Happy Disability Pride Month
Why must there be a pride month for everything?
Every so often, someone asks: Why does everything need a Pride Month now? Sometimes it’s genuine curiosity; sometimes it’s an eye roll accompanying the question.
The answer is that not everything has one. Pride months exist for communities whose histories have been ignored, erased, or actively suppressed. They’re a chance to celebrate culture, honour hard-won civil rights, and remind people that equality isn’t something that simply arrived one day and stayed.
At its core, pride isn't about claiming one identity is better than another. It’s not trying to compete. It's about replacing shame with belonging. It’s for communities that have been taught to hide, and pride is the decision to be visible anyway.
On March 12, 1990, disability activists abandoned their mobility devices to climb, crawl, and edge their way up the steps of the U.S. Capitol, forcing lawmakers and the public to confront what inaccessible infrastructure looked like in real life. The Capitol Crawl became one of the defining moments of the disability rights movement and helped build momentum for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed into law on July 26, 1990.
Although I'm Canadian, this pivotal moment in U.S. history has influenced disability rights far beyond its borders, serving as a legal and cultural framework for countries around the world.
The laws changed, accessibility improved, and representation slowly followed, but for many disabled people, pride isn't something legislation can give you; it’s something you work towards. It's unlearning who the world told you to be, and relearning who you already are and becoming.
I didn't inherit disability pride the day I was diagnosed. It took years of grieving, unlearning, and finding community before I understood that pride wasn't about loving and accepting every part of disability; it was about no longer believing it made me less than. It meant working with what I couldn't change and realizing, deep down, that none of this was my fault. There was never anything wrong with me.
There was a version of me who used to explain disability before I could exist as I was. I played defence to pave the way for people like me. It was survival mode, but I don’t do that anymore. Not because the losses stopped, not because it got easier, not because my body stopped doing its thing the way my prognosis says it would, but because I stopped waiting for permission to be just as I am. I stopped justifying my right to take up space. I stopped justifying my worth.
What’s changed most isn’t my condition; it’s that I stopped treating disability as something I had to make a case for. I can finally start to let my hair down.
I won’t pretend it’s a lesson fully learned, something I perfected, or a lens I see through without flinching. There are still rooms where I'm the only wheelchair user and that old shyness and insecurity creep back. There are still days I miss what my body used to do, still days I'm tired in a way that has nothing to do with acceptance, but somewhere along the way, I built a rhythm that didn't exist before.
Most days now, showing up as I am simply feels normal. I worked hard to be here.
To my disabled community: however far along you are in that shift, from justifying to just existing and thriving, I see you, and I’m proud to take up space next to you.
To everyone else: if disability content is showing up more in your feed lately, that’s not an algorithm accident. That’s us, finally being ordinary in public. Visibility isn’t about asking for attention; it’s about no longer hiding.
Visibility isn’t only cultural; sometimes it’s structural too. One small piece of that work that’s still in progress is something I started four years ago. I started a petition asking Unicode to create a Disability flag and Disability Pride flag emoji. We’re at 520 signatures and need 1,000 for it to have a real shot.
If you’ve been meaning to sign, today’s the day.
Petition link: https://c.org/pWCXv6X6Vc
Happy Disability Pride Month 🖤❤️💛🤍💙💚🖤