Access Intimacy and Sensual Sovereignty – The Pill For The Queer Disabled

As Pride Month marches on across India, a crucial and long-silenced conversation is breaking through- the intersection of queerness and disability. Recent weeks have seen renewed calls from activists and community leaders demanding that queer disabled lives be recognised not as footnotes, but as central to the fight for liberation.

Despite decades of activism, queer disabled people remain on the margins of both disability and queer movements – excluded from Pride parades lacking accessibility, erased from popular narratives, and overlooked in policy debates.

When movements fail their own

Mainstream Indian queer politics continues to be dominated by savarna, upper-caste, able-bodied voices. Legal and media discourse centres almost exclusively on middle-class, urban queerness – those with access to certain social capital, English-language privileges, legal representation, private clinics, and public platforms.

In this landscape, the lived realities of disabled queer people – who are navigating housing and livelihood precarity, lack of accessible healthcare, institutional exclusions, and systemic unemployment – are rarely considered central, let alone urgent or necessary.

This disparity became particularly visible during the recent hearings on marriage equality before the Honourable Supreme Court of India. Even as the legal challenge was a historic moment, it was marked by a narrow framing of what kind of “rights” queer people should be asking and fighting for.

Over the years, arguably since the reading down of Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, queer discourse has become overwhelmingly centred on marriage as the ultimate marker of recognition and equality, often framing it as the final frontier of queer liberation – a framing that is both reductive and misleading, especially for the various marginalised queer sub-groups.

Biases of able-bodiedness and caste privilege shape dominant narratives of liberation

For many communities – such as queer-disabled and queer Dalits and Bahujans living at the intersection of marginalised identities – marriage rights are neither the ultimate aspiration nor the most urgent form of emancipation.

These rights remain largely inaccessible not solely due to legal barriers, but because of the everyday realities of marginalised lives which is often characterised by financial instability, lack of familial support, geographic isolation, unsafe environments, and limited mobility. Within Indian queer spaces, deeply internalised biases of able-bodiedness and caste privilege shape dominant narratives of liberation – narratives that often erase or exclude those living outside the urban, upper-caste domain. Thus, call for marriage rights by a select-few, in courtrooms and beyond, unfortunately becomes a call by and for everyone.

Some petitioners spoke about inheritance and hospital visitation rights – vital issues, no doubt – but these concerns assume that queer people can afford property, have access to institutionalised healthcare, or will be welcomed into healthcare systems that routinely exclude or infantilise the disabled. Housing rights are particularly intriguing given that transgender persons and Dalit-Bahujan communities have long faced systematic exclusion from renting, let alone buying and owning properties.

Few discussions considered how disabled queer people are often denied the possibility of romantic partnerships altogether due to ableist beliefs about desirability, intimacy, and autonomy. Even fewer interrogated how disabled queer people might not seek state-sanctioned marriage, but instead demand social frameworks that validate their chosen kinships, care networks, and non-normative relationships.

In this rush to assimilate into the state through marriage, more radical demands – like universal access, bodily autonomy, community care, and interdependence – were shelved. Disabled queer folks were rendered invisible in courtrooms, and in the media coverage outside of it. Their most pressing needs – access to queer spaces, inclusive mairrage processes, disability-competent queer counselling – have never been seen as “big enough” demands to merit national attention.

The aesthetic and logistical architecture of queer culture – from public celebrations to digital intimacy – continues to be built by and for the able-bodied. This reproduces a hierarchy of queer worth, where visibility and rights are extended in proportion to how "legible" one's queerness is to dominant caste, class, and able-bodied norms. It is a system where disabled queerness is too messy, too dependent, too irrelevant.

But this is not a niche concern. Studies show that LGBTQIA+ people are disproportionately likely to be disabled. In the U.S., approximately 36% of LGBTQ+ adults identify as disabled, and a trans person has a 27% chance of having a disability by the age of 20, and a 39% chance by the age of 50 years.

Likewise, studies show that neuro-divergent persons, particularly persons on the autism spectrum, are empirically more likely to have alternate sexual and gender identities, than their neurotypical counterparts.

Yet it is in an exclusionary mess that the roots of a liberatary, interdependent queer politics lie.

The silence around disabled sexuality

And then there's silence. Deafening silence. In the disability community, discussions of sex, desire, and queerness are often cloaked in shame or completely erased. As Foucault famously argued, sex is governed by a system of silence and prohibition. This holds doubly true for disabled people, who are often cast as asexual, infantilised, or objects of medical concern. When efforts are made to “include” them in sexual discourse, it is often in a heterosexual, clinical, and desiring-subjects-are-abled framework.

Disability justice activist Mia Mingus notes, even when access is provided for sexual expression, it is often filtered through a heteronormative, clinical lens. Disabled people are either denied sexuality altogether or granted it only within narrowly policed, "acceptable" frameworks – typically heterosexual, able-bodied, upper-caste and reproductive.

Sheryl Marie has critiqued the social model of disability for stopping at structural access –assuming that once ramps are built or policies are written, justice has been achieved. This approach ignores the deeper realms of intimacy, pleasure, and erotic agency. Bodies may enter the room, but they remain unseen as desiring or desired.

Many disability activists argue that even rudimentary conversations around sex and desire are missing – particularly in non-institutional spaces where disabled people live, work, and love. Within this vacuum, the very idea of queer leisure becomes unimaginable. The notion of going on a date, attending a drag night, or experiencing joy in one’s sexuality is dismissed as optional, advanced, or indulgent – especially when more “basic” access is still lacking.

Most disabled people receive little to no comprehensive sex education, particularly in inclusive or queer-affirming contexts. They are taught – explicitly or by omission – that sex is not for them. This widespread desexualisation, combined with institutional neglect and family silencing, makes sexual and romantic knowledge inaccessible at best, and violently repressed at worst.

Sexuality – particularly queer sexuality – thus becomes unthinkable in disabled bodies, not because it is absent, but because the cultural scripts refuse to imagine it. And when those bodies do assert desire, they are often punished –through ridicule, rejection, or corrective violence.

From inclusion to intimacy and sovereignty

The mutual exclusion perpetuated by queer and disabled communities unintentionally, yet impactfully, has two medicines. The first is access intimacy – the deeply felt, relational ease that comes when someone understands your access needs without performance or explanation. As Mia Mingus writes, access intimacy is about more than ramps or captions – it is about trust, anticipation, and mutual care.

It is what transforms access from obligation into connection. For queer disabled people, access intimacy is survival. It is how we begin to imagine a world where we are not just included, but desired, centered, and held with complexity.

The second medicine is a call toward sensual sovereignty – an invitation for disabled cis-het people to reclaim their own erotic lives and, in doing so, to stand in solidarity with queer lives, rather than apart from them. Sensual sovereignty is the right to feel, to want, to seek pleasure without shame. It rejects the narrative that casts disabled people as asexual or undeserving of intimacy.

It also resists the trap of respectability that often pushes cis-het disabled folks to distance themselves from queerness in order to be “taken seriously.” To embrace sensual sovereignty is to say: our bodies are not broken – they are sites of joy, heat, connection, and political power. And queer lives are not deviations – they are life, too.

Anmol Ratan is a lawyer based in New Delhi NCR and is a Strategic Advisor at QAble.  

Anchal Bhatheja is a Research Fellow at Vidhi and the Founder of QAble.

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