LGBTQIA2S+ People Are Not Going Back
And disability justice must be key to how we move forward
Last week, Julia Serano, activist, musician, and author of several books including the foundational Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, called for a mass action today in which queer people and allies who have platforms of any kind would publish individual creations (such as articles, op-eds, videos, podcasts, etc) with the shared title “LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back”, which I’ve revised just slightly to include intersex, asexual and aromantic, and Two-Spirit people as well.
Each creator could choose what to focus on in their piece as long as it also called on those in the U.S. to call their elected officials and demand that we do not waver on queer issues, particularly in the face of the myriad threats to trans people’s rights to exist. I decided to use my own platform to talk about the intersections of queer justice and disability justice, as both the outgoing and incoming federal governments are and will be deadly and oppressive towards queer disabled people.
But first, a couple requests.
Mutual Aid Request
Today’s mutual aid request is for my good friend TK and their wife, a Black trans disabled couple who need help paying rent until TK starts a new job in January. They still need $665 for this month. You can read more about what they need, or just send them what you can on Venmo, CashApp at $torkz428, or Paypal at torkz.
Activism Request
Per Julia’s call to action, if you’re in the U.S., please call your representative and senators today to demand they protect queer rights. Julia has written more detailed instructions, including a sample call script that you can customize; I would also encourage you to include something around disability justice if you learn anything from this post. While there is of course power in a coordinated action today, please consider doing this if you see it later; similarly, if you have phone anxiety, you can wait until after hours to leave a voice mail.
Disability justice has always been intimately connected to queer justice. The idea of disability justice was originally formulated by Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Stacey Milbern, all queer disabled women of color who at the time were connected through the group Sins Invalid, as a response to their exclusion from the mainstream disability rights movement.
Disability justice understands ableism to be a form of systemic oppression and violence that intersects with other key forms of oppression, including racism and anti-Blackness, settler colonialism and oppression towards Indigenous people, casteism, classism, fatphobia, intersexism, misogyny, queerphobia and transphobia, and more. As such, the Sins Invalid original ten principles of disability justice include intersectionality, leadership of those most impacted, anti-capitalist politic, commitment to cross-movement organizing, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, commitment to cross-disability solidarity, interdependence, collective access, and collective liberation.
The cross-disability solidarity piece stands out to me in particular because of the diversity of disabled experiences, including disabilities that impact vision, movement, thinking, hearing, remembering, learning, communicating, social relationships, and mental health. And of course, many disabled people have multiple disabilities. Cross-disability solidarity also involves recognizing that disabled people have very different needs, including needs that may appear to come in conflict with each other, so disability justice work has to involve a vast range of approaches and solutions.
My own exposure to disability justice came before I was disabled myself and was primarily through its connections with (prison-industrial complex) abolition, transformative justice, and healing justice. These movements are deeply intertwined, recognizing that disabled people, and in particular queer disabled people of color, are disproportionately harmed by state violence, including by police, prisons and detention centers, militaries, healthcare systems, psychiatric institutions, and more. These harms also impacting communities, not just individuals, so the response to such harm must be through collective care.
For the last two and a half years, I have been disabled myself by Long COVID. I’ve shared my Long COVID story before, and what I’ve tried to emphasize every time I talk about Long COVID is that the hardest part of having it is actually not what it has done to my body. People have had to learn how to live with disabilities since the beginning of human existence, and despite being a queer agender person of color, I have so much financial privilege and support from my family and workplace that I am mostly able to deal with the chronic fatigue, post-exertional malaise, headaches, and nausea that are typical of my Long COVID experience. I can’t do all the things I could do before I got Long COVID, but I’ve mostly adapted to that.
No, the hardest part has been seeing first-hand how all disabled people, not just those with Long COVID, have been betrayed since the pandemic started – by governments, institutions, and even those in our own communities who are supposed to care for us – to dismantle our systems of public health and social services and let COVID and other infectious diseases run rampant. And that’s not even to mention the collective abandonment of Black Lives Matter, immigrant justice, and climate justice since 2020, nor the horrific perpetration of the genocide of Palestinians – all of which disproporationaly harm queer disabled people.
In the U.S., these problems were already horrific under Democratic leadership. So to me, demanding justice from our elected officials cannot just be about protecting the status quo in the face of threats from the next administration. It has to involve the fight for collective liberation on all these fronts, as well a true accountability from our leaders for their betrayals so far, so that they can understand how to move forward.
There’s a lot more I could say – and will definitely continue writing about in the future – but I wanted to close by acknowledging that I, like many others with Long COVID who were able-bodied before contracting it, have been welcomed by most disabled folks into their communities, and that we have a responsibility to not only fight for our own needs but for the cross-disability solidarity that I highlighted. I also encourage folks to check out the work of queer leaders of color working in disability justice, including adrienne maree brown, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Emi Komaya, Jen Deerinwater, Sami Schalk, Alice Wong, Rasha Abdulhadi, and Kay Ulanday Barrett. I’ve learned so much from them, and I hope I’ve passed even just a little bit of that on to you today.