Category: ableism
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A Small Step Forward for Blind Parents
I wrote a while back about the multi-layered and inexcusable discrimination many disabled parents face. There’s nothing about having a disability that makes someone less capable of parenting. That feels too obvious to even say, but it’s a truth, obvious or not, that needs to be repeated over and over until people get it, until…
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Conversation: Stigma, Sexuality, Disability
Last week I had the privilege of being on a panel about stigma, sexuality, and disability with Andrew Gurza and the cohosts of The Pulse. We managed to squish a lively discussion of flirting, dating, stigma, self-disclosure, and loads more juicy stuff into a 35-minute radio segment. The best part is that the show was…
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Disabled People, harassment, and Public Spaces
(Originally published on another blog in 2014. My writing voice has changed a lot since then, but I still agree with everything I said here! I have a lot more to say on disability and harassment, and am reposting this older piece here to get the conversation started.) *** Every time I leave my house…
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Happy Ableist Anniversary, Ken, or, Facts About Sexuality and Disabled People
An Open Letter to Ken Jennings: A year ago, you tweeted “Nothing sadder than a hot person in a wheelchair.” Yes, that was a year ago, about a million years in cyber time. Let’s revisit this anyway. There’s some important stuff here. We still have ableism, and we still have loads of wrong-headed beliefs about…
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How do disabled people have sex, anyway?
Can we all agree that asking random people on the street (or in the mall, or anywhere, really) about their sex life is just plain creepy? People with disabilities are asked, much more often than you’d think, how, or if, we have sex. No, really, this happens all the time. If it’s not about sex…
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Sexuality. Disability. Not so different after all.
Talking about sexuality and disability is a big deal. Until recently, most of what we saw in mainstream media were reports of disabled people being abused and assaulted, or syrupy-sweet feel-good stories about a person with a disability in a romantic relationship which (gasp!) included sex. Sex, and disability, as experiences, are assumed to be…