ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights the disabling environment that blind people encounter when visiting an eye doctor. It highlights the disablist attitudes displayed by health care professionals in such environments. The chapter discusses the effects of such attitudes in terms of psycho-emotional disablism. It suggests that while disablist language about blindness might not officially or legally be recognized as hate speech, its message – that it is better to be dead than blind – is effectively the same. In this way, disablist language needs to be recognized as a previously unrecognized form of hate speech, since it wounds and invalidates its victims. S. H. Elgin, building on the philosophical and linguistic work of writers like J. L. Austin and D. H. Hymes demonstrates how verbal attacks can be backgrounded within utterances, making them more difficult to address directly. The cumulative effects of disabling environments, verbal aggression, and eugenic messages about disabled lives being worthless are incredibly destructive.
