Two queer parents in Australia recently spoke with Radio National about their experiences as parents with disabilities.
Jax Jacki Brown, who is raising her four-and-a-half-month old daughter with her partner Anne, has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair. She tells Radio National’s Life Matters program (audio;Â transcript):
The assumptions that we are not parents, I think, come from the fact that we are not shown to be parents anywhere, that it’s just not considered an option for people with disabilities to be parents. And so people assume all the time that I am not Anne’s partner, that I must be a friend or a sister or something. It’s often assumed of people in queer relationships that we can’t be lovers, but I think it’s even more so assumed of disabled people.
When she and Anne decided to use reciprocal IVF to start their family, she found it hard “to enter a medical industry again when I’ve had a lot of my childhood feeling really disempowered by the medical profession, to then give over my body to a medical space where disability was presumed to be an inherently negative, terrible thing.”
She also shares her thoughts on the screening for disabilities done to donor sperm; legislation that says  potential adoptive parents “have to be fit, healthy and actively able to parent a child”; and what she wants to teach her daughter about disability.
Another parent, Jess Walton, who is now raising two children, had her leg amputated at age 10 because of cancer. For 20 years or so, she told Life Matters, “I had felt like I’m not really disabled enough to be part of that [disabled] community and I didn’t know anyone.” Instead, she found her place in the queer community, but observes, “Both the disabled and the LGBTI community can exclude and forget people within their communities that belong to multiple marginalised communities. So there’s ableism within the LGBTI community, and there’s homophobia and transphobia in the disabled community.” At the same time, she’s found safety and acceptance in the queer community because many people there “have done a lot of work thinking about who they are and dealing with bigotry and exclusion.”
Still, she finds that some people desexualize those with disabilities and can’t imagine them being in a relationship or having sex, much less getting married and having kids. She wants to show her children a different picture, noting, “I hope my kids know that I’m proud of that and that I’m not ashamed to be disabled, I’m not sad about being disabled, and in fact it’s a source of joy and pride and it’s the reason for my connection to this amazing community of people.”
She’d like to see more stories of disabled queer parents in the media, however. She mentions children’s television show Play School (which first showed a two-mom couple back in 2004) and asks, “It took so many years for me to see gay parents on Play School, but when are we going to have gay disabled parents on Play School?” Excellent question, and one we could ask of shows in the U.S. as well.
The episode is part of Life Matters’ series “We’ve Got This: Parenting with a Disability,” which also shares the stories of several other non-queer parents with disabilities.