Prefer People/Person-First Language When Appropriate

There are two ways to name a person and a characteristic in the same phrase.

Person-first puts the person before the characteristic: a person with diabetes, a person with a disability. It was adopted to stop a condition from standing in for the whole of someone.

Identity-first puts the characteristic first: a disabled person, an autistic person. It is used by people who do not regard the characteristic as something attached to them, to be separated off by a preposition, but as part of who they are.

Neither is correct everywhere. The rule is to follow the preference of the people being described.

Ask what the community asks for

Where a community has said what it prefers, that settles it, and no amount of reasoning from first principles overrides it. Preferences differ between communities, and sometimes within one.

Where the preference is genuinely unsettled or unknown, use person-first. It is the safer default, not the better form.

Where you are writing about one person who has told you how they describe themselves, use their words, whatever the wider convention is.

The Deaf community

The clearest case where person-first is usually not what people want. Many deaf people use identity-first language — a Deaf person, not a person with deafness — because deafness here is a culture and a language, not a condition someone carries.

The capital carries meaning. Written Deaf, it refers to that cultural and linguistic community; written deaf, it refers to hearing loss as an audiological fact. Someone can be deaf without being Deaf, and the distinction belongs to them rather than to the writer.

Recommended: The library ships captions contributed by Deaf reviewers.

Not recommended: The library ships captions contributed by reviewers with deafness.

The autistic community is a second widely documented case, where identity-first is broadly preferred for the same reason.

What to avoid either way

Neither form rescues a phrase that frames a characteristic as a misfortune.

Recommended: a person who uses a wheelchair

Not recommended: a person confined to a wheelchair

Avoid suffers from, afflicted with, and victim of for a characteristic someone lives with. Avoid euphemisms invented by people outside the community — differently abled, special needs — which are rarely what the people described use of themselves.

Do not make a characteristic into a noun that stands for a person: write people with epilepsy or epileptic people as the community prefers, rather than epileptics — unless that is the word those people use.

And do not mention a characteristic at all unless it bears on what you are writing. Most of the time the question of which form to use does not arise, because the sentence never needed the detail.