If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk.

Glennie’s remark challenges the way able-bodied observers convert a visible aid into a totalizing judgment. A wheelchair is read as a definitive label—“cannot walk”—when in reality mobility often exists on a spectrum, varying by distance, pain, fatigue, or circumstance. By reframing “can walk” as even a few steps, she highlights how lived experience defines capability more accurately than external assumptions. The quote also generalizes beyond disability: it critiques binary thinking (can/can’t, success/failure) and urges attention to partial capacities, incremental achievements, and self-defined measures of function and dignity.