Paris 2024 Paralympic Games: What is disability?

In this episode, the first of a special series on the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games, I explore what disability is. Professor Tom Shakespeare, a renowned Disability Studies scholar, discusses the meaning of disability for the individual and how disability is perceived within society. 

This episode is perfect if you want to learn about disability to support your enjoyment of the 2024 Paris Paralympics.

Thanks for listening to the Disability Sport Info show!

Chapters

• 0:30 Introduction
• 1:38 What do we mean by disability?
• 5:57 Including impairment in our understanding of disability
• 14:17 Difference of experience between congenital vs. acquired impairment
• 16:31 Impairment experiences and disability rights
• 19:10 Disability terminology
• 22:28 Ableism and disablism
• 25:20 Culture and disability stereotypes
• 27:58 Hierarchy of impairments
• 32:44 Tips for engaging and understanding disability
• 35:15 Conclusion

Transcript

>> Chris: OK, welcome to the Disability Sport Info show with me, Doctor Chris Brown, and I've got Professor Tom Shakespeare with me today. Hi, Tom.

>> Tom: Thank you. Nice to be with you.

>> Chris: Thank you. Yeah. So this episode is the start of a special series for the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games. 

So throughout the series, I'm going to be exploring different topics associated with the Paralympics 

To provide an expert take on what it's like in terms of the Paralympics and just to get that academic perspective. 

So this content is designed to provide a foundational understanding about disability. What is it and how is disability perceived and experienced? 

So yeah, I'm really happy to have Professor Shakespeare here. 

He was a great help for me when I was doing my PhD in terms of learning about the theory of disability, 

so it's great to kind of get from this perspective as well as from what I've learned in terms of the reading. 

So, Professor Shakespeare, obviously he can do his own introductions, but just a bit of a preamble from me. 

He's a social scientist and bioethicist with significant experience and expertise in disability studies. 

Lots of publications and including the foundational texts, Disability Rights and Wrongs. 

So yeah, Tom, thank you for joining me today. 

Let's start with a really big question. I'll start from the beginning. So what do we mean by disability? How has our understanding changed over time?

>> Tom: Well, there's two parts to that question. You've talked about how it's changed. So let me start with that. 

And so up till about 1970, we thought disability really is something wrong with a person. 

Often traditional societies thought about disability in terms of sin or curse or something in your ancestry. 

That was replaced by a medical understanding of disability, where disability was what you couldn't do. 

And what was very revolutionary about the 1970s was lots of disability activists got together and said hang on a minute. We're not second class citizens. We are human beings and we are disabled by society. 

So the idea of repression dates from the 1970s. The idea of people being disabled by society, that we focus on barriers and environment, dates from the 1970s.

And yeah, as social scientists, we look at how the same experience is very different in different places, in different times, and of course disability is just like that. 

It's very different even where you are in the world right now, even where you are in Britain for that matter, in terms of whether you can get level access, somewhere to live, whether people stare at you, whether you can have employment and standard of living. 

So, people in the 1970s said disabled people are disabled by society, so moving from a medical to a social understanding. 

My own work, and you kindly cited that earlier, my own work is saying, well, you know what people who have all sorts of, well, a everybody is to a certain extent impaired: being embodied is to be impaired. 

It's interesting you're doing a sports podcast because you know, the more we practise sports the more we're probably gonna get injuries. The more we’re gonna get impaired. 

And, indeed, if you look at sportspeople in later life, they have terrible injuries, whether it's Parkinson's from percussive injuries or whether it's too much twisting, it's very bad for the spine or whatever it might be.

But people have physical bodies, mental conditions, and they live in societies which have cultural viewpoints. 

Therefore, I think we should see disability as, yes, physical, also environmental, also psychological, and importantly, sort of social and structural as well. 

So all of those things interact to make disabled people. 

And if you look at, I think the Paralympic regulations, they're very, very much what your body can't do anymore. And therefore, what category you're in. 

So they don't ignore, it'd be ridiculous to ignore your impairment, your body completely. So they do take into account. 

