tbh the common misunderstanding of the social model really annoys me. People think that it's, "when there are enough ramps and everybody is nice to the disabled, disabilities won't exist any more."
That's not it.
The idea of the social model is built off of a concept first articulated by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, an old school disability rights organisation out of the United Kingdom.
An important excerpt from the organisation's founding statement is,
it is only the actual impairment which we must accept; the additional and totally unnecessary problems caused by the way we are treated are essentially to be overcome and not accepted
Please please please notice how they do not say that their physical impairment is created by the conditions of their social treatment. Rather, there are additional problems created by their social treatment, which they seek to address.
The social model of disability refers specifically to these problems, in distinction from the physical impairment. It is not a rejection of the material bodily fact of disablement, it is a rejection of stairs but no ramp. That is the extent of its focus and it does not prescribe the ramp as a solution to the condition itself, only as a solution to the additional, unnecessary problems caused by the way we are treated.
It is not and has never been a rejection of the material reality of impairment.
If I can let my frustration out here, it really is shocking that people think it is when Mike Oliver, who coined the social model, looks like this
Do you think a dude with an upper vertebrae spinal injury who was in a wheelchair from seventeen years old, might have some concept of the material reality of being disabled mate?
The social model comes from a historic disabled movement, articulated by a specific disabled professor of disability studies in response to the institutionalisation of disabled people circa the 1980s, with direct reference to the 1970s (the UPIAS was founded in 1972). It is a core tenant of the deinstitutionalisation movement and is a solid, proven model for actually discussing and implementing accommodative practices, especially in light of the reality of systemic policy and practice before and after the work was adopted by support services.
The full context of the UPIAS founding statement except is,
We reject also the whole idea of "experts" and professionals holding forth on how we should accept our disabilities, or giving learned lectures about the "psychology" of disablement. We already know what it feels like to be poor, isolated, segregated, done good to, stared at, and talked down to — far better than any able-bodied expert. We as a Union are not interested in descriptions of how awful it is to be disabled. What we are interested in, are ways of changing our conditions of life, and thus overcoming the disabilities which are imposed on top our physical impairments by the way this society is organised to exclude us. In our view, it is only the actual impairment which we must accept; the additional and totally unnecessary problems caused by the way we are treated are essentially to be overcome and not accepted. We look forward to the day when the army of "experts" on our social and psychological problems can find more productive work.
And yet, the way dorks attempt to "debunk" it online with "well even if there was a ramp I'd still need a chair!" presumes this is some alien able-bodied doctor concept forced upon disabled people, the very phenomenon the social model was developed in rejection of. It is so frustrating. Learn ya history
This is not to say that there are not flaws with the social model, but the primary pop criticism of the social model is literally just a re-statement of one of the core aims of the social model. And when I see it I just
