"Elderly and Disabled"

 A lot of people, myself among them, have written about how disabled adults are treated as children. Another pernicious phenomenon around the intersection of ageism and ableism is that middle-aged disabled people are framed as elderly.

 

While a disabled 30 year old is a “special needs kid,” a disabled 40 year old will be discussed as though xe were 90. This is especially true of visibly physically disabled people.

 

Partly this is because certain forms of visible disability or adaptive equipment are used as symbols of age. Wheelchairs, canes, and hearing aids are used as shorthand for “elderly person,” even though people of any age can use this equipment. This allows younger abled people to distance themselves from disability and frame access issues as “someone else’s problem.” Because culture in the U.S. is ever-increasingly age segregated by ever-increasingly fragmented “micro generations,” and because of the prevailing sentiment that no one has anything in common with someone of a different fragmented micro-generation, the association of disability with age allows young abled people to assume that they “have nothing in common” with someone who uses accessibility equipment.

There are a few even more insidious aspects, too.

In our society, middle-aged adults are by far the most age-privileged demographic (Elders and young adults fluctuate around the middle of the privilege spectrum depending on context, and minors, of course, are always at the bottom). Middle-aged adults are the presumed heads of household. They are presumed to be in charge of their own lives, as well as “in charge” of their elderly parents and their minor and young adult offspring. Conceptualizing disabled people as going directly from “children” to “elderly people” ensures that they are never conceptualized as having the stage of life in which even the most stringent ageists accept that people ought to have autonomy.

Even more insidious is that framing disabled adults as elderly positions them as “approaching the natural end of their lifespan,” which makes their preventable, premature deaths seem less preventable and premature. This became especially glaring during the COVID-19 pandemic, when everyone who died from COVID was framed as so very old, that surely they were on their deathbeds already. Disabled people’s deaths, caused by medical neglect, poverty, abuse, or other manifestations of systemic ableism and kyriarchy, can be normalized with the assumption that all disabled people are perpetually on their deathbeds, and their deaths are always “their time.”

People are the ages they are. There’s no “mental age,” “adjusted age,” “developmental level,” or any other variation of the idea that people are not the ages they are. Disabled adults aren’t children, and disabled middle-aged people aren’t elderly.

Next time, we can talk about how actually elderly people ALSO shouldn’t be controlled, oppressed, denied resources, or subjected to preventable deaths.