Every Body in Disability Pride Month: Sexual Health, Rights, Justice, and Pleasure for People with Disabilities

Every July, Disability Pride Month marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, signed on 26 July 1990, and celebrates disability as a valued part of human diversity. The theme chosen by The Arc’s National Council of Self-Advocates for 2026, “The World Works Better With Us,” argues that when disabled people are included, respected, and supported, systems function better for everyone. Sexual health is one of the systems that most often fails that test.

The World Health Organization and WAS define sexual health as a state of physical, emotional, mental, and social well-being in relation to sexuality, not merely the absence of disease, dysfunction, or infirmity (WHO, 2006). That definition belongs to every body. Yet for the estimated 1.3 billion people, about 16% of the world’s population, or one in six of us, who live with significant disability, the conditions that make sexual health possible are routinely withheld (WHO, 2022).

Sexual Rights Are Not Conditional on Ability

The WAS Declaration on Sexual Rights (2014) affirms that the right to sexual information, education, the highest attainable standard of sexual health care, and the pursuit of a satisfying, safe, and pleasurable sexual life belongs to all people, without exception, and regardless of disability. International human rights law says the same. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities obliges states to provide health services of the same range and quality to disabled people as to everyone else, including in sexual and reproductive health (UN, 2006, Article 25), and to respect the right to found a family and retain fertility (Article 23).

However, there is a gap between what disabled people are entitled to and what they actually receive as a result of the systems built around a narrow idea of whose body counts.

Desexualization

One of the most persistent barriers disabled people face in sexual health is the assumption that they are not sexual beings at all. The myth of asexuality, the presumption that disability and sexual desire are incompatible, is documented in the research. A qualitative study of attitudes toward disability and sexuality found that disabled people are commonly perceived as asexual, driven by a narrow, heteronormative idea of what sex is and who is presumed to have it (Esmail, Darry, Walter, & Knupp, 2010).

The same research found that stigma can lead disabled people to internalize the message that they are asexual, undermining confidence, desire, and the ability to form intimate relationships, while distorting a person’s sexual self-concept (Esmail et al., 2010). When a clinician, educator, or family member assumes a disabled person has no sexual life, that assumption becomes a barrier to information, to care, and to being seen as a full person.

This internalized ableism, the absorption of society’s devaluing messages about disabled bodies, desires, and relationships, operates alongside the structural and interpersonal ableism that disabled people encounter from providers, educators, and institutions (Morand, 2025a). It is compounded by what disability comedian and journalist Stella Young termed “inspiration porn”: the framing of disabled people’s ordinary existence as a spectacle of courage for the emotional benefit of non-disabled audiences (Young, 2014). Both patterns, asexual erasure and inspirational spectacle, deny disabled people their full humanity, and both function as barriers to sexual health care.

Structural Exclusion

The exclusion of disabled people from sexual and reproductive health services is the predictable output of systems built around a narrow, non-disabled idea of whose body is expected to need sexual and reproductive care.

A systematic review of barriers facing persons with disabilities accessing sexual and reproductive health services in sub-Saharan Africa identified a consistent pattern: negative attitudes from providers and communities, a shortage of providers trained to deliver disability-competent care, inaccessible facilities, communication barriers, and the financial and transport costs of reaching services at all (Ganle et al., 2020).

Each of these barriers is a feature of how services were designed, by default, around a non-disabled patient. This is the logic of the social model of disability, first named by the disabled academic Mike Oliver in 1983, who said people are disabled less by their impairments than by the barriers, attitudes, and exclusions a society erects around them (Oliver, 1983). Remove the barriers, and the gap closes.

Institutional and residential settings present a specific, and often invisible, form of this exclusion. For disabled people living in care facilities, privacy, intimate relationships, and sexual expression are frequently controlled or denied. This can include the supervision of personal relationships, restrictions on cohabitation, and the absence of any protected space for sexual expression. These controls are often enacted under the language of protection or care, while functioning to strip disabled people of the sexual citizenship that non-disabled people take for granted. Research indicates these controls also perpetuate conditions in which sexual violence occurs. (Morand, 2025b).

