Girls Using Walking Sticks

[Arran2024]

I saw a post about this on X this morning. Apparently it is a trend.

Anyway, I went into town this afternoon and sure enough, I saw a number of young women with walking sticks. None of them looked like they were leaning hard on their stick, just kind of walking along like it was a big umbrella.

Is anyone else seeing this?

It's because of the people attacking the disabled that i am worried that some people are using it as a lifestyle choice, as this will give these critics ammunition.

I just blocked a woman on X who was horrible to me about motability cars. Really abusive.

One of my daughters has tonic clonic epilepsy. People pretend they have had a seizure as an excuse to get out of trouble.

Theme parks, theatres etc have made it so difficult to get a free carer pass because of the number of people trying it on.

It drives me mad. I just saw another potential appropriation issue and saw red!

But happy to be put right about a genuine, sudden increase in use of this particular aid.

How would beta blockers help POTS.
with POTS your blood doesn’t get up to your brain fast enough. I can’t see what restricting your heart rate would do other than make things worse surely?

I can completely understand your concerns. It's not an easy time to have a disability (obviously there is never an easy time but it's dire just now) or care for someone who has one.

X is just horrendous.

I'm just being cynical because I'm probably coming from a similar perspective of concern. That there's loads of bashing against disabled people right now.

As pp said, time will tell. Maybe we'll now have confirmation bias because everyone on this thread will be looking out for it!

Many of the conditions listed on these pages cause people to collapse. If you are noticing people with sticks, multiply it up by thousands and thousands to get the number of people who could collapse out and about - possibly heading to the loo if they feel ill.

Over 7 million have heart disease, every few minutes people die of strokes and heart attacks. 11% of cardiac attacks are on the loo. I know of a teenage girl who fainted and got life changing head injuries as she wasn’t supported when she fell.

I have mixed emotions about this thread. But it is a good example of why I want everyone to use the toilet of their sex. Single sex toilets can have door gaps.

Mixed sex toilets are private with doors from floor to ceiling so more dangerous for people who are at risk of ending up on the floor of the toilet room/cubicle without anyone knowing. Same dangers with assaults of course - you don’t know how many people are in there.

Seeing as there seem to be a lot of new names on this thread I thought I would raise awareness of why unisex toilets don’t work for anyone at their most vulnerable.

Couldn't it be more that young people who need a walking aid are feeling more comfortable using them? To me, that's a good thing!

With there being a big disability 'branch' of identity politics, I also guess that some disabled people have bought into identity politics and are deciding they are non-binary and want blue hair, rather than blue-haired non-binary people "deciding" they have a disability?

I do understand people's suspicion to a degree, thanks to the 'oppression points' concept that comes with identity politics: i.e. it might seem tempting for people totally wrapped up in it to exaggerate or fake a disability to gain more 'oppression points', but I think that's rare and we shouldn't treat disabled people with disdain and suspicion because there's a tiny possibility they're faking it!

"Is it a trend? Where's the evidence that there is any social contagion?"

Look at photos of any pride parade and you'll a large amount of young trans, 'queer' and non binary indentified females using canes. It is a trend amongst that demographic, otherwise the increase would be seen across the board and it really isnt. Doesnt mean that other young people with disabilities don't exist but despite what people are insisting on here, its really not that common for young people to need walking aids, certainly no where near 15%.

To add, I'm sure in the case of some females using puberty blockers and testosterone, they do really need them due to the damage being done to their bodies as a result.

Hi, sorry but it was just a personal experience. The physios gave me a pair of bentwood sticks so that I could keep the weight of my upper body off my lower spine. As my lower back improved I simply forgot that I needed the sticks and forgot to take them with me. I know that I left one one the Tube. God alone knows what happened to the other one.

I have hypermobility and was in a wheelchair for 5 years because of the severity of displacia in my hips. I used walking aids following these years because I absolutely could not walk unaided. I have worked very hard through physio to the point I don’t use walking aids now but some days the pain is so severe I struggle to walk short distances or manage stairs. My current physio says it’s unlikely my pain will ever be less than a 5/10 and all I can do is manage and continue to keep the muscles around my joints working.

It’s very possible to have the same conditions at different severity levels to other people, shocking though that may be. The kind of joint pain that can be experienced and actual damage done because of extremely loose joints and repeated dislocations is no fucking joke.

Some people with hypermobility experience no pain. Some of us have severe problems and impairments from childhood/adolescence.

There was also some talk about teens self diagnosing Tourettes and DID from Tik Tok a while back. I remember reading an article and also discussing it with a friend as several of her teenagers friends had developed tics and were saying it was Tourettes. They were also trans/enby.

Yup, I saw this at a concert a couple of months ago. Totally filled with blue-haired non-binary women in their teens and very early 20s. Weirdly a lot with canes.

Since then I have noticed it's a thing with the young identity obsessed.

I've interpreted it as the next thing after mental health and "neurodivergency" being the focus for identity. People complained no one was paying attention to disability, so....

And I will be clear, I absolutely think it's a trend associated with id pol, because all of the young people I've seen in the doing it are from that group.