But then they make, I think a very enabling environment, and they say you can compete, nevertheless. Of course you can. And we know that all sorts of people compete. 

But yeah, there'd be no point in you and me having a fight or a race or whatever they do. Swim. 

Because my legs don't work. So even at swimming, I'm not as good as you if your legs work.

Whereas if I was competing against somebody like me, i.e. somebody who's legs don’t work or somebody who had short arms or whatever, then it's a reasonable chance. 

So this idea that, A, we can all participate. But, B, we would be better matched against somebody like us, 

is really liberational for disability sports, but also disability rights generally.

>> Chris: OK, so lots of interesting concepts there. And I'll just take it back a bit to the kind of concept of disability. 

When I was reading and learning about disability, from my understanding, including the impairment into our understanding of disability was a bit controversial. 

Can you just explain a little bit more about why that would be considered to be controversial?

>> Tom: Well, I mean, remember disability rights, in its early incarnation in the 1970s, it was very liberatory. 

So it seems to say people are disabled by society, not by our bodies. 

And you opened up, A, people coming together in lots of organisations, but, B, people didn't have to feel bad. 

They'd been brought up to feel bad about being different and they could say, well, it's not me that's at fault. It's society. Society disables me.

And I think that was extremely powerful. 

Mike Oliver, who's one of the pioneers of the social model of disability, said it's like a tool. 

And he quoted the American labour movement, and so on: if I had a hammer. 

So, you know, it’s a tool to fight oppression.

And I remember him doing that because I was speaking in the same meeting as him. 

And I said there's another English phrase which says, “if you give a person a hammer all they see is nails”. 

And the social model is a very useful tool

But the trouble is it sees the whole world in terms of people being disabled by society. 

But there are lots of other things that go on too.

And so I would say that a model, an idea that developed in the 1970s, may not be as useful in the 2020s, because it's 50 years old. 

Most of us are not quite as useful 50 years later.

>> Chris: OK. Thank you. 

And this concept of universalism that you talked about, in terms of we're all impaired, but to a different degree, you know, like it's on a sliding scale. 

And sometimes you might be more impaired if you've broken a leg or you might have a more stable impairment, et cetera. 

That seems common sense to me. But is it accepted by society, do you think?

>> Tom: I think society sees us as two separate camps: disabled people and non-disabled people. And never the twain should meet.  

And disabled people have, you know, special provision and we're very sorry for them and the majority are non-disabled and that's how we'll develop and run our life. 

But it's totally illusionary. 

For a start, we age, hopefully. And as we get older, we get more impaired and ultimately die when we have essentially too many impairments. 

And if you look at the age gradient in disability, something like 5% of children, at least 10% of working age adults, and up to 50% of older people are disabled. 

And one of the reasons that we are going to have many more disabled people is because we have many more older people.

So, we need to take into account that we're all impaired. 

And as you say, we may be temporarily impaired. 

So, for example, I used to work at the World Health Organisation in Geneva and I used to fly from UK to Geneva. 

And if you fly with a wheelchair, there's an ambulette, they used to call it. It's a special vehicle which rises to the entry level of the plane, so you can basically stay in that vehicle and wheel on or be wheeled on. 

And when I went to Geneva it was just me. I was a wheelchair user. That’s how I went. 

When I came back from Geneva, and remember the cheap flights worked through the ski season. There were lots of people because they were non-disabled people who had  broken their collarbones, twisted ankles or otherwise become impaired on the ski slope. 

That was their major exercise and, I'm afraid, it had left them disabled, in a sense, like me. So I think that you can be temporarily disabled. 

I also think just let's you've got spectacles. So when were the spectacles invented in in Europe? Say, something like the 16th century, 15th or 16th century. 

So imagine your life or indeed many of your listeners/viewers’ lives before spectacles. You wouldn't be able to read books. 

You wouldn't be able to see people at distance, perhaps. Life would have been different. And then spectacles, suddenly, lots of people who have issues with vision are non-disabled, suddenly. 

