Disability and LGBTQ+ identity can both play significant roles in the life of an individual. Disability and sexuality can often intersect, for many people being both disabled and LGBTQ+ can result in double marginalization. The two identities, either by themselves or in tandem, can complicate questions of discrimination (in workplaces, schools, or otherwise) and can affect access to resources such as accommodations, support groups, and elder care.
LGBTQ+ identity and its relationship to disability has also been analyzed by academics. LGBTQ+ identities have been pathologized as mental disorders by some groups, both historically and in the present. Alternatively, some activists, scholars, and researchers have suggested that under the social model of disability, society's failures to accommodate and include LGBTQ+ people makes such an identity function as a disability.
Rates of disability In general, studies have found that LGBTQ+ populations report higher rates of disability than the general population.
In studies looking at populations in the United States, LGBTQ populations report higher rates of disability compared to the heterosexual and cisgender majorities. According to the Movement Advance Project in 2019, an estimated 3 to 5 million lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in the United States have a disability. A 2022 report about the United States by the Human Rights Campaign reported that 36% of LGBTQ+ adults have self reported having a disability while 24% of non-LGBTQ adults self reported having a disability. A 2024 report on American LGBTQ youth found that 29.7% of the 3,100 youth polled were diagnosed with a disability, with these numbers being higher for trans youth (33.3%) than cisgender LGBQ+ youth (20.6%).
In a 2020 study of Australian LGBTQ people, 38% of respondents reported having at least one disability.
In a 2022 study of Canadians with disabilities, 8.7% of the disabled population also identified as 2S (two-spirit) or LGBTQ+. The same study found that "the 2SLGBTQ+ population with disabilities is younger than the non-2SLGBTQ+ population with disabilities". Of the 2SLGBTQ+ population with disabilities, the majority (69.9%) reported a disability related to mental health.
In China, a rough estimate of cantong, or LGBTQ people with disabilities, is about 5 million people.
Academic theory Academic research on disability and LGBTQ identities examines how social norms around ability, sexuality, and gender shape an individual's understanding of communities and practices. Disability studies emerged in the late 20th century as an academic discipline with critiques of early scholarly approaches to physical and cognitive variation in humans. Similar to the academic discipline of disability, queer theory has risen in popularity due to the shared critique of normative ideals of social performance including the negligence of gender specific medical research.Batza, Katie. Before AIDS: Gay Health Politics in the 1970s. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16t67sr.Smilges, J. Logan. Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.
Intersectional approaches to the two fields were brought to fruition with academic coverage of historical events such as the eugenics movement in the U.S. that sterilized disabled individuals, the commodified display of queer and disabled individuals within Freak shows, and the Holocaust in Germany that led to the genocide of disabled and homosexual people.
Notable scholars in the field such as Eli Clare,Taylor, Chloë. “Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure by Eli Clare (Review).” philoSOPHIA 8, no. 2 (2018): 105–9. Alison Kafer, and Robert McRuer drew inspiration from the early works of Michel Foucault in The History of SexualityFoucault, M., & Gros, F. (1990). The history of sexuality / by Michel Foucault ; translated from the French by Robert Hurley. (R. Hurley, Tran.; Vintage books edition.). Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House. and women of color's memoirs regarding the body, such as Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals.
Approaches in disability studies and queer theory draw on the shared and nuanced experiences on estranged family relationships, identity-based violence, structural and social exclusion.Elle Jean Samuels. My Body, My Closet. 2003. http://archive.org/details/invisible-disability-samuels. Both fields have debated the benefits and limitations on assimilation versus liberation, noted as the "mythical norm" in Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Eli Clare
Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (1999) This book has been deemed as one of the earliest literary works of intersecting disability studies and queer theory.Ryan, Donna F. “Life Prints: A Memoir of Healing and Discovery, and: Venus on Wheels: Two Decades of Dialogue on Disability, Biography and Being Female in America, and: Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Review).” NWSA Journal 14, no. 3 (2002): 206–10. The autobiography entails Clare's multi-layered experiences throughout his life as a transgender disabled man; from being born with cerebral palsy to being sexually abused by his father, challenging his school district to let him be in regular classes despite being "universally assumed to be 'mentally retarded.'"Clare, Eli, and Dean Spade. Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation. Duke University Press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11hpk2c. Clare analyzes the contradicting forces of having a feminine body while their "internal sense of gender is as a genderqueer" including his own internalized "freakdom" of labels and identities others have used with intent to isolate him. He analyzes how disability and sexuality intersect but differ in their forms of objectification: "In our search for liberation, we can sometimes turn the language and symbols more closely reflecting our oppression into powerful expression on pride." (Clare, 1999)
Material Ecocriticism: Meditations on Natural Worlds, Disabled Bodies, and a Politics of Cure (2014) In this chapter, Clare examines the relationship between nature and societal concepts. He derives a concept called the "politics of cure" as a narrative of thinking within interdisciplinary studies to enact a consciousness that separates nature from disabled people. He compares the medical model of disability to the politics of cure; criticizing the need for restoration: "A simple one-to-one correspondence between ecological restoration and bodily restoration reveals cure's mandate of returning damaged bodies to some former, and none disabled, state of being." (Clare, 2014)
Robert McRuer
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006) Many consider this work foundational in the queer, disability, and critical studies field for his development of crip theory that draws on works from Adrienne Rich including compulsory able-bodiedness.Berger, Ronald J. Introducing Disability Studies. Second edition. With Loren E. Wilbers. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 2021. Similar to queer theory, the new concept is also developed outside of binary categories but also depends on it for its existence.
