Nobody is faking it: The truth about the 'mobility aid trend'

There is a particular kind of scrutiny that comes with using a mobility aid in public as a young person. Whether it's a disapproving stare, the classic "what happened to you?", or the constant stream of people on the internet who think you're a part of a "social contagion", being a visibly disabled young person brings a lot of unwanted attention.

Lately, the media has described the increase in young, assigned female at birth (AFAB) people using mobility aids as a "trend", inferring or blatantly claiming that some of them must be "faking it".

It goes something like this: young AFAB people are using walking sticks in unusual numbers, and the sheer visibility of it must mean something is going wrong.

It's a tidy theory that has the added benefit of sounding concerned, rather than dismissive. But it rests on the assumption that disabled people showing up in public is itself an anomaly that needs explaining.

For most of the last century, that assumption held because it was true by design. Disabled people were institutionalised, segregated into separate schools, denied entry to buildings that had no ramps, and largely absent from the streets, workplaces and shopfronts that made up ordinary public life. If you saw a young person using a wheelchair or a cane in 1965, it registered as unusual not because disability was rare, but because disabled people were kept out of view.

Deinstitutionalisation, decades of disability rights organising and legislation requiring accessible design, didn't manufacture disabled people out of thin air. Instead, they removed some of the walls that had been built around them.

What looks now like a sudden rise in mobility aid use is better understood as the fact that fewer people conceal their bodies or stay home. Because the cost of being visibly disabled has, in some places and for some people, finally started to drop.

The discomfort some people feel about seeing more canes, walkers and wheelchairs in public isn't a response to a hidden epidemic. Instead, it's a sign of how recently that visibility has been won.

And when a stranger asks for proof, evidence, or a diagnosis that they consider acceptable for a mobility aid, it reinforces the same old idea that used to keep disabled people out of public buildings.

This questioning only worsens the imposter syndrome felt by individuals who have a dynamic disability - a condition that fluctuates, that lets you walk unaided on some days and not others. It doesn't fit neatly into the binary that a lot of people expect disability to follow, which is that you either need help all the time or you don't need it at all, and are therefore making it up.

Fluctuation is not evidence of deceit; rather, it's the reality of a huge number of disabling conditions and how they look day to day. Pretending otherwise by pushing through on the bad days to avoid being doubted on the good ones makes things worse, not better.

This results in a strange trap: you can use the aid and risk being accused of faking your disability, or don't use it and pay for that decision in pain, fatigue or a longer recovery. Neither option involves proving anything to anyone except yourself, and only one option actually helps you.

So, when should you start using a mobility aid? Here's my hot tip: whenever you think you would benefit from one.

There's no threshold to clear, no minimum severity you need to reach before it's justified. A mobility aid is a tool in the same way glasses or a hearing aid would be, and it's not something you earn after suffering enough.

No one asks a short-sighted person to squint through blurry vision for a respectable interval before consenting to glasses, and nobody expects them to show test results before putting them on in public.

The only sensible test for a mobility aid is whether it helps you do what you need to do with less pain, less fatigue, or more independence. If it does, that's all the evidence you need. It doesn't need to satisfy someone watching from the outside.

None of this is really about mobility aids, though.

It's about who gets to decide when a body's needs are real, and the answer to that question has never been, and should never be, a stranger's point of view.

If you use a mobility aid, you don't owe the people around you a diagnosis, a backstory, or a performance of how hard your bad days are before they'll accept that your good ones are also true.

You get to use the tool that helps you live your life on the days you need it, and the days you don't, without the need to narrate your reasons to anyone. You don't owe anyone an answer.

When you see more people using walking sticks, that's what it looks like when disabled people are finally allowed to take up space.