If it’s worth anything, all the visibilization, representation and positive portrayal of disability and chronic illness I’ve ever seen (and it has steadily grown in the past 10 years in my experience) has come through LGBT+ or LGBT+friendly spaces or hand in hand with them (once again, in my experience). I don’t known how mainstream it is though, since my browsing habits are not that mainstream

Bisexual with an autoimmune disorder here.

I think the simplest explanation is that LGBT acceptance doesn’t cost anyone anything - in fact it’s the opposite as they no longer have to expend energy on hatred and exclusion. Nothing had to be built or spent to give equal rights to a marginalised group, just a signature on some paper. No government funds needed to be allocated to rolling out this change.

It’s much easier to stop doing something current than to start doing something new. Disability/chronic illness accommodations are extremely varied, costly, take time and money to implement, which creates a natural barrier. From an individual perspective, it costs time and energy to help support someone with a disability or chronic condition. It costs no time or energy to agree that everyone should be treated equitably.

Protections and accommodations for those groups are codified into law much more firmly and with longer tenure as a part of decent society.

By contrast, we’re unfortunately not far removed from the time when the word “gay”, for example, was commonly used as a pejorative for just about everything. LGBTQIA+ people are also very often attacked and killed for their status as such in the modern world.

So that gap in concrete societal norms and established, ubiquitous law are what demand a more active PRIDE movement right now to help people feel seen and spread awareness to counteract hate and ignorance (which hopefully leads to similar enforced protections for these communities).

All are valid though and need more support.

It’s harder to throw a parade?

There is actually a quite hardcore history of advocacy that cropped up in the civil rights era where folk with disabilities performed some really heroic protest. The tale of Ed Roberts and the “Rolling Quads” is pretty legendary stuff.

The wins established a mostly unchallenged veiw at a legal level that differently abled people deserve to have their participation in society facilliatied. It was a major win…

But with success comes stagnation. Part of why the LGBTQIA+ is so visible is the movement is still marching and there is a secondary purpose to the movement. The visibility of actually running up a flag in those communities is a way to make something potentially invisible visible. To give a sense of solidarity. A lot of subjugation techniques of the past were to make people feel like they couldn’t possibly make strides for equality because their numbers were too small. Prides are the antithesis to that form of subjugation and for lost souls cast out from their families to find a non-hostile culture. Prides are run by legacy volunteers and are huge in participation so people who want to gain political points for future votes or as an audience gathering together anyway to advertize to look at tipping their hat to the movement as personally adventageous. They don’t nessisarily do it out of generosity and respect. While it’s possible they do actually have aligned principles of civil rights it is basic backscratching as the LGBTQIA have something they want. Votes or dollars.

As far as I am aware Disability civil rights advocacy has moved mostly into the pocketsquare and tie political sphere rather than the rough and tumble social advocacy battles where it began and as a result the short memory of society has forgotten the impact and demands of those voices in the villiage square ring of cultural advocacy. Since fewer people are counted on to be tuned into C-SPAN then can be counted at to go paint some rainbows on their faces and participate in a mardi gras style carnival event it doesn’t get the same level of attention.

In short - effective cultural advocacy along the lines of the LGBTQIA is driven by communities banding together and going out and being visible in force and making some kind of public fuss. All the better if it’s an over the top fun day… Or if you set fire to things and riot that basically gets people talking and asking questions too. Basically whatever works to be the loudest squeeky wheel. Otherwise non-minority folk who don’t have to think about your needs will forget to ask you what you need or straight up forget you exist.

Pride makes money. Companies make money off pride merch and it costs them $0 to be inclusive of LGBT+ people.

But god forbid they do anything beneficial if it doesn’t make them money or gasp cost money. That’s why they actively find new ways to discriminate against disabled people without it being too obvious so they can skirt the law. Plenty of disabled people can do just as good or better at a job than an able bodied person with accommodations, but you’re immediately a threat to a company if you request those accommodations. And then of course, just like anti union propaganda, the general public gets told that disabled people are greedy moochers that need to fuck off out of society.

I worked for a company that is vehemently anti WFH. They had everyone working remotely for all of COVID no problem. But now if a disabled person requests WFH as an accommodation they are told it is “not reasonable” and it is denied. It’s very easy to get away with discrimination against disabled people because a lot of us are just trying to get through the day. Sitting in a court room to fight a company that will extend the lawsuit as long as possible sounds like my own personal nightmare. Hell, speaking of court even FUCKING JURY DUTY won’t accommodate a lot of disabled people. That’s literally the government and they don’t give a fuck. I speak from experience.

Like most things, the answer is money. They want able bodied workers they can make money off the back of for the minimum amount possible.

Sorry this turned into a rant lmao

A lot of the points here are valid but I personally think it’s partly because disabled people aren’t “pretty”. There’s a narrow band of what’s sort of socially accepted as a disability and if you’re not in that band you’re kinda screwed. If it’s not visible enough you’re faking or overexaggerating or a hypochondriac. If it’s too visible it’s gross and annoying and ‘why are you even out if you need everyone to cater to you?’. And when it comes to issues and accepting them, I feel like most people mainly care about the “normal” people who just happen to be apart of that group. Your Ellen DeGenereses and captain Holts and whatnot. Think about it - whenever you usually see disabilities in media, it’s usually the same set of easily identifiable ones and a lot of the time the character in question has something that negates it in a way and if it is something more nonstandard, it seems like it’s the butt of the joke a lot of the time. And that doesn’t really work for disabilities because of how varied they are and how they often need conflicting things. You can’t just fight for the nice socially acceptable ones and call it a day.

