There is an old "joke" about PWD working at institutions that gets at the same issue-I won't repeat it here.....
I was born with cerebral palsy. And ever since the age of thirteen, I’ve spent significant amounts of time with other people with physical disabilities.
And while we all may have different impairments, there are many experiences that are universal among those of us with physical disabilities – and particularly very visible disabilities.
And the most common complaint I hear among my fellow physically disabled peers is a variation on statements like, “We’re not ret*rded. Our minds are fine. It’s our legs that don’t work.”
Some even go so far as to complain about having to share services and transportation (like paratransit, which is door-to-door transportation for people with disabilities) with people who have cognitive or intellectual disabilities.
And what I’ve come to realize is that the truth is that, whether they want to admit it or not, a lot of physically disabled people say these things because they’re afraid. They see cognitively disabled people as different from themselves, and they don’t understand that difference. And that difference breeds misunderstanding.
It’s the exact same reason a lot of non-disabled people don’t want to associate with physically disabled people.
It’s the worst type of hypocrisy – transferring the stigma and stereotypes that we hate onto other people. It does nothing to dispel the stigma. Instead, it just transfers them to a different group of people. That’s not the type of person we should be aiming to be.
This twisted game of “pass the stigma” has a lot to do with the way society treats people with disabilities. We’re routinely patronized, discriminated against, and ignored. We’re assumed to have the mental capacity of infants, even if we’re full-grown adults. We’re abused at abominably high rates.