity?

Ranking the severity of experiences serves no one other than the people perpetrating disablism, and that includes the disablism from inside the house. When those with nonevident disabilities say getting access is “easier” when you have an evident disability that gatekeepers can comprehend, that’s both untrue and disablism. When those with evident disabilities claim that “passing” allows people to access certain privileges, it does, but at what cost? Perhaps a person gets hired because their disability wasn’t evident, but once they start a new job, the quest for accommodations turns into a discriminatory nightmare, or they perform poorly because their disability is not accommodated and then get dismissed. Moreover, passing can actually become dangerous, as when someone with severe allergies is not taken seriously because they “look normal” and they’re exposed to a lethal allergen despite their repeated disclosures.

So many marginalized communities eat themselves. The conflict has real stakes both inside and outside. Outsiders see it and use it to justify their disablism. Insiders use it to pick each other apart, or to wonder if they’re truly insiders.

Some people with chronic illnesses don’t see themselves as disabled, for example, and while people may be swift to accuse them of internalized disablism, it’s not that simple. Not when the messaging they receive from the disability community is that they don’t “count” and aren’t “really disabled,” or perhaps that they don’t have the right attitude toward disability or don’t think about disability in the “correct” way. For example, some people with chronic illnesses experience suffering associated with their impairments and want cures for them. But they may feel uncomfortable expressing that desire when disabled people around them view disability primarily as a cultural identity and do not make space for people who don’t experience pride or community because of their impairment. A person with, say, Crohn’s disease who wants a cure is not telling other people how to feel but may be shamed for openly talking about the distress their disability causes them. Similarly, someone with a new impairment, such as a traumatic amputation, may experience grief, suffering, and other emotions; pushing that person to feel differently only alienates them.

Showing the white feather manifests in numerous ways. Nondisabled people trying to shame disabled people is certainly one. Saying that disabled people are insufficiently disabled, or that they think the wrong way about disability, is another. We all carry white feathers in our pockets, ready to hand them out at will, convinced that while other people might abuse them, we know who really deserves them, and we have a civic duty to distribute them.

“Why can’t we all just get along?” is not a sufficient response to this issue. Perhaps we need to ask instead why so many people struggle with recognizing the broad spectrum of disabilities and associated experiences; why the response to an experience other than our own is sometimes to invalidate it, crush it. One reason, of course, is disablism itself, which is eager to set disabled people against each other so they cannot work together, a mentality that affects other marginalized communities too. Another is the very fluid nature of disability: Some people are born with impairments; others acquire them. Many experience changes over their lives, a moving target that can make it hard to find and retain community. Another is the exclusion of disabled people from positions of authority in society and culture, even when the subject is their own experiences—as when the New York Times ran an entire series about pain that was criticized for relying heavily on disablist attitudes and involved very few openly disabled journalists and sources. The limited opportunities for disabled people create tremendous pressure to perform disability the right way, to simplify complex concepts, and to leave others behind in the name of any and all representation.

There is no simple solution to the hierarchy and the experience gaps that make it so hard to understand each other, but insisting that work is hard does not mean it is not worth doing.