Nobody Ever Asked Dr. House to Prove It
Editor’s note:
This piece was originally published on our director Nadia Kendall’s personal Substack, but we felt it needed a home here too.
In a climate where bigotry against disabled people, and especially disabled women, is finding new, sharper language to hide behind, staying quiet isn’t neutral. It’s a choice. And it’s not one we’re willing to make.
What follows is our director’s own analysis, in her own voice, of a recent piece of journalism that questioned whether young disabled women can be believed about their own bodies. We’re sharing it here because the argument it dismantles doesn’t stay contained to one newspaper article. It seeps into comment sections, doctor’s offices, family dinners, and the assumptions strangers make about a cane or a rollator on a Tuesday versus a Thursday.
We believe disabled people. All of them, all the time: visible symptoms or not, consistent presentation or not, diagnosis-in-hand or not. Here at Be Human, your disability will never be questioned.
Gregory House walks with a cane. I’ve watched the show nearly three times over, and across eight seasons, you learn that his entire premise for arriving quickly at a diagnostic theory is that everyone lies — but not once does anyone suggest he might be lying or faking his own disability. His limp isn’t assumed to be attention-seeking; it’s the source of his brilliance, evidence of what he’s survived, the reason he sees what nobody else can. We didn’t need convincing of any of that. It was granted in the first episode.
Gregory House sits in his hospital office, facing the camera with a flat expression, holding a black cane upright between his knees with his right hand (House M.D., Universal Television)
I don’t bring up one of my favorite fictional doctors for no reason. Unfortunately, last week, The Times gave someone a platform to question whether young women, “Gen Z” women specifically, actually need the mobility aids they use. To be clear, I have not read the full article because I decided I did not want to pay to override a paywall for 30 minutes just to read such a seemingly hateful article. However, I did read the discourse, and I have seen some spoilers.
I want to be precise about what a piece like that does, because the damage isn’t abstract and it doesn’t stay on the page. It hands language to your neighbor, your colleague, maybe your friend: the one who mutters “she’s making a big deal of her pain”, “that the cane is for attention”, that “you seemed fine last Tuesday”. Arguments like the ones made in the Times article don’t invent these suspicions. They license it.
The point is, the title of the article itself Why are young women using walking sticks? A disproportionate number of Gen Z females are affected by vague syndromes and may be victims of social contagion ignores almost everything that matters.
We just lived through a mass-disabling event. The pandemic left an enormous number of people with Long Covid, dysautonomia, debilitating fatigue, lasting respiratory damage, and more. The research shows women were disproportionately affected, with effects persisting for years. In fact, a study by the University of Alberta found that women were three times more likely to get severe Long Covid than men2. So, an increase in young disabled women following a global pandemic is not that surprising, unfortunately. Therefore, “social contagion” is a strange explanation to reach for when a far simpler one is sitting in the medical literature.
Visibility is not performance. The comparison that comes to mind is the kid in third grade wearing lens-free glasses for attention, as part of a costume. A young woman filming herself with a rollator isn’t wearing a costume or using a “prop” as the author suggested — she’s using a medical device in public and saying out loud that there’s nothing shameful about it. Often she’s doing it for the benefit of someone newly diagnosed and frightened, who has never seen anyone her own age use one. Someone who is terrified that they’ll be judged for not looking “disabled” enough to use a mobility aid in the first place. Someone who is most likely navigating their new reality that perhaps using a mobility aid would make participation in certain activities easier. A young woman with a social media platform who loves fashion, wears makeup, and just so happens to use a cane isn’t faking it. We mustn’t confuse visibility with performance. Most of all, we must not fall into the ableist trap that people with disabilities couldn’t possibly look nice or have fun because to do so would somehow negate the fact that they are disabled… news flash: that’s not how disability works.
But let’s play along with the argument that these young women are performing; the performance clearly has accomplices. There are a great many doctors, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists who have either been completely fooled by “Gen Z” young women, or it is being suggested that these practitioners have knowingly informed their patients that their conditions are more limiting than they actually are. If you ask me, it’s a seriously slippery slope of an argument. In any case, the argument only stands if you believe that medical validation comes easily — it doesn’t. Unfortunately, young women often have to be “lucky” enough to find a team of medical professionals willing to believe them, who have heard of the condition to begin with, and who won’t just say it’s “just” anxiety. Lucky for House, his entire support system is medical professionals. His friends write his prescriptions, he can get a scan as quickly as he needs to, and he has connections in the right places.
Disability is not static. Dynamic disability is a real thing. Needing a walking stick today and not tomorrow isn’t inconsistency; it is the condition. How much you exerted yourself, how much you slept, what you’re recovering from: any of it can decide whether you need a stick, a rollator, or nothing at all today. The person who looked fine to you on Tuesday and used a cane on Thursday hasn’t been “caught” out.
Nobody chooses this. If mobility aids earned young women some kind of social prize, I can’t work out why anyone would volunteer for a comment section full of strangers calling you a liar, diagnosing you from a thirty-second video, and telling you that you’re just doing it for the clicks. We’ve heard this shape of argument before. Autism is a trend. Everyone has ADHD now. And let’s not forget, none of this should be mistaken for concern for anyone’s wellbeing; it’s a refusal to accept that young people can be genuinely, seriously unwell. Disability doesn’t check your age first!
What I find interesting to further pull apart is the fact that theframing is gendered from top to bottom. Notice who the argument is about: not young people, but young women. Notice the mechanism it proposes — contagion, an idea spreading through a susceptible population and tipping them into symptoms they don’t really have. Sounds and smells a lot like “female hysteria,” and it has been an accusation aimed at women for well over a century. The accusation also sits on top of something already well documented: women’s pain is taken less seriously in clinical settings, waits longer for treatment, and is more readily filed under anxiety.
Now, back to Dr. House. The difference here isn’t the fact that House uses his cane daily or that he had an injury and not a mysterious “vague syndrome”. It’s that House is a “productive” middle-aged white man with an injury that can be evidenced on a scan, whose suffering and all that comes with it is “tolerable” to those around him because of how many cases he is able to solve. A 22-year-old with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos, for instance, often has no scan to produce, and suddenly the same object becomes a costume, and she is asked to justify it to strangers.
At the end of the day, the only person who needs to be assessing whether a young woman requires a mobility aid is that woman herself. If she's lucky enough to have access to the right doctors, her medical team gets a say too. The rest of us were never asked.
Sources:
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/young-women-walking-sticks-gen-z-disability-2ssv95mws
https://www.ualberta.ca/en/folio/2025/11/women-three-times-more-likely-than-men-to-get-severe-long-covid.html
