Philosophy
“Disability” isn’t a flaw in bodies, it’s a verdict delivered by spaces, jobs, and systems built for one narrow idea of “normal.” The real fix isn’t curing people; it’s redesigning the world so human variation can actually belong.
The Lie of the “Normal” Body
Notions of ability and disability are all lies. Not well-intentioned simplifications but active distortions that serve particular interests, primarily the interests of a capitalist form of economy, which needs bodies organised for maximum productivity and defines anybody who can not meet those demands as deficient.
Eli Clare writes about the lie of the normal body as a kind of violence: “The ideology of cure operates in all of our lives, whether we are disabled or nondisabled. It is a lie that cuts deep, telling us that our bodies are wrong and broken, in need of fixing.” This lie is not peripheral but central to how we organise social life. Buildings are designed for certain bodies and not others. Workplaces demand certain capabilities and treat any deviation as an individual failing. Healthcare treats disabled bodies as problems to be solved rather than variations to be supported. The medical model of disability locates the problem in individual bodies: you are disabled because your body doesn’t work correctly. The social model relocates the problem to social arrangements: you are disabled because society is organised in ways that exclude certain kinds of bodies and minds. A wheelchair user is not disabled by their body but by stairs, by narrow doorways, by a built environment designed without them in mind.
This shift matters enormously. If disability is an individual medical tragedy, then the solution is individual treatment, cure, or simply tragic acceptance. If disability is social exclusion, then the solution is collective transformation of how we organise space, work, education, and access.
But we are systematically lied to about this. We are told that disability is rare, exceptional and unfortunate, when actually most people experience disability at some point in their lives through ageing, illness, injury or mental health. We are told that accommodations are expensive special treatment, when actually universal design benefits everyone, and the cost is primarily political will rather than resources. We are told that disabled people’s lives are less worth living, when actually this is a projection of nondisabled people’s fears rather than disabled people’s actual experiences. Mia Mingus articulates this through the concept of ableism as a “forced choice between living and dying, between being included or excluded, between being a full human being or something less than.” The lie of the normal body creates a hierarchy where some bodies are considered fully human while others are treated as tragic mistakes, burdens, or problems to be eliminated.
Consider the violence of this in practice. A d/Deaf person is told they must learn to speak rather than being met in sign language, treating their communication as deficient rather than different. An autistic person is forced through behavioural therapies designed to make them appear “normal” rather than supporting their actual ways of being. A person with chronic illness told they are not trying hard enough because disability is supposed to be visible, dramatic, total; not fluctuating, invisible, complex.
The lie extends to how we think about medical intervention. We are told that prenatal testing and selective abortion of disabled fetuses are simply giving parents information and choice. But this operates within a system that provides no support for disabled children, that treats disability as tragedy, that offers parents a “choice” that is actually a coerced decision shaped by material constraints and cultural devaluation of disabled lives. Let’s engage with the idea that disabled people are not problems to be solved but people to be supported. The issue is not that some of us have disabled bodies and minds, but that we have built a world for only one kind of body and mind!
The lie of the normal body also intersects with other systems of oppression. Black disabled people face compounded marginalisation, their disability often made invisible by racist assumptions. Indigenous peoples whose lands and bodies were poisoned by industrial extraction are told their resulting disabilities are individual misfortune rather than structural violence. Poor people can’t access accommodations that would enable participation because disability support is treated as charity rather than a right. What would honesty about bodies and ability require? Acknowledging that variation is normal, that nobody is standard, that what we call “ability” is always contextual, you are only “able-bodied” in environments designed for your particular body. It would mean recognising that the category of disability is itself constructed, that what counts as disabling depends on social arrangements, not just bodies. It would mean understanding that disabled people aren’t failed versions of normal bodies but people navigating a world designed without them in mind.