Mainstream legacy media in the U.K. has found a new target: young disabled women.
Last week, Telegraph editor Poppy Coburn published “How having a disability became cool,” arguing so-called “sickfluencers” are “turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend.” Just a month earlier, Times of London columnist Kathleen Stock suggested the disproportionate number of Gen Z women diagnosed with what she called “vague syndromes” may be experiencing “social contagion.” Both pieces cast suspicion on young disabled women and the ways they discuss chronic illness and use mobility aids, reflecting a growing strain of far-right rhetoric that treats disabled women’s accounts of their own bodies with suspicion.
Disabled content creators criticized both pieces and the outlets that published them for perpetuating medical sexism and ableism.
Part of Coburn’s skepticism is tied to historic medical sexism: Women’s medical research remains chronically underfunded—with diseases primarily affecting men receiving approximately twice as much funding from major organizations like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), compared to diseases that primarily affect women. While heart disease remains the leading cause of death for women in the United States, just 4 percent of NIH’s heart disease research budget focuses on women.
It’s no wonder disabled women have not received the diagnoses or care they need: Most of the research about their bodies has yet to be conducted.
Women with disabilities and chronic illnesses are especially likely to experience medical gaslighting: the dismissal, minimization or disbelief of their symptoms by healthcare providers. In a 2022 KFF survey, 45 percent of women with a disability or ongoing health condition reported at least one negative interaction with a provider in the previous two years, while 36 percent said a provider had dismissed their concerns (compared with 22 percent of women without a disability or ongoing health condition).
Coburn’s piece is another form of medical gaslighting, replicating the very effects the people she’s writing about are likely experiencing.
… Disability pride [is] a movement created by and for disabled activists that argues disability is not a tragedy or defect but a natural part of human diversity.
To Coburn’s claim, “The country is sicker than it’s ever been,” I reply: Maybe we simply have access to better diagnostic tools that recognize inherent biases in diagnostic medicine—principal among them, sexism.
Yes, more people are getting diagnosed. This does not mean that more people have the disease than before—just that more people have access to the medical care they need. There’s a reason that more women (including myself) are being diagnosed as autistic than 20 years ago: We are finally receiving the care we were long denied because we did not fit the image of what an autistic person should look or act like (namely a young white boy). It’s not that we are “sicker,” nor are more autistic people being born—it’s that many of us finally have answers and therefore access to treatment to have a better quality of life.
If Coburn were referring to the resurgence of vaccine-preventable diseases amid declining childhood vaccination rates—an erosion of public trust compounded by years of vaccine misinformation from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—she would have a point.
If she is referring to how loosened FDA guidelines have caused massive food contamination and poisoning that has sickened and even killed thousands, she’s right.
If she is referring to the mental health crises caused by a systemic shortage of mental health providers, which leave people without access to emergent care and push people towards hospitalization, she has a point.
But this is not what she’s saying.
Our country is sicker because we refuse to take disability and disabled people seriously.
We are not sicker because disabled people are receiving long-denied diagnoses and medical care. We are not sicker because mobility aids—canes, wheelchairs, rollators and the like—are becoming less stigmatized.
But discrimination and stigma remain. Public transportation systems remain inaccessible, rideshare drivers continue to deny service to people using mobility aids, and airlines routinely lose or damage custom wheelchairs. These failures cost disabled people money, independence and health, and can endanger their lives. In 2021, disability advocates linked Engracia Figueroa’s death to pressure sores she developed after United Airlines destroyed her $30,000 wheelchair, forcing her to use an ill-fitting loaner.
Coburn’s argument has broader political and economic stakes. By portraying disabled people as a drain on welfare systems, she echoes a familiar far-right rationale for cutting public benefits and services—even as rising healthcare costs put care increasingly out of reach. Yet excluding disabled people carries its own economic costs: studies show if disabled people had access to key services from the start, the taxpayer would pay less in the long run. Instead, inaccessible workplaces, transportation and services limit employment opportunities and deepen poverty for disabled people. Investing in accessible infrastructure, community-based services and equal employment opportunities is not only equitable—it is essential to unlocking economic potential and reducing poverty, as the World Bank notes.
