The above is pretty similar to any dating profile description that I’ve written. ‘Regular’ stuff, peppered with life-long hereditary conditions. Including the latter in my bio is something I’ve always felt a bit conflicted about. It’s impossible for me to write about anything to do with disability (including this article) without thinking about how it will be received by a non-disabled audience. Whether rightly or wrongly, most disability narratives featured on mainstream platforms are constructed with this audience in mind.
A few weeks ago, after discussing what I was planning to write about for this piece, a non-disabled friend advised me to ditch the idea and write about how I masturbate (my disability affects my hands and arms). That, I was told, would be something different, more “sexy” and interesting to a general audience than what I had planned. Granted, whilst a larger discussion around the desexualisation of people with disabilities may be a mega rich one, I wasn’t arsed in writing something solely to be “interesting” to non-disabled people in a ‘how do I do what you do?’ sort of way; people with disabilities have to answer those types of questions enough as it is. I wanted instead to do something about perception, something that might even be relatable to people outside of the disability community.