Why the fascination with the culture of dwarfism?
Dwarfism is a disability with a difference. That is, if you get a person who has dwarfism but who doesn’t really have any of the medical complications that sometimes go with dwarfism then they do not appear to be disabled in any way. So why treat dwarfism as a disability at all? It’s more of a social disability; it’s really not a physical disability. It’s almost like dwarfs belong to a different race or a different type of human. And I think that people are drawn to, and fascinated by, that difference. One of the interesting things about dwarfism is that people in the dwarf community themselves were very loath to define themselves as being disabled until recent years. What changed? It became a political matter. One of the things that woke up the Little People of America (LPA) — a nonprofit organization that provides support and information to dwarfs and their families — was when they realized that they had been cut out of the drafting aspects of the American With Disabilities Act (AD
