Why I Celebrate Disability Pride

By Kayla Rodríguez

Happy Disability Pride Month! My name is Kayla, and I’m autistic. After everything the disability community has gone through — particularly since the onset of the pandemic — I am very proud to be a part of this community.

Accepting Autism

But this wasn’t always the case. I wasn’t always proud to have a disability. It took me a while to accept being autistic.

Half a portrait of a Black woman with her hair tied back and wearing a leather jacket and headphones.

I was bullied as a kid, and I thought it was because I was autistic. But in reality, I was bullied because of people’s reaction to me being autistic. It wasn’t my autism’s fault, it was society’s fault because of how they see and treat autistic and disabled people. Because of the bullying, I tried to be invisible so people wouldn’t notice me. I then tried to mask my autism because I wanted people to like me. I tried to please them so they would like me and not bully me. However, in the end, I realized I wasn’t making friends that way and it was tiring for me to mask my autism and try to be a people-pleaser. I ended up making more friends just by being my authentic, autistic self. To this day, I still hate that I have social anxiety caused by being autistic. But other than that, I have accepted being autistic, and I just wish society would accept it too.

Visible and Invisible Disabilities

There are two types of disabilities: the physical kind and the intellectual/developmental kind. Autism is a developmental disability that affects how my brain works. It is also an invisible disability, meaning you can’t tell by looking at me that I have a disability like you would for people who have physical disabilities, who might use mobility devices, for instance.

But here’s the thing, whether it is invisible or not, every disability is valid and every disabled person deserves to have the accommodations and the support they need to be able to live a good life.

Identity-first and person-first language

There’s a debate about whether disability defines people’s identities.

In my case, my disability does define me because it is part of who I am. It is up to each person to say whether their disability defines them or not. It’s okay if you think your disability does define you, and it’s also ok if you think it doesn’t. The choice is yours and yours to make. So in this sense, people also have the right to choose how they define themselves, including by using identity-first language (Autistic person) or person-first language (person with autism). In my case, I use identity-first language because being autistic is a huge part of who I am.

Celebrating Disability Pride

Five people sitting together, laughing. The first one, from left to right, is a wheelchair user.

Disability Pride is important because it helps us recognize there is nothing wrong with being disabled and no disabled person should feel shame in their disability. Disability is something that makes people different in a good way and in some cases -like mine-, it’s what makes them who they are.

I’m not saying that being disabled is always easy. Having a disability can be very hard.

In my opinion, a lot of the reasons why having a disability is hard is because of how society treats disabled people, not because of disability in itself.

Thanks to the work of activists like Judy Heumann, we have come a long way in terms of disability rights and accommodations for disabled people. However, we still have a long journey ahead of us. In general, society still wants to prevent or cure our disabilities instead of focusing on accepting our disabilities and giving us the accommodations and support we need to live better lives. Society also tends to not listen to us and to think our lives aren’t worth living, as the pandemic kept reminding us. They seem to think we are “inspirational”, but they don’t fix the accessibility issues that disable us in the first place. Why are we ‘inspirational’? Because we want to live life like everybody else?

I am proud to be autistic and to be part of the disability community. Despite how society treats us and the struggles we face, we’re still here, fighting for a chance to be considered equal. My journey has taught me that we need to keep up the fight. Our disability is a part of who we are and we deserve equity.

About the author

Kayla Rodríguez is a Puerto Rican autistic lesbian with ADHD and a type 1 diabetic. Kayla is originally from New York and currently resides in Buford, Georgia. Currently, she is the Vice-Chair of the Advisory Board for the Autistic Women and Non-Binary Network (AWN) and wrote a chapter in the republished version of AWN’s Sincerely, Your Autistic Child. She is also part of the US Alliance of Women, Nonbinary Persons, and Other Gender Minorities with Disabilities convened by Women Enabled International.