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                  <text>   

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Compendium!

Third Queer History Month Comes to a Close
Queerness and Disability panel discusses intersectional issues

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Duration: 1:00:28

Daisy Sprenger
This year’s Queer History Month wrapped up with a panel about Queerness and Disability on

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Thursday, October 29. The panel was a collaboration between McGill Queer History Month and
DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN) Canada and was facilitated by Nelly Bassily, Manager of
Youth Initiatives and International Relationships at DAWN Canada. The panel saw approximately
50 participants.
Four panelists were featured: Courage (Natasha) Bacchus, a Black Deaf athlete, artist, and
activist, Che Birchwood, a Black multi-disciplinary healer and organizer; Gaitrie Persaud, a
Guyanese-Canadian Deaf artist, actress, and director; and jaye simpson, an Oji-Cree Saulteaux
Indigiqueer poet. The panel touched on a number of topics at the intersection of queerness,
race, and disability.
In the first question, “what does queerness and disability mean to you?” panelists drew on their
own experiences of these intersections. simpson spoke on their experience, explaining that “I
think for me, queerness and disability has always been so intertwined with me growing up,
especially as a kid with chronic pain and neuro divergence. I was always told to hide that in favor
of normalcy. I think that’s such an intrinsic relationship with queerness, which was also my
experience to work at being cisgender and heterosexual, and especially as an Indigenous
person, I was always told to melt myself down to be palatable.” Che added to this, speaking on
how they only recently found out they were autistic because they were told growing up – and
believed themselves – that they were bullied and isolated from social situations due to their
race, class, and queerness.
The panelists also spoke on barriers to inclusion and the lack of resources for queer and
disabled communities. Courage stressed the importance of removing barriers and uplifting
queer Deaf BIPOC voices in the arts: “It’s so important because we need to have our culture, our
religion, our philosophy, our ways of thinking represented.” Gaitrie, who worked with Courage
on a show called The Two Natashas, also spoke about barriers, saying that “there’s really not a lot
of accessibility. So in the arts world and theater, you don’t actually have that relationship for
queer BIPOC deaf people. We don’t have the connections and we’re trying to figure out how to
find those connections within a theater environment. There’s not a lot of resources out there to
support us as artists.”
Panelists also discussed the racism that occurs in disabled communities. simpson spoke on
how space that is often given to white neurodivergent and disabled folks is not given to BIPOC.
“When only one group is highlighted, you’re doing a real disservice on some of the discussions
and dialogue that needs to happen in the community,” they said. “And I don’t know, I’ve had
some really awful experiences in community with white disabled folks. And it’s been a lot of
racism at times. I think there needs to be a larger discussion on how that happens.” Che added

Tweets by @mcgilldaily

�on to this, speaking about the prevalence of racism in Facebook groups about autism and
ADHD. “Sometimes people use their diagnoses as an excuse either for racism or for like not
understanding all the labour that people of colour are trying to do to explain to them. […] Saying
like, oh, I can’t read that text because I have ADHD and I can’t read long stuff but there are even
all the comments that are like breaking down for people that were just ignoring it.”
The panel ended with a question period in which participants asked questions about resources,
community, and further reading. Both the panelists and participants suggested that the best
way to access resources was to reach out to disability advocacy centres and join communitybased Facebook groups like Passion and Disability and This is Autistic Culture.

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