so if it were not for the law that made it mandatory for teachers
> to be fingerprinted (in society's zeal to track child molesters with
> criminal records), this particular 'disability' didn't have to exist!
Yes, *this particular* disability did not have to exist; it was "socially defined" in the way ideological "objects" are. But that makes the example irrelevant to the core question of the disabled. There are some "bothersome" physical (neurological) conditions (tics for example) that could, under the right historical conditions, be "socially defined" almost out of existence: People *could* learn simply not to respond to them, and then the sufferer could learn to ignore his/her own tics.
Similarly, some physical conditions could easily be "defined into" a disability. I have a little genetic curiosity: my right thumb is much thicker and shorter from knuckle to nail tip than the right. No one, including me, is bothered. But one could easily imagine circumstances in which that could be "socially defined" into a "disability" just because people "saw it" or "labelled it" a disability.
But now we get to the tricky part. I have small hands, so my thick right thumb is not that much thicker than the "average" right thumb. My uncle, who shared the trait, had big hands. And one time, I believe in his 40s, he decided he wanted to go bowling -- and discovered that he would never be able to bowl unless he ordered a bowling ball specially made that his thumb would fit. I won't try to untangle that, but I think it might show something of the scope and limits of using the California schoolteacher's situation as an instance of a disability socially defined.
One can't take really dramatic instances -- the quadriplegic or the person living in an iron lung -- as paradigmatic of the disabled because that so lends itself to the politics of excluding so-called "soft symptoms." But neither can one take instances which are made "disabilities" mostly or only because of social responses, because that could slip into a serious denial of physical reality.
Carrol