ou do not have sight but you have been blessed with vision.” This is a standard sentiment people feel compelled to express when interacting with a blind person for the first time. Those with a good grasp of Urdu say, “basaarat naheen hai par baseerat hai.”

Most recently, a manifestation of this sight-splaining was found in a widely distributed recent AFP story. Covering the match between the blind women’s teams of Pakistan and India in the inaugural Women’s T20 World Cup for the Blind, the story described the players as having “sporting vision even if they lacked sight,” ending up framing blindness as the central story rather than their performance as players. People on X (formerly, Twitter) were also more concerned about their “sporting vision” rather than their cricketing performance, with one journalist even posting the AFP caption: “Pakistan, India blind women show sporting vision with handshakes” alongside a photograph.

I often wonder why people feel the need to do this?

This need to explain sight to blind people has many parallels with mansplaining. For the uninitiated, ‘mansplaining’ is when a man explains something—such as a word, a concept or a situation—to a woman in a patronising manner, even though she might understand it better than him. So, how else can one describe the phenomenon of sighted people explaining ‘sight’ to blind people than ‘sight-splaining’?

In my over twenty years lived experience of blindness, it is always men who have shared the good news of being ‘blessed’ with ‘vision’ at the expense of sight. No woman has ever said this to me. One explanation could be that the women I have interacted with knew that I neither had sight nor vision. On a serious note, being victims of the almost daily barrage of mansplaining, women instinctively know how tedious this sight-splaining can be for blind people.

It could be argued that people mean well and no harm is intended when they indulge in sight-splaining but then, as someone rightly said, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. These platitudes of kindness may validate some inner desire to be kind towards people with disabilities but are of no use to them. The greatest problem with this world is that people want to be ‘kind’ to themselves and at the expense of being ‘right’ to others to the extent that it becomes mutually exclusive.

This unrelenting juggernaut of explaining disability to people with disabilities finds expression in official documents as well as in the expressions used by development organisations aiming to change the society for the better. There are commonly used terms and expressions which, while not openly derogatory, still reduce people to their disability conditions—worse yet, even dehumanise them.

It becomes particularly problematic when not only reductionist and medically loaded but also outright derogatory terminologies are used by government departments and organisations working in the development sector. 

I have never been able to understand the reasoning behind using the word “special” to describe people with disabilities. We all know there is nothing “special” about being a person with a disability.

“Differently-abled”? Is it not true that all of us have varying levels of ability to perform certain tasks and that we do them differently depending on what feels most comfortable? Then why do we use “differently-abled” to give a positive spin, even at the risk of reducing real people to their disability condition and otherising them?

Then there are reductionist terms, which reduce the identity of real human beings to their disability conditions such as “physically disabled,” “visually disabled” and “mentally disabled.”

It becomes particularly problematic when not only reductionist and medically loaded but also outright derogatory terminologies are used by government departments and organisations working in the development sector, especially when people-first language can be used to describe persons with disabilities accurately.

People with speech and hearing impairments are still referred to as deaf and dumb as in the case of the Deaf and Dumb Welfare Society in Lahore, the Deaf and Dumb Social Welfare Society in the Punjab, and the Balochistan Deaf and Dumb Welfare Society in Quetta. How dumb is it to call people ‘dumb’ just because they cannot communicate with them in the language they use to communicate?

In the case of people with mental health conditions, the term ‘mentally retarded’ continues to be used in the names of institutions such as the National Special Education Centre for Mentally Retarded Children in Islamabad, the Special Education Centre for Mentally Retarded in Sahiwal, the School for Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped Children under the Social Welfare Department in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the School for Mentally Retarded located within the Special Education Complex in Quetta.

The use of the term ‘mentally retarded’ is not restricted to federal and provincial governments. Some NGOs also continue to use this term, such as the Association for Retarded Children in Karachi and the Association for Retarded Children Blessing in Karachi.

It is time we learn to describe people with disabilities and their conditions as they are instead of indulging in positive or negative spins.

First of all, we need to recognise them as human beings and as people. As a group, they should be referred to as people with disabilities. Depending on the nature of their disabilities, they should be referred to as people with visual impairments, speech and hearing impairments, psychosocial impairments or physical impairments. The governments need to get rid of euphemistic, reductionist and derogatory names of institutions and bring them in harmony with language that recognises people with disabilities as human beings.

The writer is a former federal information commissioner and author of Disabled by Society. He can be reached at [email protected]. His X handle: @XahidAbdullah.