Woman slammed for asking disabled man to move on the bus
A woman has been slammed online for asking a disabled man on a bus to move so that she and her daughter could sit together.
The 32-year-old mother took to Reddit’s “Am I The A**hole?” platform to ask social media users if she was in the wrong.
In the post, she wrote that her and her five-year-old daughter boarded the bus at a “busy stop”, noting that “there were no empty seats available, except for one near a person using a wheelchair” – who she described as a man aged about 40.
“I asked the person if [he] could move [his] wheelchair to another spot so that my daughter and I could sit together, but the person declined,” she wrote.
The man in the wheelchair responded to her request and said no, saying he needed the space for his “mobility device”.
“I was taken aback and frustrated by his response,” she wrote.
She told the man that her daughter “was very young and needed to sit next to me for safety reasons” – yet the person still “refused to move”.
“I ended up having to stand for the entire ride with my daughter in tow, which was uncomfortable and tiring for both of us,” she said.
The woman recalled how she told her friend about the public transport incident, to which her friend told her she was being “insensitive and ableist”.
The writer’s friend told her “that the person in the wheelchair had a right to the space” he needed, and “that it was unfair” of her to ask the man in the wheelchair to move on such a crowded bus.
“Now, I’m questioning whether or not I was wrong for asking the person to move,” the mother concluded her post.
The post, which has racked up thousands of comments, was flooded by horrified users questioning how someone could ask a disabled person to move out of their designated space.
“Imagine being so entitled that you genuinely think standing up on your perfectly good, working legs is so awful and tiring that you ask someone who is physically unable to stand to get out of your way,” one person wrote.
“The five-year-old could have just stood. Seriously, when did five-year-olds become so fragile that they can’t stand for a bus trip. Parenting like this damages children. They are being taught that they are pathetic,” someone else wrote.
Another person defended the mum’s insistence that her daughter be able to sit down for the bus ride.
“It’s about safety. Children can easily fall in buses because they can’t reach the places to hold onto, since those are made for adults,” they wrote.
But others who “used to take the bus a lot” declared that “mothers with kids are the most entitled bus users [that] exist”.
“One can only hope [the woman] comes to realise how lucky she is she can even stand and walk without any trouble at all, and that the next time there are no seats on the bus, she would just suck it up for a few minutes of the ride,” one wrote.
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