Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suffer from a disability and so does my girlfriend. Note that our main language is French and so there is a bit of nuance to how the terms are used. Disabled is usually said "handicapé" (this word means more "incapacitated" that anything) and "person with a disability" is usually said "personne en situation de handicap" which more literally translates to "person in a disability situation" / "person currently incapa…
> If you break your legs and spend a few months in a wheelchair, you might not feel legitimate to use the term "disabled" in comparison to someone who has never been able to walk and suffers more from it. I would say "I am hungry" even if I have food in the fridge, I do not need to compare myself to poor starving people and decide to say "I am currently hungry" or "I am in a situation of hunger" > Not letting that di…
So for me your example does not count as a label. Is there no nuance at all between "being hungry" and "being disabled" in english ? If so, you're right, my argument does not stand.
> Imagine calling a midget "A person with less height" or some nonsense like that.
I think midget is pejorative so this is not a very good example. But I don't know much about that so I'll take your argument as if it wasn't at all.
I should have added that this is of course useful in some contexts. If you are talking to a specific person, then changing the language isn't very useful (except if this specific person feels the term is offensive, but that does not mean we should all change how we speek).
Where it is more useful, for example, is when you talk about limitations due to a problem. You are writing an article about height problems ? No need to say it's about dwarfism, there are other small people that might relate. You're a store and design a special help to get objects on high shelves ? No need to call it "dwarf help" or "midget help", but just "help for small people" or even "high shelf help".
In this case this is not about thinking about how to describe a person with a certain medical situation. It is about taking a step back and removing the medical situation altogether.
This applies much more to "deaf"/"hearing impaired" (or whatever, my argument is about generalizing, not about a specific term). A lot more people have difficulty hearing than are completely deaf.
Knowing about it is good. Trying to think about what your language implies is good. Forbidding the usage of words is obviously extreme and bad.