I don't think that people who use spectacles, generally, would think of themselves disabled, because they’ve got corrective vision. And so things become, as it were, routine. 

So when my granddad was still alive, he used to have talking books. 

And he used to get, I remember distinctly him getting Mansfield Park and popping into the post box the clumsy cassettes in their envelope and pop back to RIB’s library for the blind or whatever it might be. 

Now, these days, loads of people use Kindles. Loads of people use audible books and so forth, because listening to, you know, you can listen to a book while you're jogging or commuting or walking the dog or washing up or whatever it might be, taking exercise. 

Talking books are not for older people, blind people: there for everybody. 

So it shows how adaptations that were made for disabled people are available for everybody. 

My example of the airline shows how, actually, we've become impaired all the time. 

And your example of illness. I mean COVID was about a lot of people not being able to work for a while. They had a virus; they were not able to work. 

And they given time off and then they came back to work. And that is life. We are all prey to all sorts of things.

>> Chris: Yeah. So I was just wondering, like I said, this makes seems common sense to me, you know. That we all go through different stages in our life where sometimes we’ve got more impairments et cetera than we don't. 

Is it because some people feel like a threat to their identity or don't want to be associated with something that is, you know, generally perceived more negatively as a kind of condition? 

Is that is that why we don't accept universalism as easily as we should do?

>> Tom: I think you're absolutely right, Christopher. 

And in a sense, lots of people have invested in them being non-disabled, because disability sounds so terrible, so awful, you would want to have nothing to do with it. 

And so non-disabled people don't want to think of themselves as disabled. 

Actually, disabled people don't want to think of themselves as disabled. If they've got any choice, they'll hide it. 

So people with invisible conditions don't generally say, by the way, I've got a disability.  

And people in my condition who who've got restricted growth, skeletal dysplasia, they say, ‘Oh, we're different, we're not disabled’. 

When there used to be a thing in Britain called a Disability Rights Commission, founded under the Disability Discrimination Act, and they went off and surveyed people who everybody would agree were disabled, and only 50% of them, one in two, said that they felt disabled. 

The other 50% did not identify disabled at all, even though they were. They were objectively disabled, but, subjectively, they didn't think that. 

And therefore the Disability Rights Commission changed its sort of strapline to working for people with rights and the Disability Discrimination Act. 

Which is a bit of a laborious way of not saying working for disabled people. But that's what they basically were. 

Because as soon as they said working for disabled people, half their potential audience would switch off. 

So disability has been, historically, a very, very stigmatised term.

>> Chris: Yes. And there's lots we could talk about here. Obviously, we're limited by time, but I think it's really interesting. 

And also, just when you were talking about the idea of disability, We're treating it as a kind of general concept and, you know, homogeneous term, which is obviously not right. And obviously you know that anyway. 

But what's the difference between someone's perception of disability for someone who maybe had it from birth, congenital, versus someone who maybe has acquired it later in life?

I'm just interested in your thoughts about that. How, like you said about identity or experience of disability, may change depending on the nature of your condition, but also when you've acquired it. 

What are your thoughts there?

>> Tom: You're absolutely right. 

Let me first say that, obviously, disability includes vision impairment, hearing impairment, physical impairment, mental health conditions, chronic illnesses, learning disability, lots of different things. 

They’re not the same, but they are the same in one way that we think of them all as second class or as odd. 

And how may your identity change over time? Well, if you've been born in the condition, you know no other. You don't know, as it were, ‘normal life’. 

And therefore you are probably fairly adapted to being different in this way, missing a limb or a sense, or being paralysed or whatever. 

And it's you. You don't want to be changed. You are happy the way you are. 

When you acquire a condition, it may take you a long time to accommodate to it, to acclimatise to it. And you may want it removed. You may want to go back to what you had before, which is ‘normal life’. 

So, for example, I was always short. I was born short. And my dad was short. So being short was, like, life. 

If you had said to me, Tom, do you want to be tall? I go. Well, not really. It might be quite useful to play sports or to cycle. But no, it's fine. I'm fine the way I am. 

