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By Crystal Lindell
When I was still working full-time in the corporate world, I often had to go to trade conferences where I’d spend 12-hour days walking a show floor the size of multiple football fields.
I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and intercostal neuralgia, so even with very strong pain medication, it was often too much for me.
I knew that using a walking aid, like a cane or even an electric scooter, would have made the whole experience easier, but I never used them. I feared rude comments and judgements from all the professional interactions I had slated during my many meetings.
Instead, I suffered through it, barely able to keep myself upright by the end of my travels.
It didn’t have to be that way. I could have used a walking stick, a cane, or a scooter. It was only the very valid fear of social judgment and stigma that kept those tools from me.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that this happened years ago, the repulsion toward young women using mobility aids is still alive and well.
Recently, Kathleen Stock wrote a disparaging column for The Times (UK) titled, “Why are Young Women Using Walking Sticks?” (You can get a pay-wall free link here).
Stock wrote about the “disproportionate number of Gen Z females” using walking sticks or canes to get around. She dismissed it as some kind of pity play by shallow young women who are trying to draw attention.
“The message sent to onlookers is about a life spent in pain; though what kind of pain, exactly, remains unclear,” Stock wrote. “Rather than it being cruel to say this, in fact, it is cruel not to. We owe it to potentially able-bodied young people to challenge their tendencies to neuroticism and fear; to get them out into the world as functioning adults, wherever that is possible. For their sake, we need to help them ditch the props, and — quite literally — to stand on their own two feet.”
Stock’s only proof of this is that she has supposedly seen groups of young women “leaning on a walking stick as they edge gingerly along.” She claimed there were hundreds of TikTok videos instructing people how to live life with mobility aids.
Even taking her assertion at face value, one could be forgiven for assuming Stock may want to explore the very valid causes that could be leading more women to need mobility aids.
Causes like the mass disabling pandemic we’ve been dealing with since 2020, or the fact that climate change is making chronic illness symptoms worse. Or that our healthcare system doesn’t work very well.
But no, Stock doesn’t bother with any of that. Instead, she accuses the women of catching the dreaded virus of “social contagion.”
“When you dig into their explanations, a few officially medical-sounding words tend to recur: postural tachycardia, joint hypermobility, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue,” she writes. “What these syndromes all share is a set of non-specific symptoms, versions of which are familiar to all of us: dizziness, a racing heart, exhaustion, brain fog, muscle pain. And of course, many of these are also symptoms of anxiety, the defining emotion of teenage years.”
I was personally unaware that anxiety could cause things like joint hypermobility, but umm, ok. Let’s see where she goes with this.
Stock adds, “Could it be, then, that some are taking a cue from internet influencers, overanalyzing normal experiences and talking themselves into a disabled state?”
Why are we even still having this conversion in 2026? Imagine saying that about people who need reading glasses, hearing aids, or wheelchairs.
Even if her assertion is true – that more young women are using walking canes – who cares? It doesn’t impact anyone else at all when someone uses a cane!
Stock seems to think that using a walking aid will “make you different, special, excused from the pressures of life, pleasingly fussed over by strangers.”
It’s such a gross statement with zero basis in reality.
One day, if she lives long enough, Stock will also need a mobility aid. Then she will immediately find out how much nonsense she was spouting.
As someone who has used various types of mobility aids like crutches and even electric scooters, I can confirm that zero people “pleasantly fuss” over you in such cases. And while you may stand out as “different,” it’s only in the worst possible way.
Most people still hate having to see anything that reminds them of the frailty of the human body. Some will angrily make you aware of that fact as soon as they see your walking boot.
For its part, the Ehlers-Danlos Society offered a much more eloquent response than I could summon about Stocks’ drivel. They rightly point out how damaging columns like this are in major media publications.
“Every day we hear from people around the world who are challenged for using accessible parking, questioned about their need for mobility aids, told they are too young to be disabled, or have their symptoms dismissed because they do not fit assumptions about what illness or disability should look like,” the society said in a statement. “These experiences contribute to delayed diagnosis, barriers to healthcare, discrimination, and poorer quality of life.”
The bottom line is, whether you need a walking aid, wheelchair or reading glasses, you should be able to use them in peace, without sneering judgement from people like Kathleen Stock.
