As a famous heat-lover™, this past summer, with its endless days of unbroken sunshine and tropical temperatures, should have been one of the best of my life. But instead of hosting glamorous dinners and going to festivals like everyone else I knew, I spent much of it horizontal, binge-watching TV shows about cowboys, reading books on navigating the world of invisible illness, and occasionally going outside for an iced coffee or yet another round of blood tests that left me feeling even more nauseous and dizzy and bruised than before, yet provided me with no further clarity as to what was wrong with me. I ruefully turned down invitations to friends’ birthday parties and trips to the seaside, and spent whole days sat inside with tears running down my face, angry at my body and grieving the full life I had once had, which, despite my best efforts, had never quite returned to normal since the pandemic.
As I tried to navigate this new and unwelcome reality, I noticed a sudden spate of articles in right-wing broadsheets targeting young women in similar situations to me: namely, suffering from mystery illnesses with vague and fluctuating symptoms for which little standardised testing is available, and which have soared in prevalence since 2020.
In The Times, Kathleen Stock, a prominent ‘gender-critical feminist’ and contributing editor at culture war rag Unherd, wondered if the increase in “startlingly fresh-faced” young women with chronic illnesses using canes was due to “social contagion”. A month later, Poppy Coburn took to the pages of The Telegraph to explain how disabled young women “are turning chronic illness into a lifestyle trend and entrenching a culture of economic inactivity”. Her proof? “Beautiful women with slick-backed hair” are on Instagram showing off their customised pink wheelchairs and walking sticks, finding community with other women who boldly dare to have skincare routines despite being sick.
Having successfully demonised, vilified, and removed access to healthcare for transgender people, it seems the reactionary columnist class has now collectively decided to turn its bigotry on to a new target: people with disabilities who they deem to be faking it, either for sympathy and attention, or to live a life of largesse on (already paltry and increasingly inaccessible) disability benefits.
Having successfully demonised, vilified, and removed access to healthcare for transgender people, it seems the reactionary columnist class has decided to turn its bigotry on to a new target: people with disabilities who they deem to be faking it
Chronic illness can be difficult and confusing for outsiders to understand. Our rigid societal ideas around disability do not leave space for the grey area in which many of these conditions fall: naturally fluctuating, defined by periods of remission and flare-ups, and often invisible to outsiders. Symptoms can fluctuate monthly, weekly, even daily, and for many sufferers, one good day spent living like a ‘normal’ person – dancing, drinking, swimming, sunbathing, socialising – can result in a week where even getting out of bed becomes too much for the body to handle.
“Why do Gen Z females, apparently unlike every generation before them, have strangely unstable bodies that intermittently require support?” Stock asks glibly, wholly uninterested in the answer staring her in the face. It is widely documented by the medical establishment that the Covid-19 virus has long-term health effects, and that repeat infections are tied to higher odds of new health conditions. For what it’s worth, plenty of men – even straight, white ones, the kind of people who don’t suffer from hysteria and whose life experiences matter – have also been incapacitated by Covid-related chronic illness, but these bad-faith columnists know that few things annoy their readership more than young women with colourful hair and pronouns in their bios. It’s why a local news piece about the internal masking politics of a lesbian bar in a small town in Massachusetts has become the Boston Globe’s most-read story of the year.
It’s no coincidence that these harmful arguments are being pushed at a time when disability payments are being slashed, minimum two-year waiting times for mental health problems are being implemented, and the government is looking to distract from structural unemployment – where there are fewer job vacancies than people looking for work – all while rates of chronic illness and disability are soaring in previously healthy young people. Instead of grappling with the long-term effects of the pandemic on our mental and physical health, and what measures we can take at both an individual and state level to protect both ourselves and others, we are being encouraged to believe that those who are taking the situation seriously (the much maligned ‘Covid conscious’) are all suffering from a shared hysterical delusion.
Living under the long shadow of neoliberalism and endless austerity, it’s easy to forget that there was a period in British history where our welfare state was one of the most generous in the world – an era which also saw economic inequality and poverty at their lowest levels. During the early days of the pandemic, there was a brief point where it seemed as though we might be at a turning point as a society – one in which the rampant individualism that has increasingly defined our lives since Margaret Thatcher escaped from hell and privatised living and breathing – might be overturned in favour of one in which we remembered we do in fact live in a society and owe things to other people. At the very least, we thought it might lead to a cultural shift in the way we think about illness: that people would think twice about going outside for leisure purposes when they were sick and contagious, for example, understanding that what for them might be a mild cold could manifest in something much more serious in someone who is immunocompromised. Six years on, this altruistic world seems more distant than ever.
Invisible disability is an area that many leftists fall embarrassingly short on, perhaps keen to distance themselves from the more cringe and extreme factions that take up an outsized amount of space online. And while I myself – and I would argue, most immunocompromised people – have little in common with punitive, scolding shut-ins who use their time to attack strangers for going outside unmasked at all, it is not particularly hard to see how some of these people may have arrived at this unforgiving worldview. Already vulnerable, many have effectively been shut out of public life, left to watch on the sidelines as the world opened back up without any concessions made to ensure their wellbeing, trapped in their homes with only other sick people for virtual company.
It is our responsibility to pause when confronted with sensationalist narratives that seek to demonise and ridicule the most vulnerable members of society
Fundamentally, in the absence of a government that cares enough to protect its citizenry, it is up to us to behave in a way that takes the lives of the most vulnerable into account; to choose our values and stick to them rather than letting them be defined in childish opposition to purposefully salacious news stories or socially maladjusted people we encounter online. I am obviously not advocating a return to lockdowns or mask mandates, but it is worth remembering that these policies were lifted for economic reasons, not because scientific evidence showed Covid was no longer a health risk. Experts estimate that 400 million people are living with chronic conditions caused by Covid-19, a number that is only going to grow with repeated infections, something that we have all been forced to accept as a condition of wanting to live normal lives.
As we enter cold and flu season, we can all try to navigate our social lives in ways that account for the vulnerable members of society we are being conditioned to villainise and treat as expendable. Rather than double down on a culture of selfish individualism, we could instead stand to learn from other cultures, where wearing a mask while sick is an established social norm rooted in collective consideration and courtesy rather than a political statement. “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people,” tweeted author Lauren Morrill in 2017 in the midst of political debates in the US about affordable healthcare. Nearly a decade and a global pandemic later, it’s a sentiment I find myself returning to often, particularly when confronted with visibly ill people in cafes and on public transport, many of whom no longer even bother to cover their mouths when they cough or sneeze.
We are only just beginning to scratch the surface of the long-term effects of Covid, both in terms of health and the economic impact of a population with larger and larger swathes of people unable to work. Aligning ourselves with the opinions of people like Republican senator Ted Cruz, who used the Boston Globe story to illustrate that “leftism is a mental disease”, will not keep us safe. It is our responsibility to pause when confronted with sensationalist narratives that seek to demonise and ridicule the most vulnerable members of society, to push back against the reactionary impulses that make it easier to mock people with lived experiences that we may not understand instead of seeking to empathise with them – yes, even when they are annoying.