Ableist Shame and Disruptive Bodies: Survivorship at the Intersection of Queer, Trans, and Disabled Existence

Disabled people’s sexuality is fraught with tensions of desexualization and criminalization – at once presumed nonexistent while pathologized as terrifying and perverse. As sexuality is intricately tied to notions of gender identity (themselves dependent on the able-normative body), disabled people exist more often as objects in othering narratives than as subjects, let alone narrators, of their own. While people with all types of disabilities face astounding rates of sexual violence, those who are also queer, trans, or otherwise LGBTQIAP-identified inhabit bodies marginalized as deviant in multiple ways. Shared experiences of pathologization severely impact access to support, resources, mental health care, and healing spaces for queer and trans disabled survivors, whose experiences with gendered and sexual violence often transgress boundaries between home, school, institutions (and other carceral spaces), and the streets. This chapter will include discussion of exacerbating factors in trauma and erasure of queer and trans disabled survivors, such as the presumptions of incompetence and caregiver benevolence, the delegitimization of disabled people’s genders and sexualities, and the internal violence of ableist shame.