4 minute read
Disabling Relationship Prejudices
IN PUBLIC HEALTH AND SOCIETY
For many disabled people, denied support around sex and relationships, living the life they want can seem impossible. Angela Matthews shares her own experiences navigating dating and the healthcare system.
THE experiences of disabled people around sex and relationships are not a subject that is often discussed – not in the right way anyway. This is why I was pleased to see Disability History Month back in December covering the issue and provoking a very healthy debate.
Earlier in the year, the National Disability Strategy survey had asked disabled people and the general public if they would “feel comfortable in an intimate relationship with a disabled person”.
I’m not afraid to admit tears fell when I was taking the survey and read this question, and I didn’t feel much better when I read the survey analysis, published some months later.
The findings showed that just over half (56 per cent) of the general public said they ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ that they would feel comfortable being in an intimate relationship with a disabled person. Perhaps more worryingly though, just 65 per cent of disabled people said they would feel comfortable being in an intimate relationship with another disabled person.
I find myself wondering what’s worse – the fact that the Government asked this question, or what they found when they asked the question. Even a significant percentage of disabled people don’t feel comfortable to be in a relationship with another disabled person.
And then I wondered why such findings still surprise me. I am in my late thirties and I have an Inherited Metabolic Disorder (IMD) and a brain injury. These findings resonate with my own relationship experiences, relationships which appeared to be going well until we started discussing my disability.
Even just mentioning my IMD – no other details – led one guy to assume that I would need to be cared for (by him) later in life, even without knowing any details of my condition or how it will progress (or not) in the future. After a year of dating, another guy asked “When are you going to get better?” To him, this was all temporary and I would “get better”. To me, this is ‘normal’, it’s my life. I am not sick, my body just works differently to others.
But we must realise the above experiences – that many disabled people experience – are not limited to the conversations ‘behind closed doors’, in personal relationships, between two people. They are systemic, in policy (given the asking of the question about intimate relationships), and in our health system even.
Women with the same IMD as me will find that their sex life is an agenda item at every medical appointment. With
my IMD, my liver does not break down protein well. This could be “harmful” to an unborn child. By “harmful” the public health system means that a baby could be “disabled” or have “learning disabilities”. Women with my IMD are told from a very early age that they “must not get pregnant by mistake”, and then the subject is discussed at every medical appointment thereafter, often at the detriment of other more urgent topics, such as funding for treatments and getting adaptations and support at home or work.
Some women with my condition feel humiliated by how much their sex life is discussed in clinics. Other women feel the health system is regressive in terms of gender equality and upholds a system which implies women’s default destiny is to have children. For me, the main feeling is sadness at the disgust innate in the public health system’s relentless drive to prevent pregnancy in women who may bear disabled children. The subtext: being disabled is bad and must be prevented at all costs.
The eugenics agenda – eugenics meaning literally “well born” – reveals the systemic discrimination running through our public health system and in our social life. Even in Facebook support groups for people with my IMD, we are contacted by newcomers to the group – pregnant women who want to know how to get a genetic test for our IMD to help them decide whether to terminate their pregnancy. It is what Professor Tom Shakespeare, a professor in bioethics and who has achondroplasia, said in a lecture at Birkbeck College last year, “It’s the negative effects of eugenics that we worry about: everything we do to prevent ‘inferior types’ from reproducing too much”. The dating landscape which too often reveals people’s attitudes towards disabled people is merely a symptom of the discriminatory structures and prejudices that remain rife within public health and wider society. The National Disability Strategy survey showed all kinds of prejudicial attitudes people have about disabled people, which we must bring to the fore of our conversations about the social inclusion of disabled people. Medical professionals and government advisers should not be the ones leading the discussion on sex, relationships, and disability. Well done to Disability History month for causing us to have those conversations. Let’s make sure our voices don’t fall silent and that sex and disability is being discussed in the right way and by the right people.
Author: Angela Matthews, Head of Policy
at Business Disability Forum
Website: businessdisabilityforum.org.uk Twitter: @DisabilitySmart Instagram: @disabilitysmart Facebook: @DisabilitySmart
