This is The Guardian.

A time.

It feels as if the disability rights movement won.

After years of groundwork, 1981 was declared the International Year of Disabled Persons.

I was born that year, in Oslo, Norway, and though I did not receive my first diagnosis

of the world's most recent birth certificate, I was born this year in Oslo, Norway, and I did

not receive my first diagnosis of muscular dystrophy until I was a toddler, the coincidences

apt enough.

I was born into a world that was, at last, beginning to recognize this aspect of my

being in it.

Then, from 1983 to 1992, came the United Nations Decade of Disabled Persons, and the Americans

with Disabilities Act, the UK's Disability Discrimination Act, and the UN Convention on the

Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The turn of the millennium was marked by a litany of good intentions and disavowals of

unequal treatment, by an endorsement, as the first article of the UN Convention has

it, of disabled people's right to, full and effective participation in society on an

equal basis with others.

I came of age in this world, more or less protected by these rights.

In Norway, which produced its own act in 2008, I received an education, found work, and

started a family.

I am writing this as a tenured professor, as well protected as a member of a protected

class can be, and yet I am writing with a feeling, as Tony Soprano had it, that I came

...