Now, I'm in a wheelchair. If you said to me, Tom, would you prefer to not be in a wheelchair? I'd probably say yes. Because this is a nuisance. 

It's not the end of the world, but it's a nuisance. It makes life difficult, and if I could avoid having a spinal cord injury, I probably would. 

And I'm not alone. I think a lot of people would think that, but it's the way life is. So you can't do anything about that.

>> Chris: Yeah, that's interesting as well. 

You're talking about how maybe the reality of the experience, like you said, using a wheelchair for you is a nuisance. 

But I know when I was reading about disability, when I was kind of doing my PhD and also just listening to a podcast recently with Harriet Harman on the News Agents which talked about feminism,

to kind of say something negative about disability, or in her case, feminism, would potentially damage the cause that you're trying to promote. So if you're talking about how actually this impairment can be annoying, or a nuisance or whatever it might be, that's not great. 

So when we were talking earlier about the presence of impairment, is that also a reason why some people don't want to talk about impairment because it might harm the movement of trying to get greater justice?

>> Tom: Absolutely. Course it would. Of course it might. 

But I'm an academic. I am an activist, but I'm an academic, so I have to tell it like it is. Like what people say.

I remember I was with an activist one day and I was talking in their meeting in public. 

You know, and in private, they were very happy to moan to me about their aches and pains. And when we went out on stage they said it's all barriers and oppression. 

And when he came back off stage, I said, hang on a minute. That's not what you said to me. He said, yeah, I know. But I’m gonna tell them that! 

And it was exactly what you say. 

Now, there is a difference. Obviously, Harriet was talking about gender. And, in terms of gender, obviously there is menstrual pains. And I don't want to minimise menopause or whatever. 

But, broadly speaking, being a woman is not different to being a man. It's, you know, people are clever, they are strong, and all of the rest of it.  

However, often, not always, but often, having an impairment is a pain in itself. It's a nuisance. It may literally be a pain. I get a lot of pain from having a spine like mine. 

So it it's not as easy to say, ‘oh, it doesn’t make any difference. It's black or white, male or female, straight or gay. It’s all the same: it doesn’t matter. 

Well, it does matter for many, not all, but many impairments.

>> Chris: Yeah. And also just thinking if you're only focusing on perceived barriers in like the environmental domain, 

you may then ignore the other adaptions you might need to make if you weren't thinking about how an impairment could potentially have an impact on an individual's life. 

Would that be fair? To kind of think about that.

>> Tom: No, I think it is. So, I mentioned my pain, for example. So access to proper painkillers. Not opiates but proper painkillers is really important. 

And in parts of the world they are not available. So that is a disability rights issue, even though it's about bodies and pain, it's not about barriers and oppression.

>> Chris: Yeah. OK. And just kind of more of a procedural thing here. 

So, in the UK, we say disabled people. My understanding is because the social model kind of concept where we're saying people are disabled by society. 

But we also have terms like people with disabilities, where we're trying to emphasise the humane element of this is the person first, who happens to have a disability. 

Is that distinction, correct? And also, why is there potentially some issues with whether you are saying disabled people or people with disabilities?

>> Tom: So, globally, in English, the term is people with disabilities, persons with disabilities. We have the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. 

And if you go to America, they've got the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the same in Australia and many, many English speaking settings. 

However, in Britain, because you've got the social model, we talk about disabled people. But as you say, you know, I don't really care. 

You know, if you say people are disabilities or disabled people, you've obviously thought about it. 

Whereas if you say, I don’t know, handicap, or other terms of abuse. You know, that's not so good. 

Now, remembering that some people, for example, autistic people, prefer to be called, autistic people. Not people with autism. 

Because it might be liberal and right on to say people with, but it implies that there just people who happen to have autism. 

Whereas they would say autism affects every area of their lives and therefore they want to put it first. They want to be autistic people. 

And, similarly, Deaf people often say we are Deaf people. We're part of the sign language using minority. We're not hard of hearing. We're actually Deaf. That's a different culture.

