Crimes Against Feelings At The University Of New Hampshire
University of New Hampshire has published a "Bias-Free Language Guide." A sampling from its contents:

Forms of Aggression

Micro-assault, verbal attack.

• Example: "Why do you need a wheelchair? I saw you walk... You can walk, right?" to a person who is using a mobile chair for long-distance travel.
• Example: "Dogs smell funny" to a blind person using a guide dog.

Micro-insult, a form of verbal or silent demeaning through insensitive comments or behavior.

• Example: A person exhibits a stubborn, begrudging attitude, that they will accommodate an accessibility request. The verbalization is appropriate but the tone seems insulting.

Micro-invalidation, degrading a person's wholeness through making false assumptions about the other's ability, causing a sense of invalidation.

• Example: "You have a learning disability? How can you be a lawyer?" to a person with a learning disability.
• Example: "The new international student is having language challenges." (More appropriately, we would say that the new international student is concentrating on learning a new language.)

Okay, let's take on one of these -- asking a person in a wheelchair about what the deal is, for one.

No, let's not do that -- let's not engage with the person in the wheelchair; much better to do what many people do -- just look right through them.

The late quadriplegic cartoonist John Callahan was a friend of mine, and with his extremely un-PC cartoons, tried to show that people in wheelchairs are people -- meaning you can joke about them (not to mention ask them questions about themselves), same as other people.

Here's a bit about Callahan from an advice column I wrote, responding to a letter from a guy with a disability -- some kind of shaking disorder:

Your tremors, however, become public the moment you walk into a place to meet a woman -- which is actually the perfect time to make a crack like, "Is it freezing[ "Don't worry; I only shake like this on first dates...and every day since I was born."] in here, or do I have a muscular disorder?" Maybe while wearing a T-shirt with "That's my groove thing I'm shaking."

How dare I joke about a disability?! Truth be told, I can't really take credit for this approach. I call it "The Callahan," after my late quadriplegic cartoonist friend, John Callahan, who buzzed around Portland in a motorized wheelchair, cracking jokes like, "See my new shoes? I hear they're very comfortable."

Callahan understood that a person's disability often becomes a big wall between them and the rest of us because we're afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing. But through his refusal to, uh, pussychair around the subject, Callahan told people how the disabled want to be treated, which is "just like everyone else." And because the rest of us get poked fun of, Callahan did cartoons featuring disabled people. One of these has a posse on horseback in the desert looking down at an empty wheelchair. The posse leader reassures the others, "Don't worry, he won't get far on foot" -- which became the title of Callahan's autobiography.

Adopting a more Callahan-esque attitude -- using humor -- would allow you to set the tone for your condition to be just a fact about you instead of a fact people pity you for. And by offering to answer questions they might have, you can shrink any big scary mysteries down to a more manageable size.

Callahan also had no problem with people asking him about why he was in a chair or anything else.

This mandate about how all people in wheelchairs supposedly must be treated is infantilizes them. It also is likely to cause people to not talk to or engage with people who are disabled, out of fear that they'll commit some speech crime.

If somebody finds your question insensitive, let them be a grownup and shut you down.

Treating people like precious little victims from the get-go -- and assuming they can't speak for themselves if they're offended (or even that you're offending them by asking about something about them) -- is seriously insulting to anybody who wants to be seen as a person and not a disabled person, or a whatever person (insert color, etc., here).