This post is from a friend and fellow activist, Sarah Rizzuto.  Call for PCA Story Submissions Photo: Sarah Rizzuto (using a wheelchair) smiling at the camera. Hi, everyone, My name is Sarah Rizzuto, and I’m interested in assembling and publishing a collection of nonfiction stories about personal care assistants (PCAs) and the disabled individuals who employ them. If you have worked as a PCA, or if you have hired PCAs to help you or a loved one, I invite you to submit a personal account of your experiences, whether they are funny, frustrating, frightening, heroic, heartwarming, humili ..read more

Content/TW: Discussion of ableism and abuse. The best advocates for people with disabilities are other disabled people. Not their non-disabled parent(s), not their non-disabled teachers, not non-disabled researchers and professors, not non-disabled support or care workers or clinicians or therapists or professionals. Us. (I preface these possible relations or positions as non-disabled because that is the relevant marker here. Obviously -- or I hope obviously, if you read this blog -- disabled people can be any or all of these things.) If you tell a disabled person that their advocacy isn't ..read more

This article originally appeared in Disability Intersections on 29 January 2014. Here is the Internet Archive version of the original page.  Reconnecting Disability and Asexuality Lydia X. Z. Brown Note: This post contains a brief mention of rape. [Photo of people marching with mylar balloons that spell out "ASEXY"; photo by Marilyn Roxie on Flickr (used under a Creative Commons license).] On many standard demographic questions, you may be asked to select your sexual orientation from a drop-down menu or a checklist. Most questions allow you to choose among heterosexual/straight, homosex ..read more

I originally wrote this post for the National LGBTQ Task Force Blog, and it was published there on 22 June 2016. Here is a link to the last Wayback Machine capture of it, taken on 11 April 2019. Below is the original post in its entirety - please note that I am not the person who came up with the word "gendervague." I don't know who did, but I've seen sources around the internet attributing it to me, which is incorrect. The word was in wide use among other autistic people before I found out about it. Also, since I wrote the post four years ago, it probably doesn't use all of the same languag ..read more

I don't know much about virology, epidemiology, or pharmacology. But I do know that the vast majority of my friends, colleagues, and community members, are scared for their lives. Because just like always, government and corporations are showing how little they value disabled people.  I know that at the end of this there's a very big possibility that literally half the people I know or more might be dead. This year. I'm 27. And I've already lived through deaths of dozens of my peers, due to institutional abuse, medical ableism, filicide, or police violence. It's not even just that huge n ..read more

CW: If it's not obvious from the title, this (short) post talks about some very violently ableist ideas about sex and sexuality, including sexual violence. Bad types of sex ed and sexual violence prevention about developmentally disabled people Lydia X. Z. Brown [Photo: Graphic showing photo of a dusty chalkboard on cinderblock walls. The text says "Bad types of sex ed and sexual violence prevention about developmentally disabled people - lydia x.z. brown."] A friend recently posted a question asking what red flags to look for in training materials about sexual violence prevention for au ..read more