A Love Letter to Karens and the People We Choose to Hear

I have become a bit of a Karen. Not the kind who shouts at someone with less power or thinks the rules should bend around her, but the woman who asks why the service she was promised has not materialised, then asks again when the first answer does not answer the question.

Recently, airport special assistance for my AuDHD and functional seizures put me at the front of an enormous queue on the apron. I was still standing on the apron, waiting in the crowd. Apparently the special part was my position in the queue. I found myself wondering how that was supposed to help. A few years ago, I might have been too worried about seeming difficult even to wonder aloud.

In Years 10 and 11, we learnt to write and respond to opinion articles in English. Perhaps I took the assignment too literally: I thought a reasoned objection might be heard.

Studying Dickens at university raised a similar question for me. Working-class hardship was known long before he wrote about it, yet his novels could bring it to readers with the comfort and influence to look away. Why did it take a voice they recognised to make an old problem harder to dismiss?

I think about that now when I speak up about disability. Who has been saying the same thing for years without being heard? Why does it sometimes take somebody who can speak to middle- and upper-class audiences on their own terms to make an old problem seem newly urgent?

What I mean by Karen

The word “Karen” has a history that matters. It has been used to describe white women using their social position against Black people and others with less power. That behaviour deserves criticism. I am not trying to turn it into a badge of honour.

But “Karen” is also casually attached to a woman who complains, asks for an explanation, or refuses to accept a service that exists only in the policy. Class is tangled up in the sneer: we imagine her as comfortable, demanding and used to getting her own way. Sometimes that description is fair. Sometimes she has identified a real failure. Her confidence in naming it does not make the failure imaginary.

Demanding that a worker be punished for your convenience is different from asking the organisation to make access possible. The person behind the counter may have no power to redesign the process. Good advocacy knows where to direct its demands.

The advantage I cannot ignore

When I first got my diagnosis, I felt more entitled to ask for better public services, better ADHD support and better disability access. I had spent so long adapting myself to systems that did not fit; the diagnosis helped me understand that I could ask the systems to change too.

I also learned how hard it is to spot a barrier until it becomes yours. After a serious ankle sprain, I could not walk as I usually do for 12 weeks. Ordinary public spaces suddenly required planning and effort I had never noticed before. That temporary injury was a small glimpse, not a claim to understand a lifelong mobility disability. It changed what I paid attention to.

I caught myself wondering whether “I couldn’t walk properly” was ableist. I meant that I could not walk in my usual way; I was making no judgement about anyone else’s way of moving. I feel similarly about being called an autistic person, a person with autism or an autist: I care more about what the speaker means. I happen not to like “neurospicy” or “AuDHer” for myself, though I cannot quite say why. Others may love them. Listening to the person tells us more than a universal list of approved words.

Disabilities are different, and even people with the same diagnosis can need very different things. I cannot speak for every disabled person, or everyone with ADHD, autism or PTSD. Nobody can. There is something hard to cross about neurodivergent experience: someone who does not live it can listen and learn, but cannot try it on for a day; I cannot take mine off. ADHD medication does not make me neurotypical.

I have communication difficulties, yet people often do not see them because I am articulate and have what they hear as a “nice” accent. They hear the finished sentence, not the work behind it. I also have a university education, work in governance and can often put a concern in writing. I can turn “this is impossible for me” into language an institution recognises: a failed handover, an ineffective adjustment, a risk someone should own. That may help me reach people whose decisions affect others.

I dislike what that says about a society that calls itself a meritocracy. Access should not depend on sounding like the people who control it. A person’s complaint should carry weight because the problem is real, whether they arrive with a polished letter, an exhausted phone call, or no capacity left to explain themselves at all.

I know the danger of middle-class girl saviourism: assuming that because people listen to me, I should become the face of somebody else’s experience. I do not see myself as a champion for disabled people. Using my voice means being specific about what I know, listening to what others say they need, and making room for them rather than translating everything into my own story. Fear of getting that balance wrong should make me more careful, not silent.

Disabled people are already expected to find the right words and person, explain their needs repeatedly, and prove that the proposed fix helps. That unpaid work is part of the barrier. We cannot ask everyone to reinvent the wheel each time a system fails. If I can open a door, I would rather do that than leave the next person to fight alone.

What this means for further education

Further education sits right at this intersection of class, gender, disability and opportunity. A learner can have support agreed on paper yet spend weeks explaining it afresh to tutors and placement providers. An apprentice may be afraid that asking an employer for an adjustment will make them seem less capable. A woman who follows up on behalf of a disabled family member can be treated as a nuisance when she is describing the gap between a promise and a reality.

I work in risk and governance, so I see complaints as information. An adjustment form cannot tell you whether the learner could participate, the apprentice stayed, or the staff member could work without repeatedly asking for support. Those answers require listening to the people who used the system.

Leaders should also look beyond the people who feel able to complain. Who stopped attending? Who quietly gave up on an adjustment? Who cannot take time off work to chase an answer, fears the consequences of being labelled difficult, or struggles to communicate under stress? Silence may mean that the cost of speaking has become too high.

Give people a written route to raise concerns, make someone with authority responsible, check whether adjustments worked, and change the process when complaints recur. Let disabled learners and staff test access before calling it successful. Notice who is missing from the feedback.

This is a qualified love letter to the Karens who ask for better without claiming to speak for everyone. I will keep questioning that queue on the apron. One day, I hope nobody will need the right accent, vocabulary or social position to get an answer.

By Mitzi Danielson-Kaslik MICA CG, Risk, Governance & Compliance