BY STELLA YOUNG
Last week, the Victorian Government released Reporting it Right, a handy little instruction manual to tell us the right words to use when we’re talking about disabled people. Or is it people with disabilities? People with disability? People with a disability?
I’m sure you know what I mean – us freaky looking/sounding/behaving people that make everyone so uncomfortable. It’s a good thing there are rules now. There’s nothing like spelling out the dos and don’ts to make people even more anxious about something they already find confronting.
Of course, some people are a little bit up in arms, dismissing it as political correctness run wild. Melbourne radio presenter Neil Mitchell is particularly incensed, especially about what he’s supposed to call toilets.
Disabled toilets are to be no more…And disabled car parking or disabled entry areas. All banned. All gone. They must now be accessible toilets, accessible parking space and accessible entry.
While I don’t agree that talking about the language we use in relation to disability is about political correctness, I’m actually with Mitchell in my general distaste for these guidelines.
The Victorian Government is not the first to publish such a guide, and they probably won’t be the last. There are already dozens of guidelines and rule-books about this stuff. They’re remarkably inconsistent, which is a problem in itself.
This resource from the Queensland Government urges journalists to “specify the disability” of the person they’re reporting on. By that I can only assume they mean “find out the medical name of this person’s impairment and insert some sketchy details you’ve sourced from Wikipedia”.
Journalists already do that at every opportunity. I am repeatedly asked in interviews exactly “what’s wrong” with me and I always give them the same answer; I don’t identify the name of my condition in an interview unless it’s relevant to the context of the story. The fact that I’m a wheelchair user is relevant to a story about access to public transport. The long-winded medical term for my impairment is not.