Against the Disability Language Wars

there is nothing at stake in the fight over person-first and identity-first language

Matt Yglesias recently wrote a piece called ‘Defund the Language Police’ where he argues that progressives need to stop focusing so much on enforcing niche progressive language norms. This is an old and well-trodden debate that re-emerges every now and then. Some people on the left strongly believe in getting everyone to use phrases like ‘BIPOC’, ‘the unhoused’ and ‘Latinx’, while others claim that this distracts from more substantive issues and alienates outsiders. But what I find interesting about this discourse is how slippery and trivial progressive language norms can be, especially when it comes to disability rights activism.

Person-First vs Identity-First Language

There is an open debate among disability and neurodiversity activists, academics and NGOs about whether to use person-first or identity-first language. Person-first language puts the word ‘person’ before the disability, like with ‘person with disability’ or ‘person who is blind’. Identity-first language generally works the other way, like with ‘disabled person’ or ‘blind person’.

Proponents of person-first language argue that it emphasises the person and avoids reducing them to their disability. ‘Disabled person’ is taken to define the person by their disability in a way that ‘person with disability’ does not. Those who prefer identity-first language argue that their disability really is a source of identity and pride, or at least they feel that using person-first language signals that they are ashamed of who they are. There are also specific cases of developmental disorders like autism where the entire project of ‘separating the person from their autism’ does not make sense – there is no separate non-autistic mind beneath the autism. Identity-first language also avoids the linguistic clunkiness and repetitiveness of phrases like ‘person with disability’ in the English language.

An obvious compromise is to accept that different people have different preferences about how others refer to them. This is the approach that most style guides, academics and NGOs are slowly moving towards. But some advocates insist that using the ‘wrong’ language is harmful, even if someone evinces a sincere preference for it, because the language we use influences how we think and feel in a significant way.

But I don’t see it this way at all. ‘Person with disability’ and ‘disabled person’ mean the same thing. They don’t imply in any strong way that someone is or isn’t defined by their disability. Phrases like ‘person who plays soccer’ and ‘soccer player’ or ‘person who loves books’ and ‘book lover’ do not mean different things.

I occasionally see identity-first advocates claim that ‘person with autism’ really does imply that the person can be separated from their autism because we wouldn’t describe a gay person as a ‘person with gayness’. And sure, ‘person with gayness’ sounds wrong, but so do phrases like ‘person with happiness’ and ‘person with sleepiness’ which describe temporary and non-essential traits. It’s possible to come up with all sorts of cases where adjectives or the ‘person with X’ form sound more natural. The phrase ‘person with African ancestry’ sounds fine while ‘African-ancestried person’ doesn’t work - ‘ancestried’ isn’t even a real word! This doesn’t seem to be a socially significant convention. Some cases involve a deeper social meaning but the meaning is a matter of historical contingency, like ‘coloured person’ (outdated, offensive) and ‘person of colour’ (modern, acceptable).

The other language war over phrases like ‘person with a uterus’ and ‘pregnant person’ helps my illustrate my point. These gender neutral phrases are used, often interchangeably, in a medical context to accommodate transgender men and intersex people who have a uterus. Some people object to both of these phrases on the grounds that they are demeaning to women and reduce them to their body parts. Of course you could say this is just a cynical move by anti-transgender activists, but nonetheless it’s interesting that they treat person-first and identity-first language as equally problematic.

Language Is Not That Powerful

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe using ‘person with disability’ instead of ‘disabled person’ has some impact on how you think about disability. Who am I to say that the language we use doesn’t significantly influence our thoughts and perception?

There’s a famous study by Lera Boroditsky, Lauren Schmidt and Webb Phillips which shows that German and Spanish speakers associate objects with stereotypically masculine or feminine traits based on the grammatical gender the corresponding nouns have in their language. ‘Key’ is feminine in Spanish and Spanish speakers are more likely to describe keys as ‘tiny’, ‘golden’, ‘intricate’ and so on. It’s masculine in German, so German speakers were more inclined to associate keys with adjectives like ‘metal’, ‘heavy’ and ‘jagged’.

But Paul Elbourne points out that this result is more limited than it might seem. It shows that people’s habitual and irreflective thoughts, in this specific case, are influenced by the language they speak. He notes that the effect exists “only with respect to scarcely perceptible cognitive biases that can be measured only in milliseconds and subtle stereotypes that vanish instantly upon reflection.”

And even then, the famous study is yet another victim of the replication crisis. Subsequent studies lean against the thesis that grammatical gender influences our concepts. We simply don’t have compelling evidence for the view that the language we use influences the way we think. The positive evidence that we do have is weak and suggests that the impact is small.

The things that people really care about when they insist that the choice between person-first or identity-first language matters have nothing to do with language per se. Some people don’t want to be treated like their disability defines them. Other people want to make it clear that their disability is something that they’re not ashamed of, or perhaps it’s an essential part of who they are. These are things that people can, and do, convey by explaining them. It’s why whenever anyone says why they prefer person-first or identity-first language they end up explaining what it means to them. They don’t just say “I would prefer it if you said ‘person with disability’ instead of ‘disabled person’” and leave it there because it’s not obvious to the uninitiated that there’s a substantive difference between the two phrases. It’s an issue of recognition and respect, not semantics.

Getting the Priorities Straight

Even if you disagree with everything I’ve written so far, I would be remiss to mention how picking between ‘person with disability’ and ‘disabled person’ is an incredibly low stakes issue. Take almost any disability and you could compile a massive list of pressing issues before you get down to person-first/identity-first language: discrimination, access to healthcare, access to public spaces, insufficient support systems, access to education and employment, chronic pain, ordinary tasks being overly complicated and difficult, poverty etc. etc.

It would be easy for me to argue, as Freddie DeBoer does, that the relatively large amount of attention that this discourse generates is the fault of affluent, academically gifted disabled people who aren’t representative of the broader group. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò points out that academics, NGOs and the like can ‘listen to the most affected people in the room’ and ‘centre marginalised voices’, but they will inevitably end up listening to those advantaged enough to be ‘in the room’ in the first place. Complex, changing language norms might even reduce the accessibility of disability activism.

But in all honesty, I believe our current political culture simply overweighs the importance of etiquette and interpersonal communication. Plenty of people who really would benefit more from prioritising material concerns still end up focusing on these language wars and many of the more advantaged disabled people fit into that group. The disability language wars have no real stakes and they’re a distraction from more pressing issues.