Every once in a while an overtly ableist article trounces its way into the social media discourse. Last year, it was The Atlantic‘s “Accommodation Nation,” a piece that called into question university accommodations for Disabled students. It was the type of article that was thoroughly reported and yet utterly devoid of the care and attention journalists are supposed to hold for their subjects. It was also broadly panned on social media.
Ironically, this sort of thing happened again across the Atlantic this month. The UK’s Telegraph, sometimes known as the Torygraph for its continual slant toward conservatism, published a Sept. 5 story titled “How having a disability became cool.” Is this an article about the complicated joy of embracing the Disabled label, as the title would suggest? No such luck. In actuality, the piece blames young women for “entrenching a culture of economic inactivity.”
“Disability is changing. To many, it is no longer an adversity to overcome, but a social identity akin to one’s sexuality, gender, or race,” writes Poppy Coburn, the piece’s author and an associate comment editor at the paper.
Of course, this is true. However, that positivity quickly dampens when she turns to young people “somewhat cruelly dubbed ‘sickfluencers.'” Coburn even concedes that most of their accounts function as mutual-aid networks serving “a vital function.” Then she spends the rest of the piece treating them as a problem.
What she, and many writers following this same train of thought, are attempting to do is discredit Disabled people simply because their relationship to their condition(s) is not easy to quantify and they talk about that reality on social media. She takes particular aim at conditions like POTS and autism. Like many similarly styled articles, she likens social media discourse about certain medical conditions to anecdotal evidence of supposed manipulation. If that sounds familiar, it should.
As in the aforementioned Atlantic piece spent an inordinate amount of time “playing doctor,” treating ADHD and mental-health diagnoses as suspect. Coburn runs the same play, conflating data with anecdotes. She recounts her own mother faking illness as a girl to argue that pretending can make you genuinely sick. She puts Billie Eilish’s “tics” in scare quotes, noting there’s been little sign of them in her live appearances since a single interview. That’s despite the fact that people with Tourette’s often suppress symptoms during particular tasks.
The data tells a different story, and it has a gender gap. Inc. reports that in a 2021 survey of nearly 9,000 patients, more than 90% of those with a physician diagnosis of POTS were female. Women waited roughly seven years for that diagnosis, compared with 3.8 years for men. Writing in The Sick Times, Julia Doubleday cites a University of Toledo study showing new POTS diagnoses rose more than five-fold after March 2020. Coburn herself notes that one in four Britons is now Disabled. She even quotes the chair of POTS UK saying cases have climbed since the pandemic. Then she moves right past it. POTS isn’t trending. Women are finally being diagnosed, and more of them are getting sick.
That sexism runs throughout the piece. Coburn writes that young girls “seem particularly vulnerable to over-medicalisation.” She dismisses young women joking online about autism as “playing around with their identity as teenage girls are wont to do.”
The same blind spot runs through her take on autism. Coburn amps up the conflict between low support needs autistics and those who require more day-to-day care. She even defends Autism Speaks, an organization many autistic activists label a hate group. She casts low support needs autistics as the barrier to diagnosis, complaining of waiting lists “clogged” with people with mild social anxiety. Meanwhile, she conveniently ignores the strain on a chronically underfunded National Health Service. She also treats the shift in diagnoses away from young boys as dilution rather than a long-overdue correction.
And, as much of deeply right-wing coverage tends to do, Coburn takes a dig at trans people. She calls sickness-as-identity “dangerous for children” and lumps “transgender ideology” in with self-harm and bulimia. As Ms. magazine noted, that “social contagion” framing is borrowed straight from anti-trans rhetoric. Coburn isn’t alone in using it, either. Just a month earlier, a Times of London columnist, Kathleen Stock, suggested that the young women being diagnosed with what she called “vague syndromes” might be caught up in a social contagion of their own. It seems there is no marginalized group Coburn isn’t willing to take aim at, and she has company in the British press.
Then there’s the money. Coburn keeps returning to the same framework that has seen social protections for Disabled people in the UK decimated. Doubleday puts it plainly: nobody fakes a disability for the lavish lifestyle of benefits. For people who can’t work a standard shift, content creation is one of the few flexible ways to earn a living. It’s the same logic DJA flagged in the Atlantic piece, which read like a food-stamp exposé scandalized that someone bought steak.
Even if we grant the premise (only momentarily), the article does nothing to support Disabled people. To Coburn, they, we, are the enemy. Not a lack of social programs, not a lack of thorough medical education, not a punishing cost-of-living crisis. According to her, young women looking for care are the issue.
Social media is a complex beast when it comes to disability and identity, to be sure. But articles like this reinforce the idea that those who need the most support, the un- or underdiagnosed, are the root of all evil, and that we’d all be better off in the good old days.
No thanks.
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