Disability: the bald truth

A few weeks ago, I thought I saw a squirrel running along the top of my front garden hedge. Turned out it was a bloke on the other side of the hedge with a really bad toupee. Truth.

Bad toupee                       Squirrel

But it reminded me of  a case about three years ago, when a Scottish teacher tried (and failed) to establish that being bald meant he was disabled. He'd been the victim of terrible harrassment from his pupils: if his baldness was a disability, he would have the protection of the Disability Discrimination Act to support his claim of constructive and unfair dismissal.

The judge in that case said that just because the teacher's baldness was used by others to taunt and harrass him did not make it a disability:

It seems to me it would be to take the definition of impairment too far. If baldness was to be regarded as an impairment then perhaps a physical feature such as a big nose, big ears or being smaller than average height might of themselves be regarded as an impairment under the DDA. That, to me, cannot be right

So what is a disability? The judge seems from that quote to use the words impairment and disability interchangeably. But are they?

The medical model of disability sees impairment and disability as closely linked: disability arises directly from impairment, which is a physical dysfunction of the body. Disability is therefore clearly the individual's "fault", may reduce their quality of life, and causes clear disadvantage to them.

In the social model of disability, by contrast, society is the main factor in disabling people. Impairment is a necessary factor for disability, but it doesn't lead to disability unless society fails to take regard of and include people regardless of their individual differences.

The legal situation in the UK is governed by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (now consolidated into the Equality Act 2010). It uses predominantly a medical model: disabled people are defined as people with certain conditions (someone diagnosed with MS, for instance, is automatically covered under the Act), or with certain limitations on their abilities.

But when it's placing requirements on employers and service providers, it uses the social model, requiring them to make "reasonable adjustments" to their premises, policies and practices to make them accessible.

What make an adjustment "reasonable" is not defined, and most court cases focus on this point. It could, for instance, be entirely reasonable for a large department store to install an entrance ramp in view of the shop's size and number of shoppers; it might not be reasonable to expect an office with only a few staff, rarely visited by members of the public, to do the same. On the other hand, someone from the office could perhaps go to visit a customer who can't access the premises at home. It's about...well, what's reasonable.

Some people are very militant about the issue, insisting that only the social model should be used. But really, you could have the most accessible environment, the most enabling society in the world, and I still couldn't take a full part in it because of my fatigue and pain - the main symptoms of my MS, for me. These are called impairment effects: they're not recognised by everyone working in the field of Disability Studies, but for those of us experiencing invisible symptoms, they are a major factor in our experience of disability.

So, what is disability? To me, it's a mixture of the dysfunctions of my body caused by lesions in my brain, and society's response (or lack of response) to me as a result of those dysfunctions. Others may have different answers, depending on their own particular experiences and understandings.

Perhaps, in the end, disability is one of those things that means something different to every one of us. But a bad toupee? That'll always be a bad toupee!