 The influence of a dichotomous conception of disability, that is, of a conception of disability as a personal attribute one either has or lacks, is evident even in the way questions about disability and personal relationships are framed. In asking questions like “Are relationships between disabled and nondisabled people necessarily unequal?” we tend to assume that disability is a categorical characteristic: that there is a distinct subset of the population that is disabled and everyone else is nondisabled. If, instead, we adopted the human variation model of disability (see  SEP entry on disability: definitions, models, experience),  we could reframe such questions. That model conceives of an impairment as an arbitrary range on the continuum of variation for a human attribute. Moreover, the model sees disability as an interaction between atypical functioning or embodiment and an unaccommodating environment. Consequently, it emphasizes that most people are “disabled” in some particular physical or social context, insofar as they have some atypical characteristic which fits poorly in that context. The model also suggests that a disability, like an impairment, ought to be considered as a graduated characteristic: just as there are degrees of functioning, there are degrees of fit between functioning-embodiment and social environment. 