Top Ten Tips for Writing Characters with Disabilities in 2017

My New Year’s Resolution is to not put effort into posts and turn this into a lazy Buzzfeed-style blog. I think a good New Year’s Resolution for people who produce media is to make an effort to include more characters with disabilities. But how can one make a good character with a disability? Here are the top ten tips for make positive representation of disability. Just follow this guide and you will be completely inoffensive.

1.  Every person with a disability is an individual and media should show a diverse range of lifestyles and characters.  Also, the mainstream audience is incapable of distinguishing between “character with a disability” and “everyone with disability”, so only show a diverse range of lifestyles that everyone in the disability community finds socially acceptable.

2. Don’t limit characters with disabilities to straight, white, cis men. The ideal character is a pansexual, black, non-binary trans person with a disability.  This is known as intersectionality. But avoid tokenism.

3. It is good to portray people with disabilities being productive in society, but don’t show them having challenges to work with because it is inspiration porn. In addition, make sure the same people with disabilities have some challenges because otherwise it is trivializing disability.

4. Characters with disabilities in the upper class are problematic because they ignore the disproportionate poverty rate among people with disabilities. The unemployment rate among people with disabilities is high, but you shouldn’t have unemployed characters with disabilities because it reinforces the status quo.

5. Increase the number of characters with a diverse range of disabilities, but remember to find actors and actresses who have each specific disability or it is “cripping up”.

6. People with disabilities make up a significant part of the population, so remember to add people with disabilities as side or background characters. Also, just putting in side or background characters with disabilities is tokenism.  Avoid this.

7. Invisible disabilities are widely underrepresented in media, so there should be some more in 2017. But just saying that someone has a disability and then ignoring the symptoms trivializes the experiences of people with invisible disabilities. With that in mind, don’t constantly remind us of their disability because that uses disability to define a character.

8. One of the laziest and most exploitative stories is to have an able-bodied character fall in love with a character with a disability. A myth that needs to end is that people with disabilities are asexual, but avoid having two characters with disabilities fall in love because it perpetuates the myth that people with disabilities can only be in relationships with each other.

9. An unhealthy trend is to have all characters with disabilities be on the “good” side, because having a disability doesn’t determine morality and people with disabilities are heterogeneous. Furthermore, villains with disabilities are overused and harmful because they equate disability with evil.

10. If you are unsure as to whether a character with a disability is problematic, share it on social media. If at least two hashtags trend against your character, it is time for a rewrite.

     Let’s look forward to a great year of disability-related movies!