July is Disability Pride Month, in its 32nd year after the first celebration following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July 1990. Disabled people are said to make up more than one-third of the LGBTQ community, but that includes a wide range of experiences. Disability is more than a legally protected class, it includes a complex range of ways that bodies, minds, and spirits can exist in and engage with the world, from neurodiversity to mental illness to physical, sensory, digestive, learning, and other differences.
Disability Pride can be complicated. Like queerness, coming to terms with a disability can require confronting your internalized oppression and finding a way to love yourself in the face of systemic ableism. Ableism is entrenched in every facet of society, from language to physical access needs and work and fitness culture.
I wanted to host this roundtable to bring visibility to the wide variety of ways disability shows up in the queer community and how it intersects with other identities and experiences. I spent a long time being ashamed of both my queerness and my disabilities. Reading stories from other people with similar experiences helped me start to love these parts of myself, even when sometimes my chronic illnesses make me feel like my body definitely doesn’t love me. I am incredibly grateful to the Autostraddle writers who contributed to this roundtable. I hope that by sharing our stories, we can help someone out there feel a little more seen, a little bit less alone, and a little more comfortable being themselves.
— Katie
Comments
Thank you for these reflections, and happy Disability Pride Month! May you be believed and given support and find relief of pain if you have it.
Thank you so much to you all for writing this, it was exactly what I needed to read right now. I’ve been feeling extremely socially alienated by a lot of issues I’ve been dealing with physically and mentally these last few years; things that have been a problem my whole life but that have been really exacerbated by the pandemic. It feels like some long covid type stuff too honestly, but I haven’t been to the doctor in a long time. The only official diagnosis I’ve ever gotten is depression, and the thought of trying to get a doctor to pin down the rest of my complex issues is harrowing, to say the least. I usually just completely leave my body when a doctor is questioning me and then later don’t even remember what I said to them, I think I just instinctually try to tell them what they want to hear so I can leave as quickly as possible, which doesn’t help me at all. I live in a low population area and get state provided insurance, so my options for a doctor are super limited too. I’ve mostly resorted to doing my own research and figuring things out myself. I have a great partner who also struggles with much of the same things I do, so we can’t always be the best support system for each other, but we don’t have much in the way of community. I tend to really forget that tons of other people are living similar stories, that really we aren’t alone, that society is the problem and not us.
thank you all for such candid, beautiful reflections – truly grateful for having had the privilege of reading.
love love love this! I’ve been doing some disability pride family history research- my aunt was born with spina bifida in 1970, the doctors obliquely suggested to my grandmother that sometimes sick babies die, and my gram said “to hell with that” and has spent the subsequent fifty years fighting for disability rights
that legacy meant that my journey of claiming ‘disabled’ as a term was a lot less complicated than many other folks’ and i could move quickly into the angry yelling and self advocacy bit. i really have to echo what heather said about the disability community because damn, people who’ve had my back in ways i didn’t know i’d need!
Thank you all for this.
And especially thank you Heather. I asked for advice about long covid last year and you recommended the Body Politic group. That group has been an amazing community and the conversations I’ve had with people have been incredibly helpful. I’ve had some difficult decisions to make lately and having people share their own experiences has been invaluable in making those decisions and feeling happy with them. Everything you said about community resonates because of that group.
Thank you so much for all of this.
I love this thank you so much! Also, I just wanted to write that I really hope that one day you will cover something of/by/about blind and visually impaired queer folk! Those never seem to pop up in conversations, and of course it is very hard to include everyone, but still I find this is a really big thing that never gets any coverage – actually I can’t find in the archives that autostraddle has ever covered anything about this, but I might just not be looking in the right places. Anyway happy pride month!