Pride Month With MECFS. Don't Leave ME Out
Pride Is Not Accessible To All
People with ME and disabilities more broadly are very often excluded from the queer community through inaccessible venues, lack of masking and covid precautions, and ableist attitudes.
This is more than just exclusion from a party.
The reason the queer community is so central to many people's lives is that queer people are often excluded from non-queer friends, family and community. Thus disabled queer people may find themselves on the outside of both their real families and their supposed "found/adopted/chosen family" of the queer community.
Queerness is more than just being gay. It is about diverging from societal expectations and embracing your difference.
In the broader understanding of celebrating queerness, not only should LGBT disabled people be welcomed at pride but ALL disabled people who embrace being different should be.
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Disabled Dependence & Homelessness
Queer youth are often highlighted for their high rates of homelessness at 2x the rate of non-LGBT individuals (youth.gov) LGBT youth make up 7% of the US population but 40% of the youth homeless population (conventhouse.org)
Adults with ME, especially young adults, are more likely to live with parents. This can put queer people with ME in a similar situation to queer youth, dependent on families with varying levels of support or abusiveness for housing.
Disabled adults are also more likely to experience homelessness with over 40% of homeless adults having a disability (US Dept Housing & Urban Development 2008).
Queer people with ME lie at the intersection of disabled and queer homelessness statistics. More likely to be forced to rely on family AND more likely to have family that refuses to support them.
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ME Patients Risk for Abuse
Because ME is a disability so poorly recognized by governments ME patients tend to have much less of a social safety net to fall back on. While applications for SSI, SSDI, NDIS, and other disability pensions and housing can be granted they are often harder to fight for and can be backlogged.
Many people rely on the good graces of friends and family to survive the period between becoming ill and receiving benefits. Others never receive benefits.
All of this puts people with ME at the mercy of their family and those whom society views as responsible for them.
This is already problematic as many families do not believe in ME or treat their family members as mentally ill. But if a person is queer, their family has both another avenue to gaslight and abuse them and another societal mark towards distrusting them.
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Toxic Families Are NOT Safe or Acceptable Housing
ME is not an illness compatible with homelessness. Nor is it compatible with couch surfing or other housing instability.
Because of the physical toll of housing instability, queer people who if they were healthy would choose the streets over their toxic and abusive households may be forced to stay with their families.
These people are still homeless. They do not have safe housing and their health will continue to deteriorate if left in a stressful and toxic environment. These housing situations are not safe or acceptable.
Queer people with ME who have toxic families are faced with an impossible choice. Cutting off ties to their primary (but abusive) support structure or letting abusive and toxic behavior slide because they have no good alternative, either is a massive risk to their physical and mental health.
The only "correct" decision is for the rest of the disabled and queer community to support them in surviving whatever they choose, and support them in getting better options like access to steady mutual aid, safe housing, and/or disability pensions as quickly as possible.
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Queer Trauma & ME
Queer people face a large array of potential traumas not faced by non-queer people. Bad reactions to coming out, rejection of your identity, rejection by your family or friends for an essential part of who you are, being forced to go through the wrong puberty and hide or repress your identity can all cause acute or chronic stress and trauma.
While ME is not caused only by mental trauma, and cannot be cured psychologically, the dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system caused by trauma can severely exacerbate ME and dysautonomia symptoms. Stress and trauma can also leave people more open to severe viral infections causing ME, and can contribute to the exacerbation of underlying inflammatory conditions like fibromyalgia.
Trauma is also known to trigger epigenetic factors predisposing people more towards chronic illness.
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Eugenics & Pride
Disabled people and queer people are both targets of fascism and eugenics.
Disabled people were the first to die in the holocaust. Abilism is the primary driver of eugenics which seeks to create a more "capable" and "strong" race.
When able-bodied queers exclude disabled people they leave themselves uninformed on a central ideology by which queerness is oppressed: ableism.
Homophobes and transphobes will return to and continue to believe the myth that queerness is an illness.
This myth can and should be countered by the reality that you can be healthy and queer. But it must also be countered with the truth that illness does not devalue a life. That disability is not a moral failing. That our right to life, autonomy, community, self-expression and happiness is not dependent on our ability to conform to society OR our ability at all.
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Pride Is And Has Always Been Radical
The first pride was a riot.
Marginalized people have always risked the most and offered the most grassroots support for changing our society.
Yet today's pride celebrations are so often sterilized and commercialized, with the marginalized people who need the support of the queer community the most excluded.
That we can celebrate pride is great, but that celebration must not derail our efforts for real change. The fight for queer acceptance is not over and in many ways is more perilous than ever.
We can't leave the people who got us here, our marginalized, trans, poly, disabled and BIPOC queer siblings behind.
Acceptance of some gay or lesbian identities at the cost of conformity is not acceptance of queerness, it is merely a small expansion of the status quo.
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Queer & Crip Solidarity
Queer people and disabled people share an experience of being born into families and communities that do not share our marginalized identity.
It is a lottery whether our assigned families will accept us or not.
For those with ME we also share the queer experience of disbelief and gaslighting of our realities as well as being told that our illness or identity is mental illness as opposed to simply the reality of the bodies we inhabit.
The QC (queer crip) community is an amazing source of chosen family for many. But I hope that by highlighting the similarities in queer and chronically ill experiences we can broaden this community and bring together people queer and disabled people as the natural allies we are.
Pride should not just be accessible because the whole world should be more accessible. Pride should be accessible because disabled pride is just as valid as queer pride and all pride deserves a place in our celebration and revolution.
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To Make Pride Better We Must
☆Make pride accessible to all
☆Highlight and focus on supporting the lives of the most impacted people by queerness aka disabled, trans, and BIPOC communities
☆Focus on the revolutionary aspects of pride and let it be a beacon for change, not just a celebration
☆Support our queer and disabled siblings as our chosen family and be community for each other when our broader societies, communities and families leave us out
☆Let pride encompass ALL pride including disabled pride, neurodiversity pride, LGBT pride, ace pride, nonbinary pride, poly pride, kink pride, and all forms of queerness
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