Celebrating Disability Pride Month
Every July, the world comes together to recognize Disability Pride Month. This is a time to celebrate the identities, achievements, and voices of people with disabilities. It’s not just about awareness; it’s about pride, power, and the ongoing push for accessibility and inclusion.
The Origins of Disability Pride Month
Disability Pride Month traces its roots to July 1990, the day the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law in the United States. The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, education, transportation, and public spaces. This marked a monumental step forward in the disability rights movement. The first disability pride day took place in 1990.
What Disability Pride Stands For
Disability Pride is about embracing being disabled, it is not something to hide. It encourages people to live openly, rejecting the narrative that disability is inherently negative.Just like other pride movements, Disability Pride aims to breakdown the shame and stigma. It is a movement towards society stopping viewing disability deficit-based lens and start seeing it as a natural part of the human experience. Pride doesn’t mean ignoring the challenges of disabilities, it means acknowledging the barriers and working towards removing them.
A Spectrum of Experiences
Disability is an umbrella term for people with physical, sensory, cognitive, intellectual, mental health, developmental, and invisible disabilities. It’s important to understand that no single narrative defines the disabled experience.Some people are born with disabilities and others get them through life. Some poeple stand proud for disabilities and others are still building their strength, however it takes everyones opinions and experiences to build a more inclusive world.
Why Visibility Matters
Representing Disability Pride Month and all those under the wide umbrella, gives voice to these people and their daily struggles that some may never have considered. Often disabled people may feel invisible to the outside world and although they are not represented in media, politics or in education.
Visibility means:
- Seeing people with disabilities as creators, innovators, and decision-makers.
- Aiming to include accessibility from the start, not as an afterthought.
- Valuing lived experience
Accessibility Is a Right
Disability Pride Month is also a great time to reflect on how the years have changed our attitudes and our outlook, and plan for the future. For many disabled people obstacles to education, employment, transportation, housing, and healthcare are still being fought daily. Everyone has a role to play in making the future more inclusive.
Celebrating and Supporting
- Listen – Listen to the stories of the people at the centre, ask them what we can do more of to help.
- Audit your spaces – Are your workplaces, communities and schools accessible? Are they supportive or do they build barriers? How can we start making changes to benefit everyone.
- Celebrate stories – Let’s celebrate how far disabled people have brought us so far, without their fights, we may not live in the more acceptive world we do now.
- Local events– Many local towns, schools or even workplaces are promoting disability pride month to recognise how things have changed but highlight that we still have a way to go.
Pride Is Ongoing
Disability Pride doesn’t stop at the end of the month. There are many parents just like me that are fighting services daily to get the best for my spicy ones. We have to battle to get the correct support in place for our people to aid them into the future and mak ethem proud of the people they are.
Let’s celebrate Disability Pride Month with real commitment to listening, learning, and showing up and being an advocate for those with no voice when they need it, a truly inclusive world is one where everyone can belong and feel supported.
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