This is how it feels to be a disabled woman desexualised by the world

Desexualisation is the most profound way in which my womanhood is denied. It’s quite an odd experience to be in your twenties and treated like a sexless automaton, a core part of yourself stripped away. I am assumed to be either completely uninterested in or actually incapable of having sex (neither of these are true), often by people who are otherwise comfortable with disability.

I have been desexualised for so long and so often that it is actually hard to pick out specific moments that can adequately convey the strength of this messaging, but nevertheless a few spring to mind: someone at school asking me if I really needed to go to our sex ed lesson.

Friends cutting short conversations about university one-night stands when I joined the chat. The GP who assumed I wanted to go on the pill just to control my periods (I was twenty). The countless times someone on a dating app has told me they won’t date disabled women because they ‘like sex’ and we, apparently, don’t.

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Because people think my body is ‘sexless’, they feel able to treat it as public property, as an oddity to be explored. Not only do they feel entitled to ask about it – including its sexual capacities – they often feel entitled to touch me, in ways that can be gross or invasive or even scary. Often, it’s a hand left too long on my arm, or a creepy stroke of my face, but not infrequently it’s a hand on my knee or, worse, my lap.

To me, because I conceive of myself as a sexual being, this obviously feels frighteningly sexual, but what’s really horrifying is that they don’t see it like that at all. When a friend screamed at a man in a pub in Dublin for having his hand on my thigh, he was almost as appalled by the idea he looked like he was hitting on me as I was by the invasion.

In these circumstances, it becomes difficult to acknowledge or understand your own sexuality. There is no model for asserting your sexual needs, especially as, at the other end of the spectrum, some disabled women are hypersexualised by fetishists and those who find perceived vulnerability to be a turn-on. The constant insistence that you simply cannot be a sexual being makes it easier, sometimes, to deny that part of yourself to yourself, and feeds the feeling that you are not quite a real woman.

Being the subject of this refusal to see disabled female bodies as either fully adult or fully sexual inevitably affects your sense of your own womanhood, leaving you feeling alienated from your own sexual and gender identities.

How could it not, when it’s so constant and insistent? Mainstream feminism, with its focus on bodies that move through the world in typical ways, offers no help here, and nor, on the surface, does the disability rights movement, which often ignores the particular ways female disabled bodies are doubly marginalised.

But as I’ve got older and fully embraced the idea that disability is a social construct, I’ve seen that so too must be the notion that being disabled makes me less of a woman. And if that’s true, I can choose to disregard what society tells me about my womanhood.

For the past few years, then, I have attempted to treat my disabled, female body with something approaching compassion. This has eventually allowed me, belatedly but joyously, to take a bold new step: I am reclaiming womanhood for myself. I am exploring my sexuality – finding freedom, self-expression and parts of myself that had been locked away.

Rejecting the tired assumptions around sexuality and disability has not only brought me new experiences, but new ways of relating to my body and my gender. I have more ownership of them, and they both finally feel like real, sturdy parts of my identity. I still struggle with society seeing me as desexualised, but that’s not how I see myself. My understanding of disability, sexuality and gender has changed; now it’s time everyone else’s did too.

The View From Down Here is out now in paperback.

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