I was in a motel room when Ali Stroker won her Tony, making history as the first wheelchair user to be so honored. “This award is for every kid who is watching tonight who has a disability, who has a limitation or a challenge,” she said.
As a lifelong wheelchair user, I was thrilled; the feeling buoyed my spirits through the remainder of my 4,000-mile road trip. But the irony did not escape me.
On the one hand, Stroker’s triumph was a beaming example of disability integration, advancement and power. Yet on the other, the reason I was driving to my daughter’s graduation from college, a college I’d never been able to visit before, was that air travel remains prohibitively inaccessible for people like me.
In fairness, people with disabilities have made incredible progress. A year before Stroker’s victory, a giant Times Square billboard for Olay, the skincare brand, featured the silky smooth face of Jillian Mercado, who was born with a variation of muscular dystrophy, like me. Never before had New Yorkers witnessed a bigger, more prominent image of disability outside of a fundraising telethon.
Around the same time, apparel retailer American Eagle promoted its Aerie lingerie brand with unretouched photos of barely dressed women of all shapes, sizes, colors — and impairments. One was on crutches, one in a wheelchair, another brandished a colostomy bag, yet another wore an insulin pump.
More recently, Aaron Philip, an 18-year-old transgender woman with cerebral palsy, appeared in ads for Sephora and Dove, a Miley Cyrus video, and elsewhere.
This new visibility goes beyond fashion and commerce. Last year, Sen. Tammy Duckworth rolled her wheelchair into the Capitol with baby in tow. Moreover, in July a study by Rutgers University found that the disabled now represent 20% of the voting population.
In response to a lawsuit, New York City just agreed to make all 162,000 street corners in the five boroughs fully accessible within 15 years. The subways’ transformation is slower-going, but even that’s showing signs of long-overdue progress.
Twenty-nine years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, why can’t the airlines get with the program?
Sure, they’ve made attempts to accommodate. But they’re held to a lower standard. They are exempt from the Americans With Disabilities Act, bound instead to the looser Air Carrier Access Act.
Consequently, no one can stay on board an airplane in a wheelchair, unlike with most city buses. We must transfer out — often at great personal peril. Airlines rationalize this with terms like “safety” and “crash testing,” but isn’t all airline travel intrinsically risky? Surely in 2019 we can find ways to secure wheelchairs and the people in them on airplanes.
Most wheelchairs are then whisked away and shoved into the cargo hold, unless they can fit into a cabinet in the cabin. Problem is, many of today’s motorized wheelchairs don’t fit easily into the cargo hold either. That doesn’t stop cargo handlers from pigeonholing them in any way they can, though. The result: your chair may emerge more like a pretzel than an essential mobility aid, if it emerges at all.
In fact, in May 2019 alone some 951 wheelchairs and scooters were lost or damaged by the major air carriers, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. That’s 31 per day.
Will the airlines finally yield to the jet-setting demands of the new disabled glitterati, not to mention the rest of us? No such luck yet. After my return from commencement, Jillian Mercado, the model, posted on social media that she’d just landed at JFK to find her wheelchair in pieces.
She tweeted: “THEY (airport handlers) have no consideration at all that these devices is our way of living and moving forward, literally through life. It has happened to me almost 4 to 6 times in the last two years…AND I HAVE HAD IT!”
Stroker got a standing ovation. I’ll give that tweet a sitting one.
Mattlin is a financial journalist and author of two memoirs about disability.