>> Chris: OK. Yeah. Thank you for that. 

I think also for some people, maybe, some of the barriers to their representation or some or involvement with disability, if you're non-disabled, might be like causing offence, in terms of the language you use. 

So maybe some people are like, ‘oh, I don't know what to say’, and so therefore ignore the kind of idea of disability. 

There was a campaign by Warwick Davis, the actor, with Scope, I think it was, a few years, called ‘End the awkward’. 

What's your thoughts on that in terms of the terminology and just being afraid to engage?

>> Tom: Yeah, I think people do feel that we must be terribly thin-skinned and we'll take offence or whatever. But frankly, I don't think we will. 

I would rather people say, ‘what would you like to be called’, for example? And if there’s any doubt, just say, ‘what terminology do you use? 

And it might be something which I think is a bit bizarre, but if it's OK for them, then it's OK for me. I don't really care. 

What is really important is that disabled people are not second-class citizens, that we can get jobs. We can get places to live, eat, and all the rest of it. We're not excluded. 

That's what matters. 

What you call us. Especially, if you are trying to do your best, you know, surely, we can cut you a bit of slack and say, ‘actually, I prefer to be called this, not that. And that’s fine.

>> Chris: Yes. Yeah. OK. Thank you. 

And some of our listeners and viewers might have heard of the terms ‘disablism’ and ‘ableism’, but maybe aren't quite sure how they might differ. 

Are you able to just briefly kind of define those concepts, please?

>> Tom: I can, but I never use either, but I can use them.

>> Chris:

OK. Why’s that then?

>> Tom: Because I don't think they're necessary.

I think there is discrimination, prejudice, for sure. 

Ableism is the idea that I think that a non-disabled way of doing things is always seen as being the dominant way. 

So we are seen as being able-bodied people. We're seen as having an able-bodied culture. And ableism is that assumption. 

Disablism, when it was first used, was discrimination against disabled people, but I don't use them because I think, you know. 

For example, if you're talking about ableism, are you talking about the way society treats me? Or are you talking about my limitation? It's not quite clear what it means and what the limit and what the difference is. 

So I don't see the need for them. 

But, nowadays, I was asked to speak at a meeting a few weeks ago and they said can you talk about ableism please? I went OK. And I knew what they meant was prejudice against disabled people. 

But I also think the danger is that we don't see impairment or illness as being, in its own way, limiting. And it can be. Not always. But it can be. 

And that's not the same as racism, sexism, heterosexism, all the rest of it, where it’s the prejudice that is limiting. But the person is not limited by their difference. They're not limited at all. 

We often are limited.

>> Chris: Interesting. So that's going back to what we talked about earlier where we're saying if we try to ignore the presence of impairment for progressing the rights of disabled people, then we're potentially doing some harm because we're ignoring the reality of experience?

>> Tom: We might be. We might be leaving out a particular area of life. We might be saying you can't talk about that area of life. And either of those things is a problem for me.

>> Chris: Yeah. And, obviously, enough it depends on the person's impairment, doesn't it? 

One person might have a fairly stable condition, or some might have a progressively worsening condition, or whatever it might be.

>> Tom: Yeah. They might. 

I mean, I've got a fairly stable condition. I'm paralysed. And yeah, that's all there is to it. 

But, because it's an incomplete paralysis, I get a lot of pain. So that's the problem. And I always will. 

And I can take various drugs to try and minimise that, but it won't go away. It won’t be cured. And it's gotta be managed. And usually for me it's managed through drugs. 

It might be mindfulness or whatever else, but yeah, it's got to be managed, not eliminated.

>> Chris: OK. And just turning to kind of culture actually, now, would be interesting to kind of get your views here. 

So how do you think disability is represented in culture and how does that influence the kind of general view and understanding of disability?

>> Tom: So I mean a lot of things that we watch or read or become aware of are very negative about disabled people, and about disability generally. 

