Disability Visibility : First-Person Stories from the Twenty-first Century

by Alice Wong

From homeless encampments to local jail cells, social, political, and economic disparities put our communities at the front lines of ecological disaster.

The forces of capitalism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and homophobia may have cornered us into a vulnerable position in this unprecedented moment in our planet’s history, but the wisdom we’ve gained along the way could allow us all to survive in the face of climate chaos.

The history of disabled queer and trans people has continually been one of creative problem-solving within a society that refuses to center our needs.

Whether we’re looking at ecology, society, or our human culture, diversity is our best defense against the threats of climate change.

Just as capitalism is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity on this planet—seen in the clear-cutting of forests to plant monocultures for fuel—it is also the driving force behind the violence toward multiply marginalized people with disabilities, because our bodies are not perceived as being “productive.”

We must move beyond our cultural beliefs that tell us we are worth only as much as we can produce. Just as each component in Earth’s ecosystem plays a vital role in supporting everything around it, so do each of us have an essential role to play in sustaining our communities, our environment, our planet.

Strength isn’t just about momentary power to jump building to building; it is also the endurance to handle what is less than ideal. It’s the gritty persistence that disabled people embody every day.

Even in the moments when we’re in pain, when we’re uncomfortable, when the task ahead feels overwhelming and we feel defeated by the sheer scope of everything that’s wrong in the world, we don’t have to give up on life or on humanity. Queer and trans disabled people know that, because that’s how we live.

Comprising no less than 20 percent of the United States population, people with disabilities are the largest “minority” group in the nation.

People with disabilities are twice as likely to live in poverty because poverty operates as a cause and consequence of disability;

ableist social norms often criminalize the existence of disabilities such as schizophrenia, autism, oppositional-defiant disorders, and developmental and intellectual disabilities. To be sure, Black people with these and other disabilities are particularly vulnerable to unjust encounters with school officials, police officers, and the criminal legal system.

The phrase “differently abled” suggests that we are the locus of our disability when we are, in fact, disabled by social and institutional barriers.

Any movement that seeks to end police violence has no choice but to work to undo the racism and ableism and audism which, together, make Black Disabled/Deaf people prime targets for police violence.

He wanted the people who had the least community, because of all the ways ableism kills through isolation, to feel home.

As disabled people, we are often both hypervisible and invisible at the same time.

Disability justice exists every place two disabled people meet—at a kitchen table, on heating pads in bed talking to our loves. Our power and our vulnerability are often in our revolutionary obscurity and the horizontal ways of organizing that can come from it. Anyone can be a part of disability justice if they organize from their own spoons, own bodies and minds, and own communities.

We do best when we don’t compromise or water our cripness down. Make something disabled and wonderful out of the disabled knowledge our bodies and minds know—with or without anyone else’s money or understanding.

I know that no matter how dire the circumstances, we will always keep finding each other. Because this is what we have always done.

So many disabled people live short lives, largely because of social determinants of health like lack of healthcare, inadequate housing, or unmet basic needs such as clean air and water.

People sometimes assume ancestorship is reserved for those who are biologically related, but a queered or cripped understanding of ancestorship holds that our deepest relationships are with people we choose to be connected to and honor day after day.

Ancestorship, like love, is expansive and breaks man-made boundaries cast upon it, like the nuclear family model or artificial nation-state borders.

the reason to add disability justice to social justice is not just because it’s another element of diversity or representation, but rather because disability justice (and disability itself) has the potential to fundamentally transform everything we think about quality of life, purpose, work, relationships, belonging.

It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it; “This space,” I whisper to myself, “is for me.” Next to me, I sense my friend has the same electrified feeling. This space is for us.

For disabled people, those spaces are often hospitals, group therapy sessions, and other clinical settings. That is often by design; we are kept isolated from one another, as though more than two disabled people in the same room will start a riot or make everyone feel awkward.

Crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced—something radical and taboo in many parts of the world and sometimes even for people in those spaces.

Even as some of us find a sense of belonging within these corners of the world carved out for one another, not everyone feels welcome in them; disability is a broad sociocultural identity and experience, and not everyone thinks about disability in the same way.