6/21/2023 0 Comments Snapping shoals jobs![]() ![]() It does not care about respectability as much as putting in the work. It’s frequently loud, messy, and circuitous. It is not a rainbow product you can buy in a store. This June, I want us all to remember that Pride is not an endpoint or an achievement. A parade once a year is certainly a fun visual signifier of how far we have come, but Pride invites us to imagine and demand so much more. It’s continuing to fight for marriage equality so that disabled people can marry our partners without losing the healthcare and financial support we need to stay alive and remain in the community. It’s queer-inclusive, accessible sex education in schools so kids like I was don’t have to grow up without basic vocabulary to describe our existence. It’s plastic straws and free condoms and ramps without asking. It’s in the cooperation between the Black Panthers, disability rights organizers, and nondisabled allies during the 504 Sit Ins. Pride is disability justice disability justice is Pride. The world is filled with countless, everyday injustices against queer disabled people, and I see this all too frequently in the way these two communities - queer, disabled - seek to separate from each other, to disavow those of us who are both from full participation in either. It’s astonishing to me that we celebrate this for one month instead of all year round! Pride is a conversation, a dialectic between who we are and the most cherished desires of our hearts. Pride occurs where we strike a balance between dismantling the dominant narratives that seek to pigeonhole us, and creating and celebrating the joyful possibilities of queer crip stories and spaces. Pride happens in the hashtags like #DisabledAndCute, #AmbulatoryWheelchairUsersExist, and #BlackTransLivesMatter. It’s the world which insists on describing me incorrectly, and that needs to change. It’s not me who doesn’t fit into the wider world. Pride happens when we say, no, I’m not what you think I am. With so much pressure on us to conform, either to the societal default of whiteness, cis-ness, heteronormative, non-disabled, or to that society’s stereotype of what a disabled person must look like, be, or do, Pride offers us a powerful repudiation of that mandate.īoth the queer and disabled communities are no strangers to legislative attack, social stigma, and everyday humiliations. Pride situates us not as exceptions or anomalies, but as the interdependent, interconnected beings we are. There’s a saying I’ve heard in both the queer and disabled communities that goes, “if you’re wondering a lot about whether you count as queer or disabled, chances are you probably are.” Or, as I put it to a fellow genderqueer friend when they came to me to share they were questioning their gender, “cis people don’t fret about gender.”Ĭoncepts like queer pride and Crip time let us fashion ourselves, not as exceptions to an ableist, heteronormative and cisnormative environment, but as the beautiful creatures we are. Pride - in our queer, disabled selves - gives us space to imagine life beyond, outside, across these categories. ![]() Our human brains like things to be straightforward and easily categorized. While no individual fits the entire stereotype of queerness or disability, I would hazard a guess that I’m not the only one who, in comparing myself to the stereotype, has wondered, do I count? Am I queer enough? Disabled enough? Or am I a fraud? Likewise, most people don’t know my gender (nonbinary/genderqueer/genderfluid) or pronouns (she/they) unless I’m wearing a visible marker, like a pronoun button. It’s not an all-or-nothing state of being: most people know (or can deduce pretty quickly) I’m queer, but few people know I’m disabled unless I tell them or I’m using a mobility aid that day. Coming out is a process I’ve heard used to describe sharing both these identities - queer and disabled - with yourself and your community. I didn’t always know I was queer, and I didn’t come into my disabled identity until adulthood. Maybe it’s because this year is the first time I can say, with my whole chest, today will be good. Maybe it’s because as I get older and read more about queer history, I think of Pride not as the final destination on a linear arc of history, but as something messy, organic, vitally necessary. Maybe it’s because of the infuriating disjuncture between corporations who sponsor parade floats in summer while funding bigots and transphobes’ political campaigns come winter. Maybe it’s because we’ve spent every June since 2020 in a state of COVID emergency, which still curtails many of us from fully participating in public festivities. As a queer, disabled person reflecting on Pride this month, I’m struck by how much Pride resonates with me as a process rather than a discrete event. ![]()
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