Same goes for mental illness - it feels like most people are still working from the same set of sterotypes where you’re either a deranged maniac or an inaccurate sterotype like a savant with no social skills or maybe a hyper idealised version of said condition. And it’s hard to fight for accommodation when people don’t even understand what you’re fighting for.

I will add another thing. Many disabled people aren’t working force Because they can’t/there’s no acoomodation, etc What this means is that they don’t generate money And corporations/capitalism don’t care for people who are a burden

A few difficult reasons.

1. People with chronic illnesses frequently don’t have the energy to make noise and bring attention to their cause.
2. People with significant disability usually aren’t hiding in the halls of power, blending in. It’s significantly easier to hide a non-straight sexuality for long enough that you can be the decision maker who makes reform happen.
3. Disability is so varied, one person with one disability can’t know what it is like to have a different one. This stymies cross-disability advocacy. This gets even harder for family of people with disabilities, who only conceptually maybe understand their loved one’s conditions, let alone other people’s
4. Accessibility accommodations can be complex and can be expensive, LGBT+ inclusion is extremely easy and low effort by comparison.
5. Understanding how disability affects daily life pervasively is harder than understanding “those two people are in love”. Most people internally assume everyone else has roughly the same abilities and needs as themselves.
6. People with congenital conditions are frequently conditioned into not asking for better treatment. They get used to being second class citizens because it’s all they’ve ever known.
7. “Coming out” with a disability casts doubt on your ability to “perform” in the workplace. It’s very risky, the stigma of disability is huge and impacts how people evaluate you
8. Most people with disabilities don’t consider themselves disabled. For example, glasses are one of the world’s most common disability aids, but you’ll never hear them referred to as such; and rarely will their users consider their poor eyesight a disability. Mobility disabilities are often written off as “I’m just getting old” or “I’m just a little unfit lately” or “it’s just an old injury playing up” instead of “I have a medical condition which limits my daily life”.

There’s more, I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch.

Edited to add a huge one:

1. People who are born with disability or who acquire them at a young age are frequently unable to access the type of formal education that allows them to become professionals. This makes it even harder for them to be visible in workplaces, because they’re considered “unskilled”. It also means you won’t see people with disabilities regularly in offices. Out of sight, out of mind for everyone else.

And another:

1. Money is medical privilege, and the people with the most money make the types of decisions that affect larger quantities of people. For people with disabilities who are born to wealth or who are able to acquire it, their medical conditions can be better treated, managed and therefore hidden. This can result in those people and the people who surround them to not feel like the illness is “a big deal” and hence it’s not a priority issue. It’s when people with significant money are negatively affected that you begin to hear about the barriers people with no money experience all day long.

Excuse my ignorance because my only (known) disability is needing corrective lenses.

LGBTQ rights and issues are relatively straightforward (where the goal is to love whoever you love and act like the person you want to be). Disability (to me) is much more of a vague and broad concept so I don’t know what the aim of a movement would be.

The causes of disability range from a voluntary or involuntary event, whether it’s a workplace incident, sports, car crash, or sometimes people have it from birth. People inflicted with conditions such as blindness, deafness, speech impediment, schizophrenia, or being bound to a mobility or other device like a wheelchair, pacemaker, hearing aid. There’s such variety and people need assistance in different ways.

I try to help where I can, but I have trouble offering help sometimes. How do I support someone without calling attention to their disability?

No chronic illnesses and not LGBTQ here, so please correct me if I get anything wrong.

The reason many LGBTQ issues sees widespread support now wasn’t because governments and companies decided it was ok, it was because of decades of small battles and struggles that really accelerated into widespread acceptance throughout the 10’s, and to which we are already seeing a backlash in terms of the attacks on trans rights (just to note that acceptance is far from complete or just a constant journey in one direction).

Companies adopted pride not because they are allies but because it became more profitable to be pro-LGBTQ than against. Govs don’t work off profitability exactly, but public opinion shifted so far that Obama went from tepidly approving of civil unions to basically every mainstream democrat being pro-LGBTQ now. Even many Republican senators signed on to the Respect for Marriage Act in 2022.

I don’t have a lot of answers for why that doesn’t exist for people with chronic issues / disabilities yet. I’m sure there are many people working to advocate to make it so and I think we all have a responsibility to encourage accessibility as a right. I don’t think anyone saw the acceleration of pro-LGBTQ popular acceptance that was the 10’s coming, and I don’t think you can attribute it to one particular cause. The tough and unsatisfying answer is “it’s complicated,” but I hope that the example of LGBTQ progress can be a source of solidarity and support for advocating for accessibility.

There are disability advocates and most industrial nations are trying to make things more accessible.

I guess it would help if you could bring up one particular issue that you face.

A lot of businesses look on people with disabilities as an expense rather than a market. And politically they’re too diverse to be considered a voting bloc except for certain issues. But July was Disability Pride Month… https://www.womansday.com/life/a43964487/disability-pride-flag/