“Are You A CP?” or, Ways Not to Address Disability

A few weeks ago I was sitting in my favorite quiet space on campus, reading from a rather zaftig anthology, when a girl from one of my classes came up to me and asked a question I wasn’t expecting. She said, “Why do you have those braces on your legs, are you a CP?”

Now, make no mistake. In my day I have fielded infinitely more bizarre and offensive questions from curious onlookers, but there was something forgivably earnest about the way this question was phrased. I blinked for a moment before I responded, “I… have CP, yes…” to which she cheerily replied, “I thought so! I have a little niece that is a CP, too.”

Hmm, yes, I’d heard it right the first time. She said, “A” CP… and moreover, she had no idea that what she had said was out of the ordinary or even offensive. Why not?

For decades, everyone from activists to family members, from friends to policy drafters, and plain ol’ rhetorically-driven curmudgeons like myself have been kvetching about political correctness and where those lines fall when it comes to disability-related speech. No one wants to tie themselves down, or be tied.

Some people just jump the gun and get offended. Others pretend that disability does not apply to them. Still more have a strong preference to be addressed before their disability, such as in this case: “I am a person with CP.”

That sort of thing becomes clunky and stultifying to me, so I generally just say, “Yeah. I have CP.” In a way it’s interesting and the easiest way of going about it, because it clearly states that I have CP; it doesn’t have me.

At the same time though, it’s very difficult for a person with a disability to ever fully “own” their disability, because no matter who it is and what they have, it’s something out of their control that often rains difficulties down upon them.

Sadly, I can no more claim ownership of Cerebral Palsy than I can claim ownership of being a woman, a student, or anything else. These are terms that come with their own weights and parameters, these are niches that we inhabit based usually out of expediency and a need to find where we float in the grand cosmic punchbowl.

Offering up the appropriate medical jargon surrounding our respective disabilities gives us a way to define our otherness, but also a way to define our limits. The curious girl from above was talking about the word “disabled” itself, and how she is offended when the word is used in conjunction with her niece. “I tell her,” she said, “that she’s not disabled, that she can do anything she wants!”

While I applaud her on one level for not making her cousin feel trapped by her challenges, I sensed that there was something more brewing under the surface—perhaps a refusal to come to terms with the legitimate difficulties her niece faces.

Many are distressed by the term “disability” because they think that it’s a social construct invented to make us feel inferior, and it becomes easy to damn The Man for just not Getting It. However, it’s not so reducible.

Anyone who is physically disabled and has had to struggle up a flight of stairs, has been unable to find an accessible toilet when in public, has had parking spaces taken up by those who don’t need them, or has simply logged countless hours in doctors’ offices and on top of operating tables knows that there is more to disability than just a label. There are legitimate limits, there are truly problematic moments, and there are quite real inabilities that we face from time to time.

However, to look through opposite ends of the scope here, being “a” CP or even being “differently abled” doesn’t quite work. There is no sense in hiding it, no sense in being shamed by it in spite of the mental and cultural artifices in place that feed on creating shame through degrading the body. Minority discourse asks us to examine how we’re viewed, but also how we view ourselves.

The trick lies in finding where we decide to allow disability in our lives, and where to tell it to take a hike. To refuse to acknowledge it, or alternately become completely defined by it, however, is neither liberating nor helpful. Only when we can comfortably inhabit our own spaces do we allow others into them to any degree of success, and even if we can’t control how others categorize us, we can assert what we think of ourselves.