ParsnipWitch, (edited )
@ParsnipWitch@feddit.de avatar

I pulled out what you wrote earlier:

Michael Phelps is double jointed. He’s the best swimmer in the world because he has a mutation that makes his feet more effective flippers. You said a flaw is still a disability even when everyone has it. Nearly everyone is single jointed, and that makes us worse at swimming than Phelps. Your argument would imply that single jointed people are all disabled.

You can’t define disability in absolute terms, or you’ll run into problems like that. You have to define disability in socially constructed terms.

And none of it has anything to do with my point or the definition of what makes something being categorized as a disability.

  1. I never wrote a flaw is still a disability when everyone has it. I actually wrote the opposite but you didn’t understand it.
  2. Phelps mutation is not classified as a disability. So it is a moot example for the discussion. Even when using as a hypothetical example.
  3. You also did not understand the definition of what makes a disability. Just because certain disabilities can lead to a benefit in certain areas for certain individuals, that neither makes the disability in general not being a disability anymore. Nor does suddenly everyone else should be classified as disabled.

I try to give an example that’s perhaps easier to understand.

Blindness is considered a disability, because most people are not blind and our society, most of it’s appliances, etc. are therefore build around non-blind people.

That is already part of the definition of what makes something a disability.

A (permanent) blind person will not be able to live a life equally to how they would live their life when they were not blind. And the negative effects (!) of it will be present for longer than six months.

Even when the whole world would make effort into building accommodations for blind people, it would still be seen as a disability. Although other things would change on how blind people are treated in our society.

When in a parallel universe there is an earth with humans where everybody is naturally blind, blindness wouldn’t be a disability.

When suddenly superman-esque humans were born it doesn’t suddenly make everyone who isn’t superman-like a disabled person, but being susceptible to the negative effects of kryptonite could possibly be seen as a disability, when kryptonite was somehow part of our daily lifes.

Until the superman-like people become the defacto standard human, then the odd one born without supermanpowers would start to be seen as disabled, even though they are immune to kryptonite.

What does not make sense it to try to draw a line between intrinsic and non intrinsic disabilities. And claim that something is not a disability anymore just because people could potentially start to accommodate it better.

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