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“I really experienced almost no discrimination because I was a lesbian,” Harbour said. “It felt like they were really embracing that. But the deaf stuff, my god, it was like one struggle after another. There were so many problems with the system and getting interpreters and arguing for my rights, and it just felt like it was non-stop the whole time I lived there.”
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Location, according to Lewis, can also play an important role for trans people who have a disability identity. Hospitals are meant to be a safe place, a place to go for care and treatment. Lewis, however, has heard stories of times when hospitals were not safe spaces for trans people who have cognitive or emotional disabilities and are admitted as suicidal. Often times, he says, doctors do not understand trans bodies and their first step is to take away hormones.
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Lewis said medical professionals sometimes say things like, “‘Oh, we think this might be causing it,’ when really it is just this transphobia and nastiness coming out.” According to a Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality study in 2011, 25 percent of trans individuals report that they have been harassed or disrespected at a medical office. It is instances like these that show the similarities between the queer community and the disability cultural community.
Photos by Martin Biando
Lloyd Smith, a doctoral student at the University of Memphis, has taken notice of these similarities. As a bipolar gay male from the South, Smith said that his experience of coming out bipolar was comparable to his coming out gay. The feeling of having to hide, to not say it out loud, he said, was the same each time he came out.
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“Mental illness is so stigmatized that people don’t self-identify,” Smith said. “That’s a lot like the GLBT community.” Yet coming out is not the only similarity Harbour has noticed. According to Harbour, the body is
Take a look at these helpful links
Visit the Disability Cultural Center’s website: sudcc.syr.edu
Like the Disability Student Union on Facebook: facebook.com/ DisabilityStudentUnion or stop by a union meeting on Mondays at 7 p.m. in the DCC, which is located at 805 South Crouse Ave. in the Hoople Building Or just knock on the door of 105 Hoople
one topic on which both queer communities and disability communities tend to focus. The response elicited from these conversations, she said, is also very much the same. “With both communities there’s this attitude of ‘I may do it differently from you, and that’s OK,’’ Harbour said. “Whatever it is, whether it’s thinking or learning or sex or gender or having kids or whatever it might be.” With so many similarities, Lewis sees the importance for disability culture communities and queer communities to make room for each other, to support each other, and to include members who experience both identities. “Disabled people have relationships, they have friendships, they love, they have sex, all the same ways that other people do,” Lewis said. “Everything from asexual identities, aromantic identities, being bi, being queer, being gay, lesbian, straight, it all exists. Nothing really changes that if you’re disabled.”
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