Disabled Women Face Sexualized Fallout From Visibility

It’s Disability Pride Month and we happen to be in the midst of an unprecedented mass-disabling event. One in 13 people in the United States are developing long COVID-19 that ranges in severity from inconvenient to outright debilitating. What’s more, women are 22% more likely to wind up with long COVID than men are.

The community of young women who speak out about life with a disability — increasingly on TikTok, but also through Facebook, Instagram, and the hashtag #NEISVoid on Twitter — has provided a sense of support and strength to people on many different disability journeys, including long COVID patients. It can be transformative and empowering to pass on wisdom and hear collective experiences. But for young women and femmes of all identities, visibility of any kind frequently comes with a unique type of sexual harassment, and that has been true in this community as well.

Disabled women seem to exist in a world where sexuality is either denied to us even when we enthusiastically call for it or bestowed upon us even when we vehemently don’t want it. Documentaries like Crip Camp have exposed how historically, disabled women have been “asexualized, dexualized, and denied sexuality.” I was 12 when my congenital heart condition and dysautonomia accelerated, and while other seventh and eighth graders were having their first kisses, I was stifling my annoyance at a staffer in the pediatric cardiac wing giving me a Hannah Montana doll after my catheter ablation.

Internalized ableism and internalized misogyny formed my own response to my sexuality during my teenage years, and I’m not alone in that experience. “I think the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the ‘Sexy Sick/Sad/Mad Girl’ were personas I put on consciously, that at the time I thought were in my full agency,” my friend Jaki Steiger noted after reflecting on how she coped with being read as a “sexless alien robot” in high school.

Increasing visibility of disabled women in the media serves to cut back against these myths. Progress is far from perfection, though. As I grew up, that infantilization went away for me in ways that it did not go away for other disabled people. I believe a large portion of that is because my scars — the most visible markers of my disability — are sexualized in ways other markers aren’t. I’m perceived as “not THAT kind of disabled.” While I’ve had men online remark that my scars make me look “unreal” and “sexy,” other women with visible markers such as mobility aids are read with pity and infantilization. People move their wheelchairs or mobility aids without permission in the name of “helping” them, leading some women to add spikes to their wheelchairs to prevent this invasion. On the “pity” side, harassment quickly turns into negging. Mary, who runs the @chronicallyvegan account on TikTok and uses a wheelchair, recounted that more than once, she’s been told “you’re too pretty to be in that wheelchair, what a shame!” When I stopped being read as a “shame” and instead as “sexy” and “unreal,” I discovered the opposite side of the dichotomy of disability and sexuality.

I had open-heart surgery shortly after my 21st birthday. The scar is 10 inches long and goes directly between my breasts. I have extreme hypertrophic scarring, as do many people with connective tissue disorders like Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. My scars don’t fade like they’re supposed to: They’re wide, uneven, and purple-red, which makes them impossible to hide. I was horrified when people (men) became infatuated with my sternal scar whenever it was visible in public. I had an older man follow me around a grocery store, staring at my breasts, pointing, and telling me his brother-in-law had open heart surgery. It was not an outlier experience. Just a few weeks later, I got a man thrown out of a friend’s wedding for putting his hands on my chest.

I wasn’t safe from the fallout online either. Last December, I very unexpectedly nearly died of acute compartment syndrome following a routine carpal tunnel surgery. I woke up in a surgical ICU bed with my entire right arm immobilized, cut open from my palm to my elbow. I shared the entire journey with my extended network. I did not shy away from the fact that it was gory and horrifying — a former actress friend told me that photos of my arm split open to the bone from the OR looked like a horror movie prop. While I was greeted with an outpouring of support and love, I was also bombarded with sexual harassment. Random men were commenting on my photos — photos of me in the hospital with necrotic fingertips that my nurses told me were “worse than radiation burns” — telling me that I was beautiful. Men I had never met before in my DMs called me honey, demanded updates, told me that they were falling asleep thinking of me, and, worst of all, offered me unsolicited legal and medical advice. During my extended recovery, one man even suggested that I get an OnlyFans to pay my bills (after venmoing me $100 — wink, wink) and therefore “bring down the patriarchy by relying on the patriarchy to do what it does best.” As if sex work is easy, as if sex work is safe, as if the patriarchy could be relied on to do anything in that situation other than very quickly dox me because I’m covered in very visible scars. I quickly provoked ire from him for pointing out how dehumanizing and insulting his “suggestion” was.

While writing this piece, I talked to other disabled young women and femmes on social media. Many of them had similar frustrations and experiences with men harassing them. “I’ve noticed a weird trend where they’ll make a comment, follow me, then start getting mad at me if they hear I’m questioning a man’s authority, i.e., a doctor … it’s like they want a submissive woman and then they get extra special mad when they realize I’m not,” said Abigail Davis, who runs the chronic illness awareness TikTok account @hey2allmycsfleakstalkers.

Another TikToker, @nontokhanyile, shared similar stories. “I’ve gotten those DMs. They tell me I’m beautiful or that they want to take care of me or love me.” Others shared that the harassment is so pervasive that they set boundaries to protect themselves, with user @caffeinequeenx7 remarking that she had turned off DMs on her social media accounts entirely to avoid dealing with “creepers.”

Being a disabled woman means navigating through a minefield of enforced purity, stolen sexuality, internalized ableism, and misogyny and surviving it. That is worth being proud of, no matter what month it is. But while more and more women are finding themselves disabled, many aren’t aware of the sexual harassment they might face after seeking community and solidarity. For too many disabled women, sexualized fallout from visibility is yet another unexpected consequence to grapple with — and another form of bigotry to fight against.