Disability Pride Month: Would You Dare Ask Any Other Marginalised Group What That Is?

On a chilly February day in 2011, a group of disabled protestors gathered in London’s Euston Square, outside the headquarters of Atos, the company responsible for the hated ‘ability to work’ assessments inhumanely imposed upon us by the then Conservative Government. Police officers shuffled nervously against metal fences. Opposite was the temptation of a Starbucks – its windows steamy with warmth, cookie smells wafting through the air. It was a global capitalist power which we despised – and yet: the toilet, the cosy, accessible toilet. We laughed at that irony.

The Tories are now finally gone, but the fight goes on. 

July is Disability Pride Month. What is it? we are asked. How many would dare to ask other marginalised groups such a question?

The BBC summarises it as “an opportunity to raise awareness of disabilities, start positive conversations and celebrate the diversity and differences of the disabled community”. It goes on to say that “Disability Pride Month has its origins in the US, where in 1990… the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed to prevent people with disabilities being discriminated against”.

While it followed America on Disability Pride, it is important to know – and celebrate – that the disability rights movement in the UK has been a global leader, and something I am proud to say has been a part of my life since the 1980s. 

But when the Disability Discrimination Act finally arrived here in 1995, it was a diluted disappointment to many campaigners who remain disenchanted to this day with its replacement, the weak Equality Act 2010.

A different source of pride, and an important reminder, is to challenge and question what has been written, said, and claimed – our history has been ‘about us, without us’ for far too long. The truth is that every change that improves the lives of disabled people has been predominantly led by disabled people themselves, whose stories are overlooked or misappropriated.

We are a normal part of the human family that never chose to be hidden, which never truly went away. 

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Rewriting History

On a personal level, I still blame the Enlightenment. 

For instance, the much-celebrated Lady Mary Wortley Montagu reputedly hated seeing beggars and cripples on the streets of 18th Century London. Clear them up! Hide them! Once things got going with workhouses evolving through the Victorian period, not to mention asylums for ‘lunatics’ and other undesirables, it was as if we were wiped away from history. 

Yet if, like me, you have an interest in social history and folklore, you can see us creeping out in multiple guises. 

The wise woman, bent with age. The disfigured maiden, known for her skill with herbs. These people, who would clearly meet the definition of disabled for those of us in that category, ran parallel with the notorious world of the ‘freak’, whereby it was encouraged for one to display ‘deformity’ or difference. 

By the closing of the Victorian era – the time of Joseph Merrick, known as the ‘Elephant Man’ – the idea of disabled people being objects of abhorrence continued beside that of pity. We were removed from sight, sometimes under the guise of pity, and placed outside of society’s consciousness in a way that still creates discrimination today. Simply put: our presence, the seeing of us, was long denied, and we had little power to change it, particularly for those ground down in working class poverty.

I am proud that we had ‘the Cripple Suffragette’, Rosa May Billinghurst, a middle class woman with polio, famous for distributing leaflets from her ‘tricycle wheelchair’ (which also hid the stones she threw during protests). Rosa had a private income, which shows what can be done when poverty is removed. 

But in Adelaide Knight, who I’ve just discovered, we have a female working class disabled campaigner, who certainly deserves a Penny Pepper punk poem!

In my own life, I have been provoked into action and pride by other disabled women in particular. 

Kay kicked me into life from the moment we first met in 1979. Linda triggered my pride as a curious, well-read, working class teenager and, at 19, died too young. Others shared books by feminists, social commentators, and poets. I was a disabled woman under the threat of a care home – a sentence I escaped in part due to these amazing disabled women who set me on a different road.

Another friend put me onto a book called Pride Against Prejudice: Transforming Attitudes to Disability by Jenny Morris, first published in 1991. It felt like coming home to where I belonged; my tribe. The book wasn’t about pity or a ‘cure’, but about bringing us back – the need to remove barriers that prevent our inclusion, whatever they may be. 

While we are not a homogenised lump, coming from diverse and intersectional communities, we work to find a space of mutual sharing  and openness, to fight for the basics of equality, and beyond.

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Proud to Persevere

The new Labour Government brings a glimmer of hope to many disabled people, but I have concerns. At the time of writing this column, there is no minister for disabled people, and many activists are angry that Keir Starmer overlooked the disabled community throughout the election period. 

We’re primed for broken promises. We’re scarred from Tory austerity. Boris Johnson’s Covid meltdown. The deaths, our deaths, that don’t matter. But scars toughen and awareness sharpens when attack becomes default. 

With this in mind, DPAC (Disabled People Against Cuts) are preparing for another protest in Westminster on 18 July because, with our pride, comes a reminder: Labour, we’re watching.

If I make it, on health grounds, this may be my last frontline action. It’s been a long time since the Atos protest, where eventually the police kettled us, at one point refusing to let a friend through to use the accessible toilet in Starbucks. But I’m proud I was there. 

Proud we are a force to celebrate – our strength, our unity, our understanding of what is important, our refusal to ever give up. This Disability Pride Month, please join us.

Penny Pepper is an award-winning author, poet and disabled activist