Disability Pride Month 2022 Roundtable: Care, Celebrate, Collective, Fight

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