Disability and LGBTIQ advocate Jax Jacki Brown’s journey to find love has been rewarding, but not always easy. She writes about the barriers people with disability face when exploring their sexuality, and the importance of strength-based sex education.
If you talk about disability and sexuality, even in vague terms, people often get uncomfortable. It brings up unconscious biases, stereotypes and fears which people may not even be aware they are holding.
Often people with disabilities are assumed to be non-sexual or viewed as undesirable lovers. It’s assumed that we will be weak, meek and dependent on others, or we lack the capacity to give consent- that we don’t know what we want sexually. These are all myths, but they are prevalent ones. The truth is, if we are provided with accessible comprehensive sex education, people with disabilities can, and do, have fulfilling and enjoyable sex lives.
One of the key issues for many people with disabilities, including myself, is that we are often not provided with sex education, particularly sex-ed which is strength-based. Strength-based means you don’t learn about your body from a deficit model, which defines your disability as a negative thing. But, instead, you are taught about your body, desire and consent from a space where your disability is positioned as an intrinsic part of who you are, a valuable part of what makes you, and not something which you must apologize for or feel embarrassed about.
In my younger days, I often felt I needed to minimise my disability, not draw attention to it or to apologise for it in order to fit in. I did not think disability was something that you could be proud of. My internalised ableism came from living in a society which portrays people with disabilities in the media as either tragic and in need of help or pity, or an object of inspiration just for existing. It’s hard in this context to get to a place of disability pride, where one can feel that their body is hot, desirable and worthy of intimacy affection and love.
Anne Finger, a disability rights activist and educator says:
‘Sexuality is often the source of our deepest oppression; it is also often the source of our deepest pain. It’s easier for us to talk about— and formulate strategies for changing discrimination in employment, education, and housing than to talk about our exclusion from sexuality and reproduction.’
We need to work towards creating a society that values and includes people with disabilities. A society that promotes the idea that we are whole complete human beings who deserve to be loved, not despite our disabilities but because of them.
[Re-printed in part from a DSC newsletter received by TAS on our Admin Email page]
Jax Jacki Brown is a disability and LGBTIQ rights activist, writer and public speaker. She has written for ‘Junkee’, ‘Daily Life’, ‘The Feminist Observer’, Writers Victoria, ABC’s ‘Ramp Up’, ‘Hot Chicks with Big Brains’, and ‘Archer Magazine: The Australian Journal for Sexual Diversity’. Jax is published in the following anthologies: ‘Queer Disability Anthology’ (2015), ‘Doing It’ (2016), ‘Queer Stories (2018), ‘Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories’ (2019) and ‘Growing up Queer in Australia’ (2019) by Black Inc.