LOS ANGELES — LAST week, the celebrity gossip site TMZ posted pictures of Justin Bieber in a wheelchair. He was not at a hospital. He was at Disneyland. As everyone knows, Disney patrons in wheelchairs get to cut to the front of the lines. But as a dispute flared over whether this was Mr. Bieber’s intent, becoming a trending topic on Twitter, one fact remained unassailable: I was there first.

One of the great perks of being in a wheelchair — as I have been since age 4 — is being able to cut lines. Sometimes people let you go ahead of them at the grocery store. Sometimes theater and sports arena box offices give you discount tickets. When I was a kid, I often got backstage passes. In short, you get to take advantage of others’ pity — or at least their desire to keep things simple and not cause a scene. You get treated like a V.I.P. You get treated like Justin Bieber, except without the screaming fans.

The teen heartthrob’s publicists said that he was just resting an injured knee, not trying to pretend he was, well, like me. But I prefer to think otherwise. After all, they also acknowledged that even without the wheelchair, he would still get to circumvent the endless queues, to avert a riot. The point is that he was not afraid to be seen in a wheelchair, which, to me, is a point for my team.

I’ve never pretended to be in a wheelchair to curry favor, of course, but I’ve often felt that I can play the disability card for all it’s worth. I have, I confess, used it to hustle my kids through Disney lines, even though I knew full well that I wasn’t actually going to get on the ride myself.