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 totally disconcerting. It’s odd and worrying. These people wear their ‘disability’ like an identity.

I note that it’s something that’s easy to have as an off the shelf accessory, it doesn’t cause the user inconvenience or physical discomfort. Nobody seems to be rocking a lymphoedema sleeve unless they really need one, even though there’s some really cool, if a bit spendy, examples out there

No , it never occurred to me that they might have self mutilated or be ' trans ' whatever that actually means. They appeared to be quite healthy and happy young people. Obviously fitter and stronger than me. Which is why the mobility aids seemed a bit incongruous.But I wouldn't read too much into it. I also saw a young lad with a bar code tattooed across his forehead. Let's face it ; a walking stick will be much easier to ditch.

Yes, why can't we go back to the good old days when disability was seen as something shameful and unseemly to be kept out of sight where possible and many disabled people were institutionalised and separated from wider society.
Things were so much better then when people were rightly ashamed of their conditions and didn't have the brass neck to wander around being visibly disabled and giving nosy judgemental parkers a fit of the vapours by not hiding away like anyone decent would do if they happened to be disabled.
I am, for the avoidance of doubt, being sarcastic, just in case that needed clarifying!

No-one should be ashamed of their disability, of course they shouldn't, but it's a bit concerning when a significant cohort of young people are very obviously all clamouring to identify as chronically unwell, disabled and emotionally and physically delicate. Whatever happened to identifying as a punk or a skater girl? Nope. Not this lot. These days it's all 'my pronouns are they/them and I identifying as someone who can't stand up for more than 15 minutes without passing out. I have a tiktok channel where I chronicle my daily swoonings and all-round feebleness. It makes me fascinating.'

Of course for some of them it will be absolutely true. But for many others it will just be something they feign and exaggerate because they are attracted to the tragic-ness of it all, the attention it gets them, and they aspire to be that unwell.

Well you might think that's a perfectly healthy and normal way for a teenager to behave but I don't. Most genuinely unwell or physically disabled young people work really hard to live as normal a life as possible and to be seen and accepted as as normal as possible. They don't want a spotlight on their health issues, they don't want pity and sympathy. They don't descend into self absorbed narcissism and attention seeking.

Of course if they should walk with a stick if they need to, and not get judgement for it. But up until very recently, no self respecting young person would dream of using a stick or a crutch or a wheelchair unless they really couldn't manage without it. Whereas now a walking stick for a certain type of girl has become a social signifier of the 'tribe' she wants to be part of. She almost certainly has issues of some sort, but those issues probably don't require a walking stick.

Remember several years ago when the tik-tok teen girls all had tourettes and were even inducing an actual tourettes like illness in themselves because of their delusions? This is the latest version of that. They now all have self diagnosed pots/long covid/cfs, use walking sticks and complain about how medical professionals are awful and just don't get it because they cant actually find anything medically wrong with them. Even my own teen dd who didnt escape the trans social contagion unscathed (out the other side now thankfully) has noticed it and can see that its mostly nonsense

In that case thank goodness for the upcoming social media ban for under 16s.

Here is an artice about the tourettes contagion. I think a similar phenomenon might also be behind the increase in young people self diagnosing as autistic/adhd etc and various other mental health conditions. A girl who attended school with my daughter even insisted she had DID and many "alter" personalities, as well as being trans, adhd, autistic, BPD and god knows what else. This was at 12/13 years old btw. I mean, what are the actual odds? Scary what social media can do to young brains

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9014744/

no self respecting young person would dream of using a stick or a crutch or a wheelchair unless they really couldn't manage without it

I really don't wish to return to those days . I spent from my mid teens onwards struggling intensely with standing for long periods or walking long distances. I missed out on all kinds of life experiences (concerts, festivals, city breaks, art galleries and museums....) because I knew my body couldn't manage them. Companies like Cool Crutches and insta bloggers who were ambulatory wheelchair users helped me accept the help of mobility aids and it has opened up the world to me.

I have seen young men (wearing skirts) doing this in Oxford. I was puzzled by seeing three in one day.

I've noticed an increase in young blokes wearing skirts/dresses on warm days. Not in some making a statement, or trying-to-be-feminine or showy, outrageous ways, just having a long black skirt or a plain, utilitarian type dress on as ordinary clothes.

I think it's bloody brilliant! It totally should be normalised because there has been so much shame attached to clothes associated with women, and the whole idea of 'femininity' being shameful and embarrassing if expressed in some way by a man. I have said for years that I think it would actually really be a positive if men would wear skirts more to help erase this idea that it's shameful and humiliating for men to be seen in 'women's clothes' (which, of course, weren't 'women's clothes' for much of history or in other parts of the world)

Indeed. togas and kilts spring to mind for starters

Oh I hadn't heard of Tourettes contagion.

I do remember reading that prior to Flora Rheta Schreiber best selling book, Sybil and then Hollywood movie made starring Sally Field, there had only been 3 documented cases of 'multiple personality disorder.' afterwards with the book & movie there was an explosion and suddenly there were thousands. It was all later debunked as a bit of a fraud put together by three women. MPD seems to have fallen out of fashion as you rarely hear people claiming that they have it today, but it the 1970s it was all the rage.

