Shyness

Earlier, I wrote about how I legally qualified as disabled under the Americans with Disabilities Act because of my difficulty sleeping and (in the past) because of my shyness.  Amazingly, Congress recently broadened the ADA even further in response to whining by “civil-rights” groups that the law didn’t define “disability” broadly enough.

Now, a prominent lawyer has concluded that being male is a disability, too, reports the National Law Journal.  “If sleep disorders and sex problems can be used as criteria for filing disability claims, as courts have held, “being male” could also be a legally recognized disability.  So claims Louis Solomon, a partner and co-head of the Global Litigation Department at Proskauer Rose, who believes ‘maleness’ is on its way to becoming a new category for disability claims.   Men, he argues, have a greater susceptibility to certain diseases, a shorter life expectancy and a testosterone level that predisposes them to more aggressive behavior — all factors that could be classified as a disability.”

There are additional reasons why males may qualify as disabled.   Statutory amendments to the ADA now define impairment of bodily functions as a disability per se.  But men go deaf faster than women, and generally have inferior senses of smell.  My wife smokes, and I don’t.  But she has still has a vastly greater sense of smell than I do.  And my baby daughter can smell things I don’t even notice.  It sounds like I’m disabled on that basis, too.

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