A lot of the metaphors we use are basically physical or mental metaphors. You know, you're crippled by doubt. Your death to the reason, or whatever it might be.

>> Chris: Turn a blind eye, that kind of thing.

>> Tom: All the rest of it. 

And if you look at the characters, often, well, somebody has written that there are basically three main stereotypes. 

One is what we might call tragic, but brave, plucky, terribly sad. We all feel bad about it. 

Then there's the sinister cripple, nasty, nasty type. 

And remember, sinister means left-handed in its origins in Latin. So the sort of evil villain. 

And then we have the supercrip. Somebody who has overcome their problems. An inspiration to us all and you know wonderful, you know. 

The Stephen Hawking type person, or sometimes the athlete, the Paralympian athlete. 

>> Chris: Yeah, quite often. 

>> Tom: Yeah, they're awesome, they’re really good. You know, that’s what we should all be: plucky and resilient, and all the rest of it.

So all of these are not what actually people are like. 

Because people are a mixture. Disabled people are the same as non-disabled people. So we have good days and bad days, some are good, some are less good. 

And we can all change and all of all those sorts of dynamics are, as it were, undermined by this idea. 

You know, the tragic but brave, the sinister cripple, and the plucky, we have these ideas that we can't have sex. Ever. 

So there's this strong presumption of asexuality, that almost disabled people are like children. 

Or maybe like very older people that, you know, sex is, you know, that's for young people. Yeah, there. There is lots of ideas about asexuality and vulnerability and innocence and all the rest of it.

>> Chris: Yeah, I can really talk to you lots and lots about this kind of area, but I  know we’re limited by time. 

So I just want to move on to, a potentially sensitive subject. So, again, when I was studying for my PhD, I came across an article by an academic called Mark Deal, who discussed the idea of a hierarchy of impairments. 

So maybe some impairments are deemed more acceptable to the general society than others. 

So, first of all, like your thoughts on that and also to for you to consider whether this hierarchy still exists today?

>> Tom: So, first of all, I think that the way society relates to us is there is a hierarchy. 

I think everybody's equal. I think regardless of your impairment or non-impairment, you know, we're all equal. 

And there's lots of different ways to talk about that, democracy, Marxism, Christianity, or whatever. But we're all equal, is my assumption. 

But certain impairments are more or less acceptable, certainly. 

In a way, ageing, which is a source of about half of all impairment, is naturalised. 

So, you know, you're not seeing older people as disabled people, even though really they are. You're thinking this is just normal ageing, it's natural.

And then physical impairments like me, I can talk, I can argue. I'm in a wheelchair, but, otherwise I'm “normal”, as it were. So I'm not a worry or a threat, I think, to most situations. 

But intellectual disability, learning disability, and particularly mental illness, are. and they're seen as, ‘ooh, weird people. We can't trust them. They may murder us in our beds. They're they're odd. They may start, you know, inappropriate behaviour in public’, and all the rest of it. 

So if you like that hierarchy and also often it, well, it depends. It's different for different people, but maybe the visibility is a big thing as well. 

So if you’ve got a hidden impairment, you can, as it were, “pass” for normal. So you are not as problematic as somebody really can't help but be the way they are.

So somebody with a disfigurement that everybody stares at is more dangerous. 

It may be irrelevant to their lives. You know, they may just have a port wine stain across their face. 

They're not in any way different. They’re not impaired. It just happens to be a skin difference. Yet there may be, ‘ooh’. 

Traditionally, certainly, in traditional societies, you know, there's a lot of awe and fear. 

And, even in modern societies, there's a lot of, ‘ooh. Not sure what we do. I don't want to mention the difference’, that sort of thing.

>> Chris: Yeah. And also maybe that some people try to ignore or, you know, disengage in terms of society, because they don't know where to look or if they should linger too long, in terms of that kind of thing.

>> Tom: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. 

And I think, yeah, at the end of the day, we all want to be treated as people.

>> Chris: Of course.

>> Tom: And, usually, whether it's a skin difference or whether it's short stature, or whatever. Yeah, we don't really spend a lot of time thinking about it. 

