Being queer and disabled: thoughts on TDOV

If you live in the UK and you’ve been paying any attention to the news cycles, you’ll know that the last year has been hellish for both trans people and disabled people.

“Gender critical feminists” are trying to roll back trans rights under the guise of safety and harassing us for existing. Politicians are letting disabled people die at higher rates of coronavirus and forcing DNR’s on us when we don’t want them.

So today, on International Transgender Day of Visibility, I need to remind you all how I live in both groups.

I go to disability groups and worry my gender and my sexuality will ostracise me. Worrying that I won’t fit in, that my queerness will be a “distraction”.

I got to queer groups and worry that they won’t be accessible. That my disability will other me in a group of people who should understand that feeling.

There are people in both groups who hate me. People who want me to separate my identities, keep them from mixing, hide one and only show the other to the right people. So that I’m more convenient, easier to deal with, simpler to understand.

But I can’t do that.

My transness, my queerness and my disability are all a part of me. They are wrapped around my heart and bones and slip out in the way I talk, the way I laugh, the way I love.

If you don’t include all of me, how can you truly learn how to be an ally?

Intersectionality is important, and when you’re trying to be an ally, then you need to remember that we cannot just separate our identities. We are not puzzle pieces, to be neatly taken apart. We’re works of art, complete and beautiful. To take away one part of our identity, you’ll need to break the frame or cut at the canvas and it will always be obvious pieces are missing.

So, on Trans Day of Visibility, remember we’re not all just one identity.

There’s more to the trans community than white, middle class, able bodied, neurotypical trans people. Don’t make us tuck away the rest of ourselves to try and fit your narrative.

Make your narrative accessible, widen it for all of us, exactly the way we are.