My friend who lives across the street is partially blind. She can see things if she gets very close and looks at them in just the right part of her visual field. Last month she was in San Francisco, looking at a bus map while she held her white cane. Some sanctimonious prick came over and started yelling at her for "faking blind."
I can walk. A bit. I stand when I teach, when I cook, whenever else I need to. I can lift fairly heavy objects (so long as I don't have to bend over too far), climb stairs (slowly) and pick up small children and turn them upside-down. But I still need my reclining wheelchair. Some of the time. This confuses a lot of people. It even angers people when they see me get out of my chair and start walking. And it has made me keenly aware of how entrenched in most people's minds stereotypes of disabled people are. Either you can walk, and you don't need a wheelchair, or you can't and you do. Either you can see and you shouldn't carry a white cane, or you are blind and you can't read a bus map. This isn't just a theoretical problem. For disabled people who don't fit the stereotypes, it can be a major obstacle. It is not an issue I'd ever heard of or considered before I was disabled, so I thought it would be worth bringing to light.
When I leave the house in the morning, I walk down the steps with a cane. It is about 1.5 miles from here to campus. My hip will put up with me walking about .2 miles. I can't sit a bike. I can't bend it far enough to sit in one of the seats on the bus and driving doesn't work too well because I have to lean so far back. Plus, why drive when I have my own electric vehicle? The electric vehicle in this case happens to be a wheelchair.
When I get to the lecture for the course I am TAing, all of the seats assume a hip bend of about 80 degrees. I can bend mine 60. I can either lay on the floor for an hour (which I have actually done), or bring my own recliner. The recliner in this case happens to be a wheelchair.
After lecture, I have ten minutes to answer questions from my students, get out of the building and get across campus for my next course. Walking with my cane it would take me about an hour, and leave me terribly sore, and I couldn't carry my books and papers. With my chair, I am right on time, with the materials I need, and again there is some place I can sit. So it is clear to me, and those who know me well, that I need my chair.
But to those who know me less well, people use wheelchairs because they cannot walk. Getting up and walking away from my chair is a sure sign that I am faking, or being lazy, or one guy told me I was mocking the disabled. I violate their assumptions, and rather than reevaluate those assumptions, they get angry. I have one particularly misanthropic neighbor who does his best to find some reason to scream profanity at everyone. He calls me "Fuck Fake" because one minute he sees me walking with relatively little limp, and the next I am lying back in my chair. I'm not too concerned about him, because as I said, he insults everyone, but there are others whose opinions mater more. I have colleagues who every time they see me walking think I've gotten better, and every time they see me in my chair again think I've gotten worse. One guy liked to make jokes about me just not wanting to get out of bed, until I actually took him aside and explained the situation to him. Yesterday I ran into the department manager as I was walking out of the bathroom on my way to teach a section. He was very happy to see that I was "recovered." I didn't have time to explain. It is going to be interesting trying to explain to him that I still need to teach in an accessible classroom.
I've heard, through disabled friends, of people who have severely impaired vision, but won't carry a cane or use a seeing-eye dog, because they can see a little bit, and have been confronted too many times by people who "caught" them squinting at something. I have been told, by friends, that it is "weird" for me to go into a store in a wheelchair, then get up and start walking around when my chair doesn't fit between the rows of merchandise. People expect the disabled to get in a pigeonhole and stay in that pigeon hole. We can't just have people having whatever damn type of disability they want.
There are an enormous variety of ways in which the human body can fail to function properly, and probably an even larger number of ways in which people can adapt to their disabilities. Most Americans, at least 'round these parts, have learned that a disability can be dealt with, and a disabled person can still be a useful member of society. I would like for them also to learn that there is diversity of disability, and we disabled people are not stereotypes of ourselves.