It does suggest a certain suggestibility.

A girl from Hong Kong that I work with said that they'd already had the walking stick trend a few years previously (before London 2025) and thought it was connected to an anime/manga girl character with a walking stick and multicoloured hair. She also said something about chunky soled shoes/boots completing the look.

I can't say I've seen as many this summer as there were everywhere last year.

Has anyone else noticed how everyone seems to be 'blindsided' today?

I overheard a woman at work say 'I got home and she'd bought Tetley instead of Yorkshire and I was totally blindsided.'

Seriously, over a teabag? It seems to be the 'in' word at the mo.

So what would you rather? People hiding their disabilities more, maybe not in your face as much in case you find it disconcerting?
🙄
This thread is sick.

I love a kilt on a man, and I'd be totally up for seeing a blokey version of dresses and skirts for boys and a fashion trend that really took off. It would certainly take the wind out of the sails of those people with penises who think that the simple act of putting on a dress or a skirt automatically defines them as a woman.

My son has started wearing skirts. Yungblud has done a range for Weekday which includes a denim "kilt."
https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/productpage.1342150001.html

Love those. Such a strong look. I've seen Yungblud in something similar. My son is a bit too old now but if he'd been 16 or 18 now, he and a few of his friends would definitely have gone for that look.

Everlore This reminded me of an incident that happened to me a few years ago. I use a crutch when I'm out and about as I have quite bad osteoarthritis in one of my hips. Whilst queuing at the tills in a shop with my DD,a member of staff opened another till whereby the woman behind us nipped round in front of us. My DD said to her it would have been nice to let my disabled mum go first, seeing as she was actually in the queue in front of you. The woman said 'If your mum can't cope with standing in a queue for a few minutes,maybe she'd be better off staying at home,in bed'. For once,I was lost for words.

I am a physically disabled adult. Before that I was a physically disabled teenager and before that a physically disabled child so, forgive me if I am wrong, but I am guessing I may be more qualified to comment on this subject from personal experience than you.
I have been immediately obviously disabled all my life, having been born without eyes and with multiple joint deformities. I never had the luxury of 'downplaying' or hiding my disability which must mark me as a failure in your eyes since you seem to think that making our disabilities as invisible as possible should be the goal for all disabled people.
I adopted a bright and distinctive style of dress as a teenager in an attempt to establish an identity for myself beyond being primarily seen as a 'blind girl', though this wasn't quite as effective as a distraction technique as I hoped. It does mean, however, that I fell into the group of teenage weirdos with brightly dyed hair and wacky clothes you are accusing of faking disabilities here and I can tell you, with some certainty, that adopting a quirky dress sense does not magically render one able-bodied. I did not miraculously sprout eyeballs the day I first had my hair dyed! Disability and individual style are not mutually exclusive concepts which appears to be the conclusion you have, somewhat bafflingly, reached.
If you are genuinely interested in why young disabled people may choose to adopt alternative forms of dress then please see my post earlier in this thread. I hope this will help you not to make knee-jerk assumptions about every young person you see carrying a walking stick while not dressed in dowdy clothes.

There’s a lot of different points being made in this thread and I can see why offence is, at times, being taken.

I think the thrust of the thread was to shine a light on a subset of girls who identify as needing walking sticks, rather than having these recommended by healthcare professionals.

Often these girls self diagnose POTS and connective tissue disorders. They tend to find a sense of belonging with each other, with these self diagnoses forming a major part of their identity.

We seem to be talking at cross purposes. It's clear that many of these young people have no disabilities at all. If I had a disability I'd love a cool crutch . Or a sturdy blackthorn stick. Or whatever.

If there's been a huge surge in the number of disabled teenagers, surely that is worthy of comment? Likewise if there has been an epidemic of , neuro diverse , selectively mute , ADHD . But it does look more like social contagion.

I am a physically disabled adult. Before that I was a physically disabled teenager and before that a physically disabled child so, forgive me if I am wrong, but I am guessing I may be more qualified to comment on this subject from personal experience than you.

I actually think that people with disabilities will find it significantly harder to see what is happening now and view it objectively because of their experiences.

In the same way, in the sex/gender debate we have seen so many adult trans people say that young children who say that they have dysphoria should always be believed and affirmed, because that's what they would have wanted when they were younger. But they are blind to the social contagion aspect and don't see the harm that is caused by blind affirmation. They downplayed any suggestion that this might be something different, and said that people who were not trans did not understand/there was just a moral panic.

Would a person who actually has Tourette's be more qualified to discuss the Tourette's social-media driven contagion that took place a few years ago?

This isn't about why young people who already use sticks are choosing brightly-coloured sticks or outfits. Until a few years ago, I had only occasionally seen a young person with stick, and if they had happened to choose a brightly-coloured one or had bright hair I wouldn't have batted an eyelid. But it's the massive increase in numbers that makes me think there is something else going on here. If you don't live in a big city with a student population won't have seen this phenomenon and won't get why people are concerned.

I object to fake disabilities - not real ones.