If it was a real change in people's health, or medical practice, that wouldn't be the case.

Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. The name describes quick changes in posture causing fast heartbeat. There are also other symptoms. Most people have immediate (I'm not sure you can call them) reflexes in the autonomic nervous system that compensate for sudden changes in blood flow, such as happen when you stand up. People with POTS have trouble with that.

Frankly, it's bizarre.

We all know there are dishonest or deluded people in the world. Who will pretend all kinds of things.

Surely we also all know what kinds of crazy things people will believe about "identity" we can see it all around us. We can see it with gender identity, we can sometimes see it in groups that believe they are being possessed by spirits, there was the girls in the US all going to their doctors with what they claimed was tourettes.

Why would anyone think that couldn't or wouldn't happen with any other condition?

That doesn't mena anyone who knows these things believes they don't exist.

It boggles my mind that anyone who is a real sufferer would defend people engaging in this kind of fakery, either consciously or nt.

It boggles my mind that people can't see that their thinking has become twisted. If it has, don't you even on some level acknowledge it? Defending others saying that they're judging people on sight whether they think they have a disability or not via age, hair colour etc. 🙄
How would you even know what disabilities people have just by looking at them?!
Transphobia really does hurt everyone, doesn't it? Women who don't "look" feminine enough. Now it seems women who don't "look" disabled and/or have purple hair and are young and use a walking stick. Must be doing it due to social contagion, or as a pp alluded, it's a big conspiracy driven by........
(don't think they ever came back to clarify, was pretty clear what they were trying to say though)

Isn't this part-and-parcel to TRA gaslighting? We're told not to believe our eyes - that obvious men could simply be women who don't look feminine enough, that the enormous increase in young people, especially girls, identifying as trans was akin to left-handedness, that the high correlation with autism was unremarkable. Once again we're being asked not to see a large spike in young women and girls using mobility canes who seem to be especially associated with alternative, on-line youth culture. And of course that injunction comes with shaming: if we did take note it's because we're psychologically deranged, it's not that we're seeing an obvious social trend of dis-regulated behavior around us, it's because we've become emotionally dis-regulated.

Of course it's possible that the observation is an illusion, that this cohort of mobility cane users has always been there we just haven't noticed before. It's also conceivable as some have argued that the epidemic has an underlying organic cause like long COVID. But the TRA approach to debate is not to contest evidence but to gaslight.

I'm not a "TRA"- go off on the usual trying to discredit anyone speaking out though if it makes you feel better 🙄

I was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease as a 20-year-old. Previously a very active person, I then had to use a walking stick to get around, and on occasion, a wheelchair. I wasn’t doing it for fun, identity purposes, and I certainly didn’t think it helped me look cool. In fact, I thought I looked like an elderly person, invisible, and ugly.

I think these issues are much more complex than they seem on the surface, and it doesn’t help to to frame other people as ‘dishonest’ or ‘deluded’ in such circumstances.

"I'm not a 'TRA'"

Fair enough. But, I wasn't accusing you specifically of being a TRA. In fact I phrased my response to avoid that implication:

"Isn't this part-and-parcel to TRA gaslighting? "

I was pointing out the trope of using 'transphobia' to gaslight people, i.e. arguing that it's the alleged transphobe (unproven) who has the delusion (due to their transphobia) - so their observations can't be trusted, even by themselves - instead of addressing the substance of the debate.

If neurodivergent/autistic people are more likely to dye their hair vivid colours and be non-binary, then you would expect to see a higher proportion of "blue-haired non-binary women" to be using canes, as autism is linked with many physical health conditions including EDS, chronic fatigue, congenital heart disease, fainting, and fibromyalgia, all of which might make someone more likely to use a cane.

people with ADHD have high levels of risk taking behaviour which can lead to physical consequences, lack of control over your body is also more likely to lead to injury

So as a way of arguing that this walking stick phenomenon definitely isn't a social contagion thing, we are asked to consider that girls with ADHD and a stick might be hobbling around on sprained ankles because their ADHD meant they couldn't resist the urge to jump off a very tall wall?

I think that's a bit of a stretch, frankly.

OMG this place gets worse 😱🤣
So she apparently sometimes is able to stand she should "just stand the fuck up?!"
People can have better days than others where they have bad days. Or she may have been highlighting that there was literally no assistance for disabled wheelchair users so they'd be stuck - surely you're not so ignorant that you think anyone could just stand up and "stop playing victim?"
You sound delightful hotrendous

I knew someone would jump at me.

i made my comment based on that creators own information. If she can fucking stand up any other time and skip about the fucking park she can stand up and get off the bloody train.

Im The first to defend disabled people, what with being one myself and all, but don’t be acting like you are fucking stuck on a train when you upload multiple videos of you being absolutely able to get yourself help if needed. It’s pathetic.

Agreed. Being able to stand or walk short distances SOME days is not the same as being able to stand up and safely lift their wheelchair onto the train by themselves. Its not that fucking hard to see you just have to not be a cunt