No, a plastic card won’t give me human rights
I often see feel-good stories about new “disability” cards. I’m not sure I believe in it.
All around the world, well-meaning organisations think about how they can help disabled people live their lives with dignity.
There’s a range of issues that disabled people face, like:
- getting refused entry due to a guide dog
- getting refused access to accessible bathrooms
- being treated differently, or badly, at venues and businesses.
Many organisations thinking about this problem seem to reach for the same solution: a plastic card, or some kind of trinket like a sunflower lanyard. I call these organisations “trinket schemes”.
There’s a range of them here in New Zealand. Just recently, Blind Low Vision NZ released a plastic card to signal that a guide dog is “official”.
But I have always held a fairly stubborn, perhaps pessimistic view of such solutions.
Basically, I do not want to carry around a plastic card in order to be treated with dignity and respect as a human being.
Respecting me should not be contingent upon a chunk of plastic in my wallet. I have human rights because I am human, not because I hold a piece of plastic.
I also feel the same way about initiatives such as making disabled people wear sunflower lanyards to indicate invisible disability. I do not want accessible, dignified treatment to rely upon what trinket I choose to wear on a given day. I have seen, in New Zealand, examples where accessibility features of a building were restricted to people wearing sunflower lanyards. This is wrong.
I understand my views may not be shared by the entire disabled community. Some people might find these plastic cards and lanyards valuable. But for me, I don’t think they’re an ideal, or correct solution.
Imagine a business owner is so ill-informed they refuse a blind person with a guide dog access to a restaurant. Is an “official” piece of plastic really going to change their mind and suddenly make them comply with the Human Rights Act? I doubt it. I think individuals who are ill-informed enough to treat disabled people that way are unlikely to be swayed by a piece of plastic. The discrimination in such situations is more fundamental and deep-seated than that.
I foresee another problem that may arise. These plastic cards might become mandatory. If business owners learn about these cards, they might start demanding to see them from everyone with a guide dog. This means there’s an additional step guide dog owners must take in order to be treated with dignity — they must acquire, and continually carry a card, or else they risk being carded and denied entry for a lack of card.
I have a specific dislike of the sunflower lanyard.
If you like the sunflower lanyard, that’s okay. I just hold a different view.
Basically, there’s this thing called “invisible disability” where it’s not immediately visually obvious that someone is disabled.
The sunflower lanyard is intended for people with invisible disability, to visually communicate to those around them that they may need additional support, time, patience, etc.
But I’ll never wear one. Even though I have a disability that is often invisible.
I think society should be accepting of people irrespective of whether their disability is visually obvious or not. It shouldn’t depend on a lanyard.
I also don’t understand why we must seek to make invisible disability more visible. It seems to assume visual recognition of disability is somehow a requirement to show human respect and kindness. I disagree with this framing.
Here’s a radical idea — what if we simply allow invisible disability to remain invisible? This has the added benefit of enhancing privacy for the individual.
Most trinket schemes will also package training services alongside their trinket. To be clear, I’m absolutely supportive of training businesses to become more accessible for disabled people (heck, I sell that service!). But I think it starts to become an issue if the training teaches staff to only provide accessibility features if the disabled person holds a specific plastic card or lanyard.
My core belief is our culture, laws, and standards should facilitate a harmonious relationship between a disabled person and the society around them. If a blind person is refused service due to a guide dog, that business should be prosecuted. The laws, and the culture, should correct those errors.
Some disability organisations exist to advocate for enhanced laws, to shift the culture, and to improve accessibility standards (and compliance with those standards). This is what I aim for OpenAccess to be.
Some disability organisations exist to become a middleman between disabled people and an accessible society. Basically, the organisation may aim to make its trinket an essential part of an accessible experience. Such an organisation might teach other companies to only provide accessible experiences if a disabled person has a specific trinket, sold by the middleman. This then ensures disabled people must go through one specific middleman in order to get an accessible experience.
The nature of trinket schemes is they have a strong incentive to be a virtual monopoly. In the case of the sunflower lanyard, it can only become widely recognised if it’s practically the only design on a lanyard that is associated with invisible disability. If we had 20+ lanyard designs, nobody would recognise the lanyard or know what it means.
Hypothetically, an international trinket scheme might appear to a typical person to be a charitable organisation, but is actually a private for-profit entity. Such an entity might choose to trademark or copyright the design of its trinkets. The scheme might then commence legal proceedings against anybody who creates similar-looking trinkets, and claim there is a risk of injury or death if disabled people use non-official trinkets.
So, this hypothetical trinket scheme makes itself broadly recognised as a symbol of disability, meanwhile being the only entity legally allowed to sell the trinket, holding full private control over the imagery and meaning of the trinket.
This means a disabled person has to start openly wearing the symbols of one specific private company in order to signal their disability.
Philosophically, this doesn’t sit right with me. Symbols of disability and accessibility, especially those that become widespread, should not be owned by private companies. These ubiquitous symbols should be owned by the community. They should be open source and owned by humanity. To lock it all down to a single supplier is the middleman strategy in a nutshell.
I understand that my views on this might not be shared by everyone. I know there are people out there who swear by wearing trinkets, and they feel trinkets improve their lives. I just wish we didn’t live in a society where disabled people feel they need to carry cards and lanyards around to live their lives.
If you’re a company or disability organisation, you should think long and hard about the implications of making disabled people carry around trinkets to be considered a “real disabled”. It might cause more harm than good.
— Callum