Ok here's a tangent, but bear with me.
Imagine you're dropped suddenly into an unfamiliar landscape, stark naked. Take a minute to think of everything you would wish you had in that situation. Clothes, a blanket, a way of contacting someone you knew? A knife, a fishing net, a fire starter, knowledge of local plants and animals? Prepared food? Glasses, shoes? Medications? All of those things are assistive technologies. They are tools that help you survive and thrive in the world, in ways you would struggle with alone and naked. Some are physical technologies, some are social technologies, some are things you could make for yourself and some are not - but all of them are things you rely on to get by.
As a society we've set an expectation about the set of assistive technologies it is "normal" to need. The fact of needing these things is glossed over, unexamined.
Disability is defined by being unable to perform key functions of your own life or participation in society - but it is defined this way in the context of assumptions about assistive technology access.
Some disabilities can be near-completely ameliorated by specific assistive devices (like glasses.) For others, the assistive technology needed includes more complex social support technologies. But broadly, an approach is possible that says, what would you need, in order to live your life fully? Does it exist, and if not, can we create it? Assistive technologies are by no means a solved problem, but the outlook is to improve life and capacity as much as possible by exploring support options. Anyone who has an unmet need can be benefited by this approach - a total expansion of social support.
In practice, what we mostly see is the inverse of that. The normal level of social support becomes a benchmark. Medicalization of disability often says, "what would it take to make you into someone who only needed 'normal' levels of support?"
Worse, the normal level of social support becomes a reward. A reward for what? Why, for being able to function in society without any more support than that! If you can't accomplish that, do you even deserve this much support? Key pieces of social technology for living in the world are withheld from some people - on the basis of their supposed unfitness to be fully independent members of society. This is what's discussed above - in the context of women being barred from property ownership or independent bank accounts, children being barred from decision making about almost every aspect of their lives, and disabled adults deemed "legally incompetent" facing both.
Lacking access to technologies that would make you able to participate in the physical and social world is disabling. Disability is a status of lacking what you need to function, which can arrise from many causes. Health can be disabling. Poverty can be disabling. Abusive relationships can be disabling. Criminalization and discriminated legal status can be disabling.
Very often, the people withholding key social technologies make the argument that they are withheld *because* you lack capacity - deflecting the impacts of what is withheld ON your capacity and re-naturalizing the source of the problem as inherent to you. This can be done to anyone, by anyone with enough social power over them. The fact that it often occurs to people who are Also struggling because of other unmet needs that would be unmet even if they did receive the full allocation of "normal" support, should not obscure that both of these dynamics are rooted in denial of needed support and blame for needing support at all.
It is because of this deflection that I think disability analysis can't afford to center on what disabilities are "inherent" to a person, versus situational due to discrimination and lack of resources. I don't think those are seperable factors, and even if they were I wouldn't trust people to seperate them accurately, due to the nature of discrimination itself.
Likewise, I think it's crucial to challenge the unexamined status of what is a "normal" level of assistive technology to have access to - including examining things like "autonomy" and "being taken seriously" AS assistive technologies - in the sense that they are social technologies that critically impair quality of life if denied. Perhaps if people who don't think of themselves as disabled, learned to view things they absolutely rely on as assistive technologies, they would be less careless about treating other people's assistive technologies as if they were optional.
(I think one reason for pushback on this framing is the fear that it trivializes disability. That by putting disability on a continuum with experiences had by people who face much less profound social struggles, people will feel they are granted liscence to focus on their own problems. I can't say that's not a real concern! We've all seen versions of that happen, I think. I DO think this type of reframing of disability is useful to understanding why people face the struggles they do, and what other approaches are possible. But it does always bear reiterating that some people are having an EXTREMELY bad time and that their struggles need to be prioritized.)
