Disability Pride Month 2024

July is Disability Pride Month

Throughout the year there are various awareness raising days, weeks and months for specific things. For example we have Sign Language Week, Ehlers Danlos Awareness Month, Neurodiversity Celebration Week, Autism acceptance month, Epilepsy Awareness, cataract awareness and the list goes on. These are all great for people to raise awareness about personal diagnoses, genetic variations and things that effect people’s daily lives. Under the social model of disability these are often known as our individual impairments or differences.

For Disabled people generally we have two months of the year where we try and focus our efforts together. These are Disability History Month (this year from 14th November to 20th December) and Disability Pride Month. Disability History Month always includes the International Day of Disabled Person (or International Day of Persons with Disabilities) on 3 December, and is often after Disability Pay Gap day.

What is Disability Pride Month?

Disability Pride month is now a worldwide celebration. It originated in the United States to commemorate the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July 1990. Disabled people are at least 15% of the worlds population and disability is present in all ages, races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions and socio-economic backgrounds.

Disability Pride Month is a chance to celebrate disabled people and their history, culture and contributions they make to society. It is a time when we can feel pride in who we are and seeks to challenge the way other people view and define disability. We want to end the stigma of being disabled and celebrate the breadth of human diversity that we are part of.

Many people use Disability Pride Month to raise awareness of some of the barriers we still face in life, in work and in society.

Disability Pride Flag

The disability Pride flag was redesigned in 2021 by Ann Magill, an update on Ann’s 2019 design. The colour brightness was muted and the bolt removed in response to feedback from people with visually triggered seizures and migraines.

The flag colours in a stripe shows how disabled people have to cut across barriers in society. It contains all six of the standard county flag colours, signifying how disability spans borders and nations. The black field is mourning for the victims of ableist violence and abuse, red stripe for physical disabilities, gold stripe for neurodivergence, white stripe for non-visible and undiagnosed disabilities, blue stripe for mental health disabilities and the green stripe for sensory disabilities.

What does Disability Pride mean to me?

Disability pride for me is knowing that I was able to adapt to changing situations and find alternate ways to continue my life. 

Disability pride is learning about what other activists have done in the past to make sure that when I (and others) become disabled, we can continue to work (where we are able to) and socialise as the necessary laws were already in place. 

Disability pride is knowing I try to make a difference and try to educate others how to better include disabled people. 

Disability pride is seeing my wheelchair as one of the greatest keys to freedom and independence and not seeing my use of one as tragic and one of the worst things that could happen (it definitely is not that!). 

Disability pride is the community I became a part of and how wonderful it was to learn from and be part of so many others who could help me and advise me along the way.

Disability pride is being alive and smashing people’s biases and thoughts on what disabled people can be and do.

Disability pride is being proud of all I’ve achieved.

Disability pride is being able and proud to take on the identity of disabled and ignoring the stigma.

I’m Vikki, I’m disabled and I’m proud of it.