It's Friday evening and I'm lying in bed looking for something fun to do on Saturday. My wheelchair is next to me, fully-charged and waiting for our next adventure. I find a park I'd like to visit just outside of my city: it has free entry, a lake, plenty of greenery and even a small castle. But here's the problem: I can't go tomorrow, because you can only get there by train, and Deutsche Bahn refuse to provide boarding assistance without 24 hours' notice.

It's a brisk winter day a few weeks before Christmas, and I plan a trip to visit a Christmas market with friends. It's on a hill in the grounds of a castle, and it looks amazing from the pictures. I book my trains in advance and plan the whole day to make sure I don't miss the one specific train I have to get in order for DB to provide assistance. We get to the village and the bus up to the castle isn't accessible. A taxi is over 40 euros one way, so we can't see the market and spend the afternoon in a café which we have to carry my chair into.

One more story to illustrate my point (because good things come in threes): it's this time last year, and I wake up excited for my trip to Prague. I've booked everything weeks in advance to make sure nothing can go wrong. Half an hour before I have to leave the house, I get an email: the train that I booked assistance for two weeks ago doesn't have an accessible carriage, so I can't travel today. I rebook for the next day, but have to shorten my trip to just a few hours as the earliest and latest trains are never accessible.

My chronic pain means I can't easily walk long distances. But with my wheelchair, I can go anywhere... so long as it's accessible. It's usually not my body that stops me from getting around (although, of course I still have days where I'm too fatigued or in pain to face going out) - nine times out of ten, it's structural inaccessibility or ableist travel company policies which mean I can't do the things I want to.

And yet, it's these same companies who are actively preventing me from being mobile who call me a 'person with reduced mobility'. My problem isn't with the phrase 'reduced mobility' itself - plenty of people find this term an accurate way to describe how their disability affects them, and it certainly could have been applied to me before I got my powerchair. But now I have my chair, it's just not accurate - I can be out for hours and go faster than most people walk. I'm much more mobile than I was in the time after becoming physically disabled but before having a powerchair. My mobility isn't inherently impaired because of how my body is, but rather, it is - completely avoidably - impaired by ableism.

Additionally, it makes me feel weird how many people seem to use 'mobility' as a synonym for 'walking' - as if walking is the 'correct' way to be mobile, and anything else is inferior. 'Mobility-impaired' also feels like a euphemism, a way to avoid saying 'disabled'.

In my opinion, calling anyone who has difficulty walking 'mobility-impaired' shifts the issue onto us and our disabled bodies, whilst allowing the companies who are preventing us from getting around to avoid accountability. To quote Shirley from the recent Doctor Who specials: don't make me the problem.

My blog posts

My disability affects my walking. Ableism affects my mobility.

Why I don’t like being called a ‘person with reduced mobility’.

Why I don’t have a disability ID card.

My experience with the German ‘Schwerbehindertenausweis’.