Instead of seeing abled and disabled as polar opposites, McRuer uses crip theory to highlight assumptions of ableism where disabled people will always choose to not be disabled and where non-disabled people fear the day they become disabled."...it's clear that we're inescapably haunted by the disability to come. And by the disability to come, the one we invoke, has often been frightening..." (McRuer, 2006)
Special Issue of GLQ "Desiring Disability" Co-edited with Abby Wilkerson (2003) In 2003, Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson co-edited a Special Issue of GLQ entitled "Desiring disability: queer theory meets disability studies" and introduced a form of radical thinking that deconstructs dominant norms to create space for "desiring disability".
Sex and Disability Co-edited with Anna Mallow (2012) Barounis, Cynthia. “Sex and Disability Ed. by Robert McRuer and Anna Mollow (Review).” Symploke 21, no. 1 (2013): 411–13.
Following November 11, 2001, media coverage about inaccessibility to handicap emergency exits for disabled workers trapped in the Twin Towers.
Both authors note the shift in cultural publications about disability and sex, recent authors inspired by Anne Finger's works in the late twentieth century. They question what can happen if sex and disability are politicized through sections throughout the book: access, histories, spaces, lives, and desires all enveloped through a collection of essays. They consider the similarities and contradictions within this intersection, stating that the book
Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence (2017) McRuer used Adrienne Rich's idea of compulsory heterosexuality to examine how society might also perpetuate "compulsory able-bodiness". He recalls on the term normalcy, previously analyzed historically by Lennard Davis, to show how performances of able-bodiedness and heterosexuality are connected. Their repetitive actions connect to Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity for the social categories that created them including the impossible expectations connected to them. In a disability context, McRuer renamed Gender Trouble as "ability trouble," as disabled individuals are considered queer in their assumed asexual identity and queer individuals seen as disabled through the pathologization of their sexuality in the DSM. Robert concludes the chapter by urging the reader to think of queer and disabled bodies as otherwise than in hegemonic categories.
Alison Kafer Feminist theorist Alison Kafer has been cited as a foundational researcher in queer-disability studies for her publication Feminist, Queer, and Crip.
Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013) Kafer reimagines the social model of disability, which was developed in the 1970s by disability rights activists. She critiques the rigid categories of only considering social accessibility and not the chronic pain individuals face that can’t be fixed by only accommodation, further vilifying them for seeking medical intervention to lessen their symptoms."...the social model can marginalize those disabled people who are interested in medical interventions or cures...[in] other words, because we are so often confronted with the medical framing of disability as unending burden, or as a permanent drag on one's quality of life, disability rights activists and scholars tend to deny our own feelings of pain or depression; admitting to struggling with our impairments or to wanting a cure for them is seen as accepting the very framings we are fighting against..." (Kaefer, 2013)Kafer considers another concept, crip time, influenced by Robert McRuer's Crip Theory. She wants to counter the normative concept of time to question what defines an appropriate amount of time for someone to arrive based on a level of able-bodiedness. She further connects crip and queer futuritySchalk, Sami. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction. Duke University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.33610735. to Donna Haraway's cyborg theory. Kafer states that it "could encompass everyone from people with learning disabilities to those with chronic illness, from people with mobility impairments to those with HIV/AIDS, from people with sensory impairments to those with mental illness". (Kafer, 2013)
Many consider Kafer's "engagement with the intersections of gender and cripping time [has never been] stronger than in the instances where she makes explicit the mainstream responses to gendered disability narratives". Others critique the exclusive focus on Westernized ideals of disability, pushing for a more global reach to encompass disability studies inclusively.
Other Scholars