We just get on and do our thing. And it's not a big problem, not a big part of us.

And therefore, you know, we need to move away from thinking of these things and treat people as equal.

>> Chris: Yes, of course. Obviously, we take the starting point as everyone should be treated equally and is actually equal themselves. 

But in terms of how it is viewed within society, that's where we potentially get that hierarchy, where from what I'm getting from you is that it's how it diverges from ‘normality’. 

That's kind of influences the hierarchy. 

So if you're further from what we “deem to be normal”, then you're more likely to be viewed suspiciously or not favourably. 

Whereas like if you can fit within normal society, then it's OK. You're just a little bit different.

>> Tom: Yeah. Yeah. And it even extends to people who work with people. So if you look at medicine and look at doctors, 

the people who are valued least in medicine, are the geriatricians, who deal with old people, and psychiatrists and rehabilitation doctors who deal with all those old, disabled, mentally ill people that we don't want to. 

Whereas people who deal with cardiac arrest or brain surgery. You know, they deal with normal people. Nothing wrong with them. 

And then they just happen to have a problem and we will sort it out and heal it.

>> Chris: Interesting. Yeah, that was an interesting distinction that you made between even within a profession, there's a distinction.

>> Tom: They're all paid the same. And they all trained the same. And they're all equally, hopefully, equally good

>> Chris: Yeah, fingers crossed! 

OK. Interesting. And so I'm very conscious of time. So I think I'll have this last question, if that's OK, Tom. 

So for a non-disabled person, with no prior involvement or experience of disability, what would be your top tips for giving them, to be able to engage and understand disability in a more fairer and compassionate way?

>> Tom: Well, you might not have a disability, but I'm pretty sure that somebody in your family does. 

That may be a child. It may be a sibling. It may be a parent, but you know, most families have a disabled person in, so it's not that unfamiliar. 

And also you yourself could and may well become disabled, whether through ageing or through an accident. So, don't think it's us and them? 

So the first start is don't think it's us and them. 

Secondly, this idea that people are disabled by society, really. 

So don't block the pavement. Don't park on the pavement. Don't stare at people. Don't treat people differently. 

You know, there's lots of ways that you make life more difficult for disabled people. And you don't have to do any of them.

You know, don't go, “Oh, look, there's aa accessible loo. That’s bigger! I'll change my clothes in there.” Don't do that. 

You know, it may be more convenient, but it's not more convenient for disabled people. 

I talked about call people what they want to be called, so terms like disabled person or person with a disability, they're fine. But if in doubt, say to somebody, quietly and not obtrusively, how do you prefer to be called? 

So you don't make a mistake when you introduce them, for example, or whatever. 

And you know, be an ally. A lot of people have talked about allyship, and it's about, you know, maybe some volunteering or some support. 

Not taking over, not being the voice of somebody, but being there, being there with them. 

I used to work at UEA. And I had a research student. And Norwich is very flat but we had to go down to a cafe downhill, and he very quietly put his hand on my wheelchair to push me up the hill. 

He wouldn't make a big thing of it. He wouldn't say. “Oh, I'm pushing him up the hill.” He would just quietly push me up the hill. 

And I really appreciated that because he didn't make a big thing of it. It was a decent thing to do. He didn't have to do it. I didn't ask him to do that. 

Obviously, he would have stopped immediately had I not wanted it. But it was a nice way of including me.

>> Chris: Excellent, thank you. 

Well, so Tom, I've really enjoyed having a chat with you. I think it's been really interesting. Really thought-provoking, hopefully, for our listeners and our viewers. 

So I really thank you for your time, Tom.

>> Tom: No problem. Thank you, Christopher. 

And good luck with all your work explaining to people the mysterious world of the Paralympics.

>> Chris: Yes, well, I'm trying to. Let's see if we'll be successful, but yeah, thank you ever so much for engaging and for helping people to understand in more detail about disability. 

So thank you and I look forward to catching up with you soon.

>> Tom: Thank you.