Autonomy and Consent

The violation of disabled people's bodily autonomy takes multiple forms. The World Health Organization and UNFPA document that people with disabilities are up to three times more likely than non-disabled people to experience physical and sexual abuse and rape, a disparity driven by structural conditions such as: dependency relationships, institutional environments that concentrate power in the hands of caregivers, systematic exclusion from sexual health education, and legal and social service systems that routinely fail to respond when disabled people report abuse (WHO/UNFPA, 2009). 

Sexual violence against disabled people is an expression of the same logic that denies disabled people access to reproductive healthcare, contraception, and autonomous decision-making, the assumption that disabled bodies are available for management by others.

Nowhere is the denial of disabled people's sexual rights starker than in the practice of forced and coerced sterilization, carried out on disabled people, particularly women and girls, and especially those with intellectual or psychosocial disabilities, without free and informed consent, and in some jurisdictions still legally permissible. The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has repeatedly called on states to prohibit the practice and to replace substitute decision-making regimes with supported decision-making, in line with its General Comment on equal recognition before the law (UN CRPD Committee, 2014).

Rather than asking whether a disabled person is "competent" to make a sexual or reproductive decision, and handing that decision to someone else when the answer is judged to be no, supported decision-making asks what support a person needs to make and communicate their own decision.

Sexual Justice

The three failures described above — being presumed asexual, being shut out of care, and being denied control over one’s own body — are expressions of the same thing: an unequal distribution of power that decides whose sexuality is recognized, whose access is prioritized, and whose autonomy is respected.

The WAS Declaration on Sexual Justice, adopted on 18 June 2025, addresses “the social determinants and structural conditions of inequalities and discriminations that persist globally in relation to sexual health and rights” (WAS, 2025a).

The Declaration affirms that sexual justice promotes the social acceptance of the most marginalized and stigmatized populations, listing, among them, people marginalized by “health status and disabilities.”

Disabled women, LGBTQIA+ disabled people, and disabled people of color face intersecting and compounding forms of discrimination that amplify barriers to sexual justice (Morand, 2025b). Disability cannot be disaggregated from race, gender, class, or sexuality when analyzing who is excluded and why, and responses that address disability as a single-axis identity, without attending to these intersections, will consistently fall short. (Ladau, 2021).

The same argument is developed at length in the WAS position paper Sexual Justice and the Future of Sexual Rights: A Call to Action (Giami et al., 2026) and anchored in the Porto Proclamation on Sexual Health, Rights, and Justice, adopted at the inaugural World Sexual Health Assembly in Porto, Portugal, in September 2025 (WAS, 2025b).

The forces that determine whether a disabled person can experience sexual health are the desexualizing assumptions embedded in how providers are trained; the inaccessible clinics and absent communication supports; the curricula that picture a non-disabled student by default; and the legal frameworks that, in places, still permit decisions to be made about a disabled person’s body without their consent. These are problems of policy, power, stigma, and institutional design.

Every Body: The WSHD 2026 Connection

This is the Disabled Bodies theme of World Sexual Health Day 2026, “Every Body”, one of ten structural themes WAS is exploring across the year. “Every Body” is a structural-justice framing: the question is never how people with disabilities should feel about their bodies, but what system produced the gap in their care. 

From Awareness to Action

For professionals, advocates, and institutions, Every Body translates into concrete steps:

• Train providers in disability-competent sexual health care, and treat the desexualization of disabled patients as a clinical failure.

• Use language that reflects disabled people’s identity and preferences. Ask individuals whether they prefer identity-first (“disabled person”) or person-first (“person with a disability”) language, avoid terms that medicalize or infantilize disability, and recognize that ableist language is sufficiently embedded in professional norms that active unlearning is required. (Ladau, 2021).

• Make sexual health services physically and communicatively accessible; accessible premises, accessible information formats, and provision for diverse communication needs.

• Co-design sexuality education and services with disabled people, following the principle of “nothing about us without us.”

