Temporarily Able-Bodied

The term Temporarily Able Bodied (TAB) was created by disability self-advocates in the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) to describe those people who are not disabled. The anti-disability advocates use the term "humorous" and other putdowns to minimize the observations and viewpoints of these advocates.

Like other publicly used concepts, these terms are first used without being published into any form of softcopy or hardcopy. Publishing has many barriers to minority or innovative versions of reality, since publishing is socially constructed. One of the weaknesses therefore of published sources is that they do not include non-published usages, regardless of how widely used these uses are.

TABs are argued to be a temporary version of human life, used by the politically dominant populations during their alert-hours of the peak-performance years of the dominant politically-favored social group. This dominant social group is correctly sensed by underschooled and under-educated persons, for example most of those people without exposure to secondary formal education, especially children. The socially "disabled" persons are those who do not fit the statistical norm of the neighbourhood population. Usually this statistical norm is determined physically: height, weight, skin-color, hair-color, skin & limb imperfections.

After the "What You See Is What You Get" WYSIWYG phase of human social life, come other sociological and psychological factors which define the TAB. Usually Age, Sex, Social Caste, ... are determined correctly or not by WYSIWYG camouflage. However since both TABs and Disabled People are both able to give wrong visual signals on WYSIWYG, these give-away signals are usually exaggerated to suggest the more politically favored social construction.

A very common example: short people often wear high-uplifting clothing and footwear, with over-dominant adult personas of a higher social caste, to try to avoid the supposed priviledges that belong to larger, heavier, taller persons. Despite rational and scientific evidence then, these shorter, lighter people do not become aerospace or racing drivers (except on camels and horses).

Notes

* Ann Rae, What's in a Name? article reproduced from International Rehabilitation Review 1989, retrieved from Centre for Disability Studies, University of Leeds [1] July 24, 2006 - p.3 credits Judy Heumann with introducing the term "TAB" in England