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Disability Wiki

Gender and Disability

Disabled women, trans, and nonbinary people are not a list of bad things that happen to them. They found movements, make art, parent, organize, and lead. The harms named further down are real and worth telling honestly — but they are context, not identity. We lead with people.

Leadership, culture, and joy

Section titled “Leadership, culture, and joy”

Disabled women and gender-diverse people didn’t just join disability movements — they built them.

  • Judy Heumann (1947–2023), often called “the mother of the disability rights movement,” helped found the Berkeley Center for Independent Living, co-founded the World Institute on Disability, and led the 1977 Section 504 Sit-in. A disabled woman wheelchair-user was the central architect of independent living.
  • Disability justice as a framework was created largely by disabled queer women and nonbinary people of color — among them Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, whose work on collective access and access intimacy ties disability to reproductive justice and abolition.
  • Sins Invalid, the performance project centering disabled artists of color and queer/gender-variant artists, treats disability culture as beauty and joy, not deficit.
  • “Crip” feminism reclaims a defiant, joyful identity — reading disability through gender and sexuality as a source of insight and community.

Bodily autonomy as the through-line

Section titled “Bodily autonomy as the through-line”

Much of what disabled women and gender-diverse people organize against comes down to one question: who is trusted to decide about their own body?

  • Reproductive coercion and sterilization. Tens of thousands of people — disproportionately disabled people, poor people, and people of color — were sterilized under 20th-century eugenics laws. This isn’t only history: a National Women’s Law Center analysis (with the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network; most recent report 2025) found that 31 states and Washington, D.C. still have laws permitting court-authorized sterilization of disabled people. (That’s a legal-landscape fact about what’s permitted, not a measure of how often it happens.)
  • Medical dismissal. Women’s pain has long been minimized as “emotional” or “hysterical,” and research shows the pattern persists — delayed diagnoses, disbelief, and patients forced into constant self-advocacy. (Much of this evidence is survey- and experience-based; “medical gaslighting” is a lived-experience term, strong as a pattern rather than a single statistic.)

The realities (told honestly)

Section titled “The realities (told honestly)”
  • Prevalence. Across most disability types, prevalence is higher among women than men (CDC/BRFSS data).
  • Violence. Disabled people experience sexual and intimate-partner violence at substantially higher rates than non-disabled people. The most defensible figures: a 2022 peer-reviewed meta-analysis found about 2.3× the odds of sexual victimization (pooled OR 2.27; Mailhot Amborski et al., Trauma, Violence, & Abuse), and U.S. data show women with a disability experience lifetime sexual violence at about double the rate of non-disabled women (CDC) — highest for women with multiple disabilities. (Avoid the widely circulated “80%” figure; it isn’t traceable to a sound source.)
  • Care work. Globally, women perform roughly three-quarters of unpaid care work. Disabled women are both more likely to need care and, when able, to give it — which is why disability justice reframes care as valued, mutual labor rather than burden.

Care as relationship, not burden

Section titled “Care as relationship, not burden”

A core disability-justice idea is interdependence: the recognition that all people give and receive care, and that needing support is ordinary and human, not shameful. Disabled women and gender-diverse people have produced some of the most generative thinking anywhere about how communities care for each other — turning “dependence,” which systems treat as failure, into a practice of love.

Organizations and resources

Section titled “Organizations and resources”
Section titled “Related Pages”

Contribute to This Page

Section titled “Contribute to This Page”

This page especially needs the expertise and stories of disabled women, trans, and nonbinary people — including the leadership and joy, not only the struggle. If you can strengthen or correct it, see How to Contribute.