July is Disability Pride Month. This month isn’t about being inspirational to others, “overcoming” the odds, or putting on a brave face. It’s about rejecting the shame that’s been placed on disabled people. It’s about naming the ways disabled people have been excluded, underestimated, refused meaningful participation, pathologized, and erased. It’s about calling out the systems that treat disabled people’s lives as problems to be solved. 

For many disabled folks, pride may not be a feeling that comes naturally. It’s something we grow into, often while unlearning everything we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves: that we’re broken, burdensome, dramatic, weak, or too much. Whether you’re physically disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, or navigating pain that isn’t always visible, your existence challenges a system built on productivity, independence without support, and able-bodied norms. That’s not your flaw. That’s a flaw in the inherently ableist system.

Ableism is the discrimination, prejudice, or social attitudes against disabled people, rooted in the belief that non-disabled bodies and minds are inherently more valuable. It’s built into systems, spaces, and attitudes that treat disability as something to be feared, pitied, or erased. 

Pride Isn’t Just About Celebration—It’s About Survival

The word “pride” can feel complicated, especially if you’ve spent most of your life being told to hide your needs, minimize your symptoms, or try harder to pass as “normal.” Pride can feel out of reach when you’ve been invalidated by professionals, dismissed by family and friends, or excluded from spaces that were never built with you or your needs in mind.

So, for many disabled people, pride doesn’t look like confidence or joy. Sometimes, it looks like still being here. Still asking for care. Still choosing to take up space, even when others are uncomfortable with what they may not understand. Still demanding accessibility—not as a luxury, special privilege, or favour, but as a right. 

That, too, is pride.

Disability Doesn’t Exist in a Vacuum

Disability is not a single-issue experience. The way someone is treated as a disabled person is shaped by everything else about their identity too.

Being disabled and racialized often means confronting healthcare, education, and legal systems that have historically devalued your body, your pain, and your survival. For many Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, disability is pathologized earlier, punished more harshly, and met with more suspicion. It’s not just about access—it’s about safety.

Being a disabled woman or gender-diverse person means being more likely to be dismissed, misdiagnosed, or labelled as “emotional” or “anxious.” Folks in larger bodies may experience added stigma and bias, creating extra hurdles to receiving respectful and effective care. Living in poverty and being disabled might mean being forced to choose between medication and food, or between housing and treatment not covered by public healthcare.

Disability doesn’t exist apart from racism, colonialism, gender violence, or capitalism. It’s shaped by all of them.

These realities aren’t random. They are the result of systems that reward proximity to whiteness, maleness, thinness, neurotypicality, and economic privilege, and punish everyone else for not fitting the mould.

Disability justice is incomplete without naming this. There’s no pride if it only belongs to the most “palatable,” resourced, or visible among us. If the movement doesn’t include those at the margins of the margins, then it risks becoming performative instead of transformative.

Medical Systems Don’t Define Who We Are

Disability is often framed through a medical lens—something to treat, fix, or eliminate. The disability justice movement reminds us that our worth isn’t determined by our functionality, independence, or “compliance.” A diagnosis doesn’t capture your full self. A treatment plan isn’t an identity. No one else— professional or the general public — gets to decide what a meaningful life looks like for you.

Disabled people are allowed to exist without striving to be palatable to society. Without needing to appear “easy” to accommodate, without having to perform constant gratitude for basic access or understanding, and without having to explain or justify what their bodies or minds need in order to move through the world recognized, included, and supported.

There’s No “Right” Way to Be Disabled

Disability Pride Month isn’t only for people with mobility aids or visible conditions. It’s also for those who are often erased in different ways: people with chronic pain, fatigue, or invisible illness that doesn’t show up the way we expect it to. It’s also for neurodivergent people who’ve been called “difficult” or “too much” their whole lives. It’s for folks who’ve been harmed by systems that were supposed to help, but instead, misdiagnosed, dismissed, or disbelieved them. 

It’s for those who are still figuring out if “disabled” is a word they’re allowed to claim (You are if it feels right for you.) It’s for people navigating the messy in-between—wanting and deserving support, while also wanting to be seen by others as capable, competent, and whole in a society that often only recognizes those traits on its own narrow terms. It’s for people who’ve internalized shame because they were told their needs were excessive.  

What Able-Bodied People Can Do

If you’re not disabled, Disability Pride Month is an opportunity to listen, learn, and unlearn. It means noticing how disability is talked about, ignored, or erased in the spaces you move through. It means questioning who gets to be considered credible, competent, or deserving of support.

Here are a few ways to show up for disabled folks:

• Believe them, even when their needs or pain aren’t visible to you.
• Don’t wait for someone to disclose before advocating for accessibility for everyone who needs it in different environments — workplaces, schools, social settings, healthcare settings. 
• Share resources created by disabled writers, activists, and creators to amplify their voices.
• Examine and reflect upon your own beliefs about productivity, independence, and worth. 

Being an ally isn’t about helping people “overcome” their disability. It’s about helping dismantle the barriers that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

Disabled people don’t need fixing. They need support, access, safety, and respect.

This Disability Pride Month, we celebrate the strength, truth, and resistance of disabled people in all forms. At VOX Mental Health, we are committed to offering therapy that is accessible, affirming, and grounded in justice, not judgment. Our approach is rooted in the belief that therapy should not replicate the ableism people already experience in schools, workplaces, medical systems, and families.

If you’re navigating the weight of being disabled in a world that wasn’t built for you, you’re not alone. Pride can be quiet. It can be exhausted. It can be angry. It can be still. Your experience matters, however it shows up. 

 To learn more about ableism, visit: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/disability-is-diversity/202205/the-effects-ableist-language

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