I am a twenty-one-year-old disabled women, attending college on the East Coast of the US, and am primarily interested in psychology, and writing on issues around disability as well as some fiction writing. I was born with spastic diplegia cerebral palsy, and have attended both special education and mainstream schools. I spent three years working in the Anti-Defamation League World of Difference program as an orator and group discussion facilitator, bringing the issues of disability into these “diversity workshops.” It was a very rewarding experience for me which taught me to be more vocal and to voice my fears and hopes in order to help others and in general to foster awareness and openness.
Within the last few years I have become increasingly interested in the study of sexuality, particularly where it intersects with disability, because I became sexually active around that time, and my disability’s effects on my sex life were bothersome for me. I sought out to find answers to all of my questions, but looking for those answers was so frustrating that it often brought me near tears–there just is not a lot out there. Activity on numerous mailing lists and discussion forums taught me that others feel the way that I did and that these resources were sorely needed. So–while I am not a psychologist, psychiatrist, doctor, or sex therapist, I have pooled my resources and read anything I can get my hands on, and am still doing this, in order to be informed so that I can be more aware and help others in a world where we are often underestimated, underappreciated, and asexualized. We have to be informed and loudmouthed in order to be heard and taken seriously in this world–and I hope that this site will help us all to be both of those things.