To look at this issue from a slightly different perspective, if you’re the kind of person who has a bicycle and primarily uses it for exercise, a wheelchair becomes immediately useful as it’s the same thing for the upper body. On one hand, they are a medical device; however, there’s no law against owning one for other reasons. The problem you run into here (aside from the social stigma of using a medical device for exercise and/or recreation, people will think you have no respect for those who need the device and may even feel you’re ethically obligated to donate the chair to a handicapped person in need) is that because it’s a medical device, it costs more than it should. When I was a kid, I had a neighbor who had a wheelchair, but did not use it. I would help her around the house (she was a multiple amputee), and I would help look after her sons. They wanted to play in the chair. She said fine, just don’t break it. It was pretty sturdy anyway. So I’d push them around in it, and sitting in the thing, I found it was a heck of an exercise device for the chest and arms. So I looked into getting one. In the 1990s, they started at $500. Meanwhile, you could get a decent mountain bike for $150. Not a great one, but one that would get you on the trail. And I wasn’t even looking at a sporty wheelchair, either, I was looking at the silver and grey kind you’d find in a hospital. I can only imagine the cool ones cost way more. But, maybe you can find one used, thrift one or something. If you got the chair, you or a partner can role play. Bonus, they’re kinda fun to use until you gotta go uphill, and if someone tries to help you and you tell them you aren’t really handicapped, you look like an arsehole.

Still, I think using a wheelchair for non-medical reasons is way, way down the arsehole ladder from fetishising people with handicaps in the eyes of society. You can make up excuses for either, but people are still gonna talk. The only way to win that argument is to not play from the start.

If it’s truly not a fetish and you really want to meet people with disabilities without running into the other social stigma (power imbalance in a relationship), I’d say one way to do that is to advocate for disabled rights in your community. So you would start with a rehabilitation place of some kind — the problem here is, those places are not going to refer you to individuals due to privacy laws — and your approach is that you want to fight for something in your community, and your cause of choice is the rights of people with disabilities. Ask these places if you can put up a flyer. You’re a rebel with a lot of free time and you want to make things better for people living with disabilities, so you want them to contact you at no cost or obligation to talk about the difficulties they face that abled people do not, and you try to effect some changes in your local community. Tell the people who contact you to come support you in town hall meetings where you call upon local leaders to implement more ramps, more handicap parking spaces, and other disabled-friendly implementations. This way, people see you as a good guy, and you don’t have any power over people with disabilities. Rather, it’s kind of the other way around, since you’re working for them. But you’re their local hometown hero.

You should not do things like that for the sole purpose of sleeping with someone, or other selfish reasons. But, that’s how you get out from under the fetishisation and power imbalance accusations. It’s not easy and it’s not fast, but what’s right seldom is.

I’ve never done anything like that, so if anyone who has experience wants to clarify, go right on ahead.