Doctor Who and the Disability Discourse

I know all the meltdowns on social media were about the trans character and actress on the new Doctor Who, but what about the disabled one? Cos Shirley Anne Bingham is evidently cis and played by a cis actress, Ruth Madeley, but still, casting a disabled person as a disabled character is as “woke” DEI representation as a trans one, right? Someone’s got to be aggravated by that, surely? Twitter did not disappoint:

Cue a bunch of people advising his majesty that some people in wheelchairs are actually capable of doing that, including me:

Which was a slightly… aggressive response, perhaps, and it drew a response from someone that went “Ew no, I don’t want people like this in my community” which I’m still not sure if that was aimed at me or him, though I suspect it was the latter, i.e. she was more appalled at this clown potentially becoming part of the disabled community than at the clown wishing disability upon him. Anyway, I stand by it, and as you may see I’ve had an awful lot of likes on my tweet, more than I can ever remember having (except maybe for one I made after 2013 when I congratulated News Corp for winning that year’s federal election).

As for Garbageman, he’s since deleted his account. Which means that, however inadvertently, I took part in one of those Twitter activities I’ve always abhorred, i.e. I participated in a pile-on that drove someone off the platform. Somehow I feel less bad about this than I suspect I should, I’m actually kind of OK with this. Oh well.

Anyway, our next subject is still there; after asking a similar question the mobility of Shirley Anne’s legs, someone whose posts are private replied and then he said:

Because—as he actually said to someone else who called him out on this shit—a fully disabled actress would be “more representation” as if representation were something you can actually quantify and measure. Just how disabled is “fully”? Would you settle for the character and/or actress being paraplegic? Quadraplegic? Dead? Cos you don’t get any more disabled than not being alive at all. You tell me. I mean, Ruth Madeley needs those wheels to get her around, but she’s not completely paralysed. Not only does she have spina bifida, she has the fucking nerve to only be disabled to a degree that these goombas find insufficient. I mean, FUCKING LOOK AT THIS:

Being disabled and flexible enough to do that? Political correctness gone mad, obviously. What a cow.

And he called me a “mozza” when I called him out. What was that even supposed to mean? Did he compare me to Morrissey? Good grief. I haven’t been this insulted in a LONG time. He is, of course, whining about being called “ableist” and such things… honestly, just accept the fuck-up and that some people know more than you about some things. It’s OK to learn.

The funny thing is, I never even noticed what Ruth Madeley’s legs were doing in the first place. It was these dickheads going off about it that drew my attention to it, and got a bunch of people snapping back at them. All I know is that, if the day comes when I have to rely on a chair to get around, I want it to be packing heat like Shirley’s…