the only "adversity" aimee mullins says she has ever had to overcome is what?
The opportunity of adversity
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Mullins set up earth records using prosthetic devices, she'due south an actress and model
- She believes people aren't disabled; society disables people when information technology denies their potential
- Mullins: The stigma of amputation is largely gone in the United States thanks to engineering
New York (CNN) -- People come up to Aimee Mullins all the time and say, "you know, I have to tell you lot, y'all but don't look disabled."
The record-setting athlete, actress and model says, "And it's sweetness because I know that they're confused, and they're telling me this because they know I'm missing both legs from the shin downwardly, only they're presented with this package of a highly capable young woman. This has happened all over the world. I tell them it's interesting considering I don't feel disabled."
She believes that people are not born disabled. "It's society that disables an individual by not investing in enough inventiveness to allow for someone to prove us the quality that makes them rare and valuable and capable."
Mullins was born without fibula bones and was expected to use a wheelchair to go around. Her legs were amputated beneath the knees when she was a year old. She learned to walk, bicycle, swim and play sports using prosthetics.
While a student at Georgetown University, she competed in the NCAA Division I, using pioneering carbon-cobweb prosthetic devices designed to imitate the hind legs of a cheetah. At the Paralympics in 1996, she ready globe records in several track events, drawing attention that landed her on magazine covers and in one media "best of" list after another.
Mullins was featured in a 1999 prove past the late mode designer Alexander McQueen and has gone on to a career as an actress. In an interview with CNN.com, she said she'south offset work on a screenplay near the life of scientist Rosalind Franklin, whose discoveries helped lead to the unlocking of the structure of Deoxyribonucleic acid.
In a talk at concluding yr's TED MED conference in San Diego, Mullins explored the concept of disability and talked about how overcoming adversity is something everyone must face up, in 1 way or another. [TED is a nonprofit that distributes talks on a wide variety of subjects at http://www.ted.com/; TED MED is a divide organization that focuses on medical and health care related issues.]
Mullins spoke to CNN Mon. Here's an edited transcript:
CNN: Yous spoke at the TED MED briefing nearly the negative connotations of the term "disabled." How important is information technology that we get the linguistic communication right?
Aimee Mullins: Information technology's non so much the word itself. The idea of being politically correct is not the goal here. It's how we utilise the word very casually as a label to try to encompass somebody'due south value to our community and the worth of their contribution to our community. That's what we demand to get right.
I've had so many letters from parents or medical professionals who will say, I didn't fifty-fifty think near how casually I'll tell someone oh, I have a disabled child. It never even occurred to them that if they really finish to think about information technology, their child may have a specific medical condition that can exist defined as paralysis or autism or beingness an amputee. ...it's how we utilise words and how they shape what we think about deviation and other people in our community.
CNN: In your own life, how significant take these kinds of words been?
Mullins: Well for me I never e'er felt the ownership or any identity with any community of disabilities. I didn't grow upwards beingness told that I was a disabled kid. Subsequently the '96 games, and I was competing in Segmentation I track at Georgetown and I was starting to get mainstream printing ... where I'd be on the encompass of a magazine that was heralding my speed and athletic prowess and it would say, "Disabled athlete Aimee Mullins runs faster than most people on the planet with flesh and os legs." And I thought how does a journalist miss that, and just casually write "disabled athlete."
I've had journalists request me what do we call you -- is it handicapped , are y'all disabled, physically challenged? I said well hopefully you lot could just call me Aimee. But if you have to draw it, I'm a bilateral below the knee amputee.
Ten years later on, watching Oscar Pistorius go through many of the aforementioned issues I had 10-12 years agone, I realized that our language merely hasn't defenseless up with the opportunities engineering is providing for people...
I feel similar today there's a different sense, so much more widespread, of people feeling like they don't want to be negated, they don't want to exist marginalized, they desire to make their own definitions of their identity. They want to identify themselves.
CNN: You have said that at that place's a stigma relating to differences between people. Practise y'all think, just setting the word aside, is there still a stigma relating to physical limitations such as existence an amputee?
Mullins: There's much, much less of a stigma here. It's my ain personal experience that parents of children today who are amputees have an entirely different view. I call up a lot of this is considering of the Net. They have then much more access to information and to learn about what prosthetics are out there. And a sense of sheer numbers, to learn that you're not solitary. ...
I've been in developing countries where existence an amputee and indeed having any kind of concrete or intellectual or emotional disability is highly stigmatized. I was in Kibera [in Nairobi, Kenya], i of the largest slums in the globe, terminal fall, and mothers of babies born with club feet are encouraged to abandon these children. If the babies are born with Down's syndrome, they're encouraged to abandon them.
If the female parent doesn't really abandon the child, the child is kept in a backroom in a shack and literally does non run into the light of day. And the child is non even counted. When I asked a mother how many children she had, she told me she had three, simply there were four. I was sitting in their living room and her three year onetime had been built-in with his caput enlarged and the rest of his body wasn't developing at the same rate.
I had a really disturbing message from a physician who was at TED MED and heard me speak and went to Haiti immediately later the earthquake -- he'due south an anesthesiologist. And he said, we have to talk because I accept then many patients down here who are choosing death over amputation.
And and so I'm sure that part of the social stigma in a developing country when employment and piece of work are already scarce, it's difficult for people to imagine how they could back up their family financially with a unlike torso.
CNN: How does engineering science play into this and how is it changing the lives of amputees?
Mullins: Applied science's a huge factor. In that location had been a existent dearth of technological advancement since the last world state of war. ...
I grew up as a teenager having this wonderful naivete about, well I tin can become encounter something that James Cameron dreamt up and [Oscar-winning visual effects designer] Stan Winston built it. Why can't I have that for my body? Or I would go into Madame Tussaud's wax museum and come across the kind of artistry was done in that location for a leg. Why tin't I combine that with Stan Winston's doing?
Watch James Cameron'due south talk at TED2010
It was a very alone voice echoing in the wilderness... And I really think because of the ii wars we are in right now and because of the fact that we have so many immature men and women in this situation, information technology'southward unthinkable that nosotros're willing to make a 19-year old irrelevant by not giving them their capabilities. And that's why you're seeing and then many leaps in progress.
Over again with the growth of the Internet, then many more people are saying I found some designer in Silicon Valley who's using a 3-D printer to create a model of a prosthetic leg and customize it and print it out. At that place is that sense of possibility that'due south been and so expanded because of technology and because so many more than people take accepted this invitation to come into the chat. I've had fashion designers, graphic designers, and advice designers, people who don't have technology backgrounds, who don't have medical backgrounds, who are very intrigued by the idea of creating prosthetics for assistive devices...
The idea of prosthetics is a tool. Most people's jail cell phones are prosthetics. If you leave your cell phone at home, yous feel impacted past not having it. It's an important part of your daily office and what you can practise in a day.
CNN: How much of your own time do you devote to raising awareness about these issues?
Mullins: I'thou not an advocate for disability issues. Human bug are what involvement me. Yous can't possibly speak for a diverse group of people. I don't know what it's like to be an arm amputee, or have fifty-fifty one flesh-and-bone leg, or to have cerebral palsy.
I don't speak for such huge and diverse groups. What I've tried to do, what I've been fortunate to exercise, is to live my live and create my life as I've wanted to create it. To be able to live with such an autonomy has itself raised sensation.
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Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/09/mullins.beyond.disability/index.html