i keep trying to find the words to talk about Captain America as a disabled person
because like. the climax of the first act of his movie is his disabled body getting erased, freeing him to do hero things, and we all know about how problematic that is, and if he was a new superhero and not literally made up in the early 40s it would be offensive. (as it is i'm really glad the movie played up a bunch of serious physical impairments instead of going with the halfhearted 'weak and small' take.)
but the thing is Steve remains a disabled man in an abled body.
in the terms Erskine valued him for--not a perfect soldier but a good man, someone who did not lose sight of the value of his own strength, and the value of other people in spite of their not having it--but in other ways, too.
emotional ways. tactical ways--he adapts instantly to being overpowered and outnumbered and works with and around it, in a way Thor and Tony can't because having had educational field trips into helplessness and relative lack of social privilege doesn't teach you not to be shocked by it the way living with it your whole life does.
steve doesn't stop being the man who spent his whole life fighting against being defined by the things he couldn't do. he doesn't stop being someone who expected to die young and wanted more than anything to make the time he did get worthwhile.
he doesn't stop being the person who needed these things because he lived in a world that told him he was worthless.
eugenics was incredibly normalized in America in Steve's day. Americans developed a lot of the theory the Nazis went on to apply. Steve Rogers is someone who grew up hungry, being told he was one of God's mistakes and should die without further polluting the gene pool.
His life did not stop being a fuck you to that ideology the second he got a non-disabled body and stopped being an obvious target.
because that was where the Nazis started, remember? their first mass cullings. they got the disabled concentrated in big hospital institutions, and then started killing them off. because those were the easiest and most obvious targets of their worldview.
steve was already in one of the groups the Nazis wanted to exterminate. this gets much less attention than queer readings, for plenty of reasons including that disability doesn't come with built-in romance plots and that he got made un-disabled by the story, but within canon it was already personal.
he wasn't motivated by self-preservation because lol it's steve, but he wasn't opposed to Nazi Germany as a simple moral ally of its victims, either. he was one of the people fascists wanted to destroy. he knew their kind from the ground. and i think that matters in a way we as a fandom tend to undervalue.
steve doesn't identify as part of a disabled community cuz that wasn't really a thing, and he has a lot of internalized ableism, and neither of those things stop me from relating to him as a disabled protagonist.
at a fundamental level he's always going to be that furious little gremlin showing the world his teeth and demanding it answer for the fact that it contained so much injustice.