Kathleen Stock has written a column in the Times asking why so many young women are suddenly using walking sticks. She calls their conditions "vague syndromes." She raises the spectre of "social contagion." She acknowledges, almost in passing, that doctors have a long, well-documented history of not believing young women when they report symptoms. And then, in the very same piece, she does this very thing.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as pure fury, and fury is easy to dismiss. So let me be precise about what I'm objecting to, and why I think it matters far beyond one newspaper column.
The argument that eats itself
Stock's piece contains its own contradiction, and it's worth sitting with it rather than rushing past it.
She notes that women's pain has historically been minimised, medicalised as anxiety, or waved away as stress. That's true, and it's good that she says it. But then she pivots: this time, she suggests, the pattern is different. This time the young women reaching for mobility aids are not an underserved population finally being seen, they're a trend, a contagion, a generation performing fragility because disability has somehow become desirable.
You cannot hold both of these positions with a straight face. Either doctors and commentators have a pattern of not believing women's bodies, or a rise in visible disability among young women is best explained by fashion and TikTok. Stock wants credit for acknowledging the first while doing the second in the same breath.
What a walking stick is actually for
Here is the part that I think reveals the whole piece for what it is. Stock argues that people who spend their time sitting or lying down become less fit and feel worse, and suggests, in effect, that young women should be encouraged to stop leaning on their aids and get moving.
But a walking stick is the getting moving. That's the entire point of it. Mobility aids don't take people out of the world, they're what lets people re-enter it. The alternative to a stick, for a lot of us, isn't walking unaided. It's not walking at all. It's the couch, the missed shifts, the cancelled plans, the shrinking radius of a life. If Stock is worried about deconditioning, she is worried about precisely the thing a walking stick prevents, and worried about it while looking directly at the evidence that it's working, because the young women she's writing about are out on the street, being seen, participating.
The only way this makes sense as an argument is if the real objection isn't mobility aids at all. It's who's using them, how young and how visibly. There's an old idea underneath all of this, that to use an aid is to be weak, fragile, seeking pity. Stock's invocation of stiff-upper-lip stoicism as the alternative is that idea in its oldest clothes. It's not new insight dressed as concern. It's the same instruction women have been given for generations: don't make a fuss, don't ask for help, suffer quietly and you'll be respected for it. That instruction has never made anyone healthier. It has only made them quieter about being sick.
This is a public health story, not a cultural war
What actually changed, demographically, in the last five years? We lived through a pandemic that killed roughly seven million people worldwide and left millions more with lasting illness. Research has repeatedly shown that post-viral conditions, Long Covid among them, disproportionately affect women, and that conditions like POTS, dysautonomia, ME/CFS and fibromyalgia have surged in its wake. Estimates put the number of Americans disabled by Long Covid alone in the millions.
That is not a marginal detail. That is the headline. If you are asking "why are there suddenly more young women with unstable, unpredictable bodies," and you don't lead with "we just lived through a mass-disabling event," you are not asking the question in good faith, you're asking it to infuriate and antagonise for click-bait.
The genuinely dangerous part isn't that Stock got the explanation wrong. It's the message the piece sends to anyone currently in the position I was once in: that reaching for support is suspect, that disability has to be earned through visible suffering to be believed, that using a stick invites public judgement rather than public acceptance. That message doesn't make anyone better. It makes them hide longer, present later, and get sicker in the meantime. Illness left unaddressed doesn't resolve itself out of embarrassment. It progresses.
What that message cost me
I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, POTS, and dysautonomia. I also, it turned out, had a serious autoimmune disease underneath all of it, the thing actually driving the rest.
Before any of that had a name, I reported fatigue, a racing heart, light-headedness, temperature regulation that had stopped working, breathing that didn't feel right, a body that was quietly failing. I was told it was anxiety. Stress. New motherhood. The condescension had a very long list of names, and none of them were the right one.
I had to fight my own internalised bias before I could even fight my doctors'. I didn't want to use a walking stick after I dislocated my hip, not because I didn't need one, but because I was afraid of being stopped in the street and accused of faking it. That fear isn't paranoid. It's the exact scenario a piece like this one invites its readers to enact: to look at a young woman with a stick and wonder, out loud or in your head, whether she's really earned it.
A doctor once asked me why I was in a wheelchair. I had to tell him I didn't know, because every time I'd tried to explain, I'd been dismissed before I finished the sentence. By the time I was finally diagnosed with POTS and dysautonomia, I had largely given up on the medical profession. Not because I stopped being sick, but because the emotional and financial cost of trying to be believed had become its own illness.
It was a cardiologist who finally changed that. He apologised for every appointment before his. He confirmed the POTS and dysautonomia, and then said he suspected something sinister was underneath it. He was right. That "something sinister" was life-threatening, and it had been sitting there the entire time I was being told to relax.
If I had followed the advice underneath Stock's column... I would not have survived long enough to write this piece.
Why this matters now
The one genuinely good thing to come out of the pandemic is that conditions like POTS, EDS, ME/CFS and dysautonomia, long dismissed, chronically underfunded, poorly understood, are finally getting attention. Research is catching up. Diagnosis times, while still far too long, are starting to shorten. People are finding each other, comparing notes, and recognising patterns that used to take individuals decades to piece together alone.
A column like this doesn't just get the science wrong. It spends the credibility of a prominent, influential writer pushing back against that progress, telling a generation of young women, right as they're starting to be taken seriously, that they should be quieter, more sceptical of their own bodies, more embarrassed by the tools that let them function. That's not a contrarian take. It's a public health catastrophe, aimed at the vulnerable, for the crime of being in society while using an aid.
I know what it is to grapple with the stigma of using a walking stick/ wheelie walker/ wheelchair as a young woman. I know what its like to feel like to push through and suffer for onlookers comfort rather than your own function. I don't wish that particular kind of harm on anyone, least of all on young women who are already fighting to be believed.
