Sep 15, 2026 · 30 min · 11 segments
It's an emergency pod! By now you've probably seen the discourse online. The Times and The Telegraph each published articles - that quickly went viral - about young women with chronic illnesses…
definitely and you can be you can be an honorary member of the community today because you could on the screen be invisibly disabled
No one would know, as long as I keep my headrest suitably hidden from the camera.
But I owe a lot personally to sick fluences.
If we didn't have sick fluences, I wouldn't have cool wheelchair accessories, clearly, is the main conclusion I've been taking out of these pretty toxic far-right opinion pieces that have been flooding the internet over the last couple of weeks.
So I wonder, Soph, to set the scene, would you mind telling us a little bit about the particular pieces in question we're going to be discussing and unpacking today, and also, yeah, how those stories are rippling through the waves of the internet at the moment.
For sure.
Well, I'm one of the invisibly disabled people in question.
article.
Uh-oh.
um yeah so there have been two articles in recent times one published by the times and one published by the telegraph both british newspapers with a right-wing leaning um the first one was titled something like why are so many young women using walking sticks and the second one was um is disability, when did disability become cool? Something to that effect.
But both of them set the same premise, which was they were highlighting the fact that there seemed to be more young women than ever who are invisibly disabled and are using mobility or accessibility tools like canes.
And I think that it feels like, to me, these conversations are like a shoe we've been waiting to drop because this is already... a fear that a lot of invisibly disabled people have is that people are secretly thinking you're faking or you're lying or something to that effect.
And so, I mean, obviously it feels horrible to see these kind of narratives being platformed on huge mainstream publications.
But weirdly, I felt like, well, it was coming for us at some point.
So it's almost like good to be having the conversation out loud in a way.
But yeah, those are the sort of two pieces that are floating around at the moment.
Both of the writers have connections to anti-trans politics, and neither of them have any kind of medical background.
So I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind when thinking about the framing of both of these stories.
definitely and you can be you can be an honorary member of the community today because you could on the screen be invisibly disabled
No one would know, as long as I keep my headrest suitably hidden from the camera.
But I owe a lot personally to sick fluences.
If we didn't have sick fluences, I wouldn't have cool wheelchair accessories, clearly, is the main conclusion I've been taking out of these pretty toxic far-right opinion pieces that have been flooding the internet over the last couple of weeks.
So I wonder, Soph, to set the scene, would you mind telling us a little bit about the particular pieces in question we're going to be discussing and unpacking today, and also, yeah, how those stories are rippling through the waves of the internet at the moment.
For sure.
Well, I'm one of the invisibly disabled people in question.
article.
Uh-oh.
um yeah so there have been two articles in recent times one published by the times and one published by the telegraph both british newspapers with a right-wing leaning um the first one was titled something like why are so many young women using walking sticks and the second one was um is disability, when did disability become cool? Something to that effect.
But both of them set the same premise, which was they were highlighting the fact that there seemed to be more young women than ever who are invisibly disabled and are using mobility or accessibility tools like canes.
And I think that it feels like, to me, these conversations are like a shoe we've been waiting to drop because this is already... a fear that a lot of invisibly disabled people have is that people are secretly thinking you're faking or you're lying or something to that effect.
And so, I mean, obviously it feels horrible to see these kind of narratives being platformed on huge mainstream publications.
But weirdly, I felt like, well, it was coming for us at some point.
So it's almost like good to be having the conversation out loud in a way.
But yeah, those are the sort of two pieces that are floating around at the moment.
Both of the writers have connections to anti-trans politics, and neither of them have any kind of medical background.
So I think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind when thinking about the framing of both of these stories.
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