> the Social Model of disability

The best way I’ve heard this articulated is:

Under the medical model, disabled individuals are expected to change their behavior to accommodate (fit on with) society. We ask people whose lives are already more difficult than average to do additional work.

Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead. Further, the social model says that any policy that affects disabled people should be crafted by or with disabled people who are affected by that policy. Nothing about us without us.

I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

I support the social model. It’s the one where I get to have agency.

> I’m disabled and became disabled as an adult and, in my experience, after becoming disabled I’ve faced rampant discrimination that wasn’t there before. I’ve been fired twice in the last 10 years due to disability-related issues. I have no recourse, anything I could do would risk torpedoing my career. This is life under the medical model. You’re expected to live a smaller existence.

For what it is worth, I'm probably in different countries to you, and "me too". I fractured T8 and spent some time unable to walk at all and in a wheelchair -- I can now use a crutch some of the time and have a fairly complex medical history.

You never notice how much [en-gb] pavements / [en-us] sidewalks camber towards the road for drainage until moving your pelvis is excruciating, or driving a manual wheelchair on a camber means that you're constantly working twice as hard with one hand compared to the other. Nor do you notice what a bin on the street does when kerbs are difficult. Low hanging vegetation, normally pretty, over a neighbour's wall becomes incredibly annoying if you literally cannot move yourself to avoid it inevitably hitting your eyes. So many minor annoyances, from booked assistance on train travel forgetting you exist halfway through, right the way through to outright discrimination from your colleagues. And don't get me started on the bladder management!

Everyone could be disabled, and as said earlier at some point in life everyone probably would be. Inclusive design is just that -- inclusive -- and done correctly it costs nothing to little extra. I don't really understand why we don't build it into society, rather than try to get people to (as I increasingly want to) fork out thousands to tens of thousands for electric wheelchairs. Sure, they're great, but sometimes I miss taking long walks or cycling ('normally').

Those both skirt around the correct way to think about it, which is the costs way.there are extra costs associated with having a disability. the two models you propose are the disabled person pays or everyone else pays. Everyone else pays is not the correct model because it coerces people into mazsive costs that dont necessarily make sense for them. Disabled person pays isnt correct either because there are many near zero cost things we could do if we just thought about it at design phase. There should be ahealthier middle ground that routinely gets the cheap stuff done and leaves an easy path for the expensive stuff without coercing spending

> Under the social model, we ask all able-bodied people to accommodate disabled individuals instead.

This sounds good in the abstract, but the devil is in the details. What specific accommodation is being asked for? What counts as a disability? For example, should I simply have to ignore angry outbursts directed at me and my coworkers from someone with oppositional defiance disorder[1]? Am I supposed to take someone's word that they have ODD or can I request proof from a medical professional?

There are real tradeoffs here. You see it in how these kinds of accommodations are abused at elite universities[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppositional_defiant_disorder

[2] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/8/harvard-undergr...

I support the medical model then, disabled people who can't work should, ought, to be among the poorest in society, just above the people that can work but don't. Because some people have to be the relatively poor compared to the rest (in absolute terms though: you are richer than almost anyone alive in year 800 CE so not starving poor nor barely surviving poor) and so, who should be? Should the able working be poorer than a disabled person doing less work? The same work?

And why should disabled people be able to craft policy that will be funded largely by the abled? In order to have legitimacy of a policy, you need to involve the people that will pay for it.

The social model is non-sensical, it's unfair, and it cloaks its unfairness in the language of social justice which it doesn't deserve to. There are better forms of advocacy.