Disabled athlete Justine Levene has found himself plastering the newspapers and internet in the last few days as a video of him dragging himself through Luton airport from 2017 appeared online. Levene is paraplegic and, like me uses a wheelchair full time. As happens far too often when flying, his wheelchair had been left behind.

So far, so usual. You only have to look at Frank Gardner’s twitter feed, or do a quick internet search to discover just how appallingly disabled air passengers are treated. So I don’t really want to use this piece to talk about air travel specifically. Instead I’d like to talk about the able-bodied response to this incident – at least a part of it – to explain why, to my mind at least, Levene did exactly the right thing.

A strand has emerged from the response to Levene’s actions which basically boils down to his refusal of the airport wheelchair being seen as a preformative act, as a stunt to get attention. People seem to think it would have been much easier for him and the other people involved if he had just accepted the chair rather than crawling. Here are some responses to Frank Gardner’s tweet of support:

‘Plan’, and ‘stunt’, as well as the idea that sitting in an airport chair would have been less degrading are comments that keep popping up in response to this story.

For what its worth, I think Levene was – in some ways – pulling a stunt. This only goes so far; he did not loose his wheelchair on purpose nor fly with the express hope of it getting lost just so he could sue! What I mean is maybe he could have accepted the airport wheelchair and have been pushed quietly stewing in his own anger through security like a good little disabled person who knows that the airline is ‘really sorry’ that they lost your independence. I’m so pleased he didn’t though.

I frequently find myself in a similar situation to Levene at Liverpool Street Station. To access the tube line I have to use a lift which takes me down about 6 steps. More often than not this lift is out of order. When faced with this difficulty, the train staff suggest alternative bus routes for me. I never accept this. Instead, intrusting my backpack to a kind passer by, and instructing the tube staff how to lift my five thousand pounds worth of wheelchair, I flop – there really is no other word for it – on to the floor, and shuffle on my arse, just like Levene, down the filthy steps. (Here is the video I fired at TFL the last time this happened)

Doing this is degrading. But simply not being able to access public transport is also degrading. In that moment I already feel like a second class citizen, so why not go the whole hog. Because, by me going the whole hog,other people are humiliated too. I am aware of people watching me while I climb down the stairs.  By performing this ‘stunt’ I am interrupting their day; at the very least, they have to wait for me to get up before they can access the steps. Their responses vary from empathy to pity or even disgust but they have no option but to be involved. Yes, I could retain the dignity of being in my wheelchair if I just went and got on a bus, but the shame and humiliation of once again being unable to access somewhere would still exist. And no one else would see it.

For so long the disabled community has been voiceless, unable to achieve the same changes as other minority groups often because the simple act of leaving the house was impossible. The visible actions of protesting or rioting are fairly physically demanding. Now that, mainly thanks to social media, we have a voice it is so often all too easy to silence – look at the brushing off Liz Carr’s Not Dead Yet group received from the cast and crew of Me Before You back in 2016, or the current plastic straw debacle in which disabled voices are being consistently ignored.

When I climb down the stairs at Liverpool Street knowing that I’m going to cry as soon as I am away from the public eye, I want the member of the tube staff carrying my wheelchair to feel ashamed for me, I want the person carrying my bags to share in some of the injustice, I want people to be annoyed that I am delaying their commute. In performing ‘stunts’ like this, disability rights issues can leave the easily silenceable confines of the internet or the already rather full breadth of our own individual shoulders. The out-of-order lift at a tube station ceases to be ‘my’ problem and becomes ‘our’ problem.

Being pushed in airport wheelchairs which are not our own, or riding buses rather than the tube, or simply not being there because where ever ‘there’ is was inaccessible, disabled people are quiet, out of the way. Accepting sub-par solutions like Levene was offered makes the situation easier and go away quicker for other people, but not for us.

If Levene is anything like me, the half an hour he sat in a wheelchair that wasn’t his with no autonomy would have been utterly humiliating. If airlines expect disabled passengers to be happy to be treated like toddlers, strapped into a buggy and pushed around, they shouldn’t be surprised when we throw a tantrum. Had the fellow passengers at Luton airport seen a bloke being pushed in an airport wheelchair rather than his own they would have seen nothing untoward and  they could have carried on with their day unaware and unaffected by yet another instance of institutionalized ableism. If Levene’s friend had filmed that experience the internet would not have noticed. By crawling Levene visualized his humiliation in a way that was understandable to his audience and drew attention to the daily degradation faced by disabled people. The loss of his chair ceased to be ‘his’ problem and became ‘our’ problem.

Sometimes we have to rub the terrible treatment we deal with everyday in able bodied people’s faces. The reactions to this latest story prove this. They are always surprised but, more importantly reluctant to accept the severity of the situations into which we are placed. This is why those of us who are able to should keep performing stunts; if we are literally under the feet of able bodied people they might just have to look down and so something about it.