Read on Twitter
Them: disabled people can't be sexy.
Me: ok, I won't.
Me: ok, I won't.
It would be just *terrible* if more disabled people retweeted this with pictures of themselves being NOT AT ALL sexy.
Ok, I have to get back to marking assignments. In the meantime, consider yourselves properly chastised for either being sexy and disabled or finding a disabled person sexy. Shame on you. Shame on all of us. 
Now FEELS: this is the first time in my life (both before and after my "mutant abilities" manifested) that I have EVER, publicly or privately, insinuated in even the most roundabout way that I might be... sexy? And I know confidence comes from within, but also, like, thank you?
I was a fat queer kid who never could seem to deliver on AFAB expectations, and I grew up to be a disabled queer adult with even less gender clarity, so this experience of being aesthetically appreciated is frankly just surreal.
And I'm trying now to wrap my head around this, and I guess that rather than saying "disabled people can also be conventionally attractive" or "we're all beautiful in our own ways", maybe we can interrogate the tangled mess of attraction, appearance, and value?
Because it sure fucked me up for a long time... It was actually disability that gave me the confidence to post this tweet because I KNOW my disability already places me outside of the boundaries of conventional attractiveness, and that's strangely liberating.
(And even after a totally soul-sucking year of dating while disabled, I can still say that I like how I present more now than I ever have before because I'm not trying to meet standards that exclude me a priori, so liking how I look no longer feels somehow presumptuous.)
Also let's allow for the truly wide range of attractions and druthers that exist. Dominant standards of physical attractiveness are a racist, colonial, classist, ableist, anti-fat cishetero patriarchal clusterfuck. They constrain our bodies and our imaginations.
If desire doesn't fit that mold, it is relegated to the realm of fetish -- and I don't say that to kink shame but to point out the ways that pretty fucking vanilla things become taboo depending on the bodies involved. As a fairly boring person, I want space to be "boring sexy."
I also want space for people to appreciate one another whether or not they adhere to dominant standards of attractiveness and expectations around orientation. Like, I mean, I find Alfred Molina extraordinarily beautiful, and everyone has their own Alfred Molinas. That's not weird
Anyway, no disrespect to Alfred Molina. I'm muddling my way through these thoughts. They're not fully formed -- OBVIOUSLY. I'm sure a ton of appearance activists in the disability community have much more insightful things to say, so I've got some reading to do.
I really didn't expect this to be a kind of emotional experience for me. I just felt damn good in a favourite sweater, struck a pose, took a picture, and threw it at the Internet -- and you've all made me blush!