In the same breath, Coburn also warns that “sickfluencers” are convincing a generation of young people to “be sick,” or that being sick is cool. This argument is directly plagiarized from anti-trans rhetoric around “social contagion.” Coburn even writes, this is “also the case with dogmatic aspects of transgender ideology, sickness-as-identity politics is especially dangerous for children.”
To be clear, this is not what is happening. Disabled content creators are destigmatizing disability, mobility aids and devices, highlighting years-old struggles for diagnoses and fighting medical gaslighting. They are creating virtual communities for people who often cannot leave their homes because they are immunocompromised, and people continue to refuse to wear masks as COVID resurges again and again, year after year. Disabled feminists are creating online communities of people with underdiagnosed diseases who need support that the state is not providing, and are raising awareness for conditions that doctors continue to mis- and underdiagnose because of medical sexism and racism.
They are teaching children and adults that the words “disabled” and “disability” are not dirty or derogatory—and that terms like “special needs” and “differently abled” are harmful and patronizing.
I can guarantee no disabled content creators are “creating” or “making” people sick, just as no transgender people are making children trans. What content creators are doing is giving young people the language and community support to be who they already are. It’s about giving people the tools to find each other and the strength to stand and fight in solidarity with one another. They are, as Coburn aptly argues, changing the ways in which we understand disability as a society: “To many, it is no longer an adversity to overcome, but a social identity akin to one’s sexuality, gender, or race; an immutable reality to be celebrated by the subject and accommodated by the rest of us.”
What Coburn is criticizing here is disability pride, a movement created by and for disabled activists that argues disability is not a tragedy or defect but a natural part of human diversity. This is a direct response to ableist individuals and institutions framing accessibility as charity, viewing disabled people as objects of pity or burdens to society and its resources (as Coburn refers to in her piece). Disability pride embraces the social model of disability, namely that society disables people because it creates barriers to access spaces and communicate.
Even further, the disability justice movement (founded by a collective of Black, brown, queer and trans disabled organizers in 2005) argues that ableism is intimately interconnected with racism, sexism, queerphobia and capitalism. These ancestors and leaders—Patty Berne, Mia Mingus and Stacey Milbern—argue we can only be free when all of us are free. Our disability rights movement, they argue, must be intersectional, just as our feminist movements must be—a key part of the late Gloria Steinem‘s legacy.
Disability justice activists’ wisdom about how sexism and ableism intersect is invaluable in unpacking Coburn’s piece. Their framework reveals that the same structures and people questioning women with chronic illness are the ones that question survivors of sexual assault and domestic abuse. Both phenomena are tied to a fundamental mistrust in women sharing their lived experience. Similarly, Coburn’s claim that disabled people “burden” the welfare system is rooted in classist arguments that privilege productivity over personhood. They show us Coburn’s “hit piece” on “sickfluencers” is rooted in able-bodied people’s fears about committing to anti-abelist action, about what it will mean in terms of their energy to learn how to be anti-ableist in America today—which would, on some level, call into question the capitalist structures that dictate our lives.
To be clear, disability pride and disability justice are direct responses to the ongoing presence of eugenics in America. Eugenics, or medical, social and political steps to arrest, institutionalize, incarcerate and kill disabled people, continue to this day—by attempting to overturn disabled people’s rights to live in community, disproportionately arresting disabled young people and denying people in detention centers vital medical care.
So when I encounter pieces like Coburn’s, that try to shift the blame for overstretched welfare systems, insurance exploitation and overtaxed medical professionals onto disabled people, I am not fooled—and neither are disabled people online. We just see someone who is fundamentally afraid of her place in a future where disabled people are not ostracized, not outcasts, any longer.
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