• Adopt supported decision-making frameworks, and end practices, including non-consensual sterilization, that override disabled people’s autonomy.

• Include sexual health, intimacy, and pleasure as standard topics in care, rather than subjects assumed not to apply.

Join Us

Throughout 2026, WAS is sharing resources, stories, and tools under the Every Body theme, including the official World Sexual Health Day 2026 toolkit. Explore the materials and find ways to take part at the official WSHD website. If you work in sexual health consider joining the global WAS community as an individual or organizational member, and help ensure that sexual health reaches every body.

Every Body

The world works better with disabled people, included, not accommodated as an afterthought.

Every Body has a sexual self. Every Body has the right to autonomy over it. Every Body deserves Sexual Health, Rights, Justice and Pleasure.

Contributor

The editors thank Nadia Morand, EFS Executive Committee Member (Association Les dévalideuses; Association Le labo de vie, France), whose poster presentations at the World Sexual Health Assembly (Porto, September 2025), Anti-Ableism and Sexual Health: Fostering Autonomy and Self-Determination for People with Disabilities and Sexual Justice for People with Disabilities: Challenges and Actions for Equality, directly informed key sections of this post.

References

Esmail, S., Darry, K., Walter, A., & Knupp, H. (2010). Attitudes and perceptions towards disability and sexuality. Disability and Rehabilitation, 32(14), 1148–1155. https://doi.org/10.3109/09638280903419277

Ganle, J. K., Baatiema, L., Quansah, R., & Danso-Appiah, A. (2020). Barriers facing persons with disability in accessing sexual and reproductive health services in sub-Saharan Africa: A systematic review. PLOS ONE, 15(10), e0238585. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0238585

Giami, A., Corona, E., Welsh, L., Hernandez Forcada, R., Stardust, Z., Islam Khan, M. S., Pirotte, M., Parker, R. G., El Feki, S., Gómez Regalado, A., Medico, D., Loewe Kurilla, A., Perelman, L., de Klerk, R., Janssen, E., Nobre, P., & Rudolph, E. (2026). Sexual justice and the future of sexual rights: A call to action. International Journal of Sexual Health. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317611.2026.2655809

Ladau, E. (2021). Demystifying disability: What to know, what to say, and how to be an ally. Ten Speed Press.

Morand, N. (2025a). Anti-ableism and sexual health: Fostering autonomy and self-determination for people with disabilities [Poster presentation]. World Sexual Health Assembly, Porto, Portugal. Association Les dévalideuses; Association Le labo de vie.

Morand, N. (2025b). Sexual justice for people with disabilities: Challenges and actions for equality [Poster presentation]. World Sexual Health Assembly, Porto, Portugal. Association Les dévalideuses; Association Le labo de vie.

Oliver, M. (1983). Social work with disabled people. Macmillan.

United Nations. (2006). Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/convention-on-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities.html

UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2014). General comment No. 1 (2014): Article 12: Equal recognition before the law (CRPD/C/GC/1). United Nations. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-1-2014-article-12-equal

World Association for Sexual Health. (2014). Declaration on sexual rights. https://worldsexualhealth.net/declaration-on-sexual-rights/

World Association for Sexual Health. (2025a). Declaration on sexual justice. https://worldsexualhealth.net/declaration-on-sexual-justice/

World Association for Sexual Health. (2025b). Porto proclamation on sexual health, rights, and justice. World Sexual Health Assembly, Porto, Portugal, September 2025.

World Health Organization & United Nations Population Fund. (2009). Promoting sexual and reproductive health for persons with disabilities: WHO/UNFPA guidance note. World Health Organization. https://www.unfpa.org/publications/promoting-sexual-and-reproductive-health-persons-disabilities

World Health Organization. (2006). Defining sexual health: Report of a technical consultation on sexual health, 28–31 January 2002, Geneva. https://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/sexual_health/defining_sh/en/

World Health Organization. (2022). Disability and health [Fact sheet]. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health

Young, S. (2014, April). I’m not your inspiration, thank you very much [TEDx Talk]. TEDxSydney. https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much