Yet even talking about disability can be a fraught experience. The vocabulary of this status is highly charged, and for even the most well-meaning person, a conversation can feel like stepping into a maze of courtesy, correctness and possible offense. When I lecture about disability, someone always wants to know — either defensively, earnestly or cluelessly — the “correct” way to refer to this new politicized identity.

What we call ourselves can also be controversial. Different constituencies have vibrant debates about the politics of self-naming. “People first” language asserts that if we call ourselves “people with disabilities,” we put our humanity first and consider our impairment a modification. Others claim disability pride by getting our identity right up front, making us “disabled people.” Others, like many sign language users, reject the term “disability.”

The old way of talking about disability as a curse, tragedy, misfortune or individual failing is no longer appropriate, but we are unsure about what more progressive, more polite, language to use. “Crippled,” “handicapped” and “feebleminded” are outdated and derogatory. Many pre-Holocaust eugenic categories that were indicators for state-sponsored sterilization or extermination policies — “idiot,” “moron,” “imbecile” and even “mentally retarded” — have been discarded in favor of terms such as “developmentally delayed” or “intellectually disabled.” In 2010, President Obama signed Rosa’s Law, which replaced references to “mental retardation” with “intellectual disability” in federal statutes.

The author and scholar Simi Linton writes about learning to be disabled in a hospital after a spinal cord injury — not by way of her rehabilitation but rather by bonding with other young people new to disability. She calls this entering into community “claiming disability.” In “Sight Unseen,” an elegant explication of blindness and sight as cultural metaphors, Georgina Kleege wryly suggests the difference between medical low vision and blindness as a cultural identity by observing that, “Writing this book made me blind,” a process she calls gaining blindness rather than losing sight.

Like them, I had no idea until the 1980s what it meant to be disabled, that there was a history, culture and politics of disability. Without a disability consciousness, I was in the closet.

Since that time, other people with disabilities have entered the worlds in which I live and work, and I have found community and developed a sturdy disability identity. I have changed the way I see and treat myself and others. I have taken up the job of teaching disability studies and bioethics as part of my work. I have learned to be disabled.

What has been transformed is not my body, but my consciousness.

As we manage our bodies in environments not built for them, the social barriers can sometimes be more awkward than the physical ones. Confused responses to racial or gender categories can provoke the question “What are you?” Whereas disability interrogations are “What’s wrong with you?” Before I learned about disability rights and disability pride, which I came to by way of the women’s movement, I always squirmed out a shame-filled, “I was born this way.” Now I’m likely to begin one of these uncomfortable encounters with, “I have a disability,” and to complete it with, “And these are the accommodations I need.” This is a claim to inclusion and right to access resources.