Rethinking Happily Ever After

Models for Disability and LGBTQ+ Experience

Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash

Lately I have been reading Amanda Leduc’s excellent book, Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space,¹ which explores the (Western) fairy tale tradition through the lens of disability—an examination that reveals just how ingrained ableism is in the stories we tell. Why is it that these fairy tales so often seem to link physical difference with vice or misfortune, and physical conformity with virtue and happily ever afters? What kind of effect do these stories (which are pervasive, a part of the air we breathe) have on us? What will it take to begin to tell different stories, and what possibilities can this open up for disabled people²—as well as for everyone else? 

In the second chapter, titled “Disability: A Fairy Tale,” Leduc outlines four different models for understanding and approaching disability: 1) the medical model, 2) the charity model, 3) psychological approaches to disability, and 4) the social model. Virtually all of the fairy tales Leduc examines involve some aspect of the first three models, which often end up perpetuating varying levels of harm for disabled folks. But Leduc makes the case that the social model of disability is not only a more helpful and illuminating model in many ways, but also an untapped creative resource; she asks, what would happen if the social model influenced the kind of stories we tell?

I am especially interested in how her insights regarding models of disability are mirrored in models of understanding and approaching sexual and gender minority experience. While disabled experience and sexual and gender minority experience certainly have their differences, the similarities are striking (and of course, it is worth noting that being disabled and being LGBTQ+ are not mutually exclusive!). It seems to me that refusing to recognize these similarities actually owes a lot to ableism, or at least over-reliance on the first three models of disability to the exclusion of the social model which I, like Leduc, find most helpful and illuminating. Let me show you what I mean by discussing each model of disability in turn, making connections to sexual and gender minority experience along the way.

The Medical Model

Leduc describes the medical model of disability as one which “links a body directly to a diagnosis and places emphasis on the intervention of medicine as a way of solving or eradicating the particular disability or condition.”³ Disability is, in this model, always bad, and needs to be “fixed”—it is incompatible with a happy ever after. The happiness of the disabled person is measured by how much their disability can be overcome, “solved,” or “eradicated,” how well they can approximate able-bodied existence—and thus, how little they can seem disabled. In fairy tales, this usually plays out in the form of magic rather than medicine: “It is almost always the protagonists themselves who transform in some way—becoming more palatable, more beautiful, more easily able to fit into the mould of society already in place.”⁴ The medical model, in other words, “celebrates an individual’s triumph over disability.”⁵

There is a model of sexual and gender minority experience too that treats being LGBTQ+ as a diagnosis: always bad, always in need of being “fixed.” (This is, after all, the origin of the word “homosexual”; it began as a diagnosis). In this model, an LGBTQ+ person might be able to attain happiness, but this happiness is measured by how well they can approximate heterosexual cisgender existence: acting in socially acceptable gendered ways, finding an opposite-sex spouse, having children. Conformity, not difference. This model can involve the idea that with enough discipline—avoiding other LGBTQ+ folks, learning how to imitate cisgender heterosexual people, dating people of the “right” sex or gender, submitting to various forms of “therapy”—one’s sexual orientation or gender identity can eventually be “overcome.” But importantly, it can also involve living a celibate life that does not draw attention to itself, one that slips into the background, neither encouraging other sexual or gender minorities nor challenging sexual and gender majorities. The happily ever after in this model is, in a real sense, no longer being LGBTQ+ at all.

Psychological Approaches

Psychological approaches to disability, for Leduc, can be summed up in the phrase, “The only disability is a bad attitude.”⁶ In this model, the blame for the disability (still incompatible with a happily ever after) belongs not to disabled bodies, but to disabled people themselves, if they do not somehow move past their disability. Disabled folks are encouraged to think more positively, to “push through”—and when they do, they are praised as “examples for all, as people who have refused to let themselves be ‘confined’ by their physical limitations.”⁷ Stella Young (an Australian disability activist) called this “inspiration porn”: patronizing praise of disabled people for meeting a modified (i.e. lowered) able-bodied standard of excellence.⁸ Disabled folks hear they are “inspirations” for just living their lives. Psychological approaches “make disability not a lived, mundane reality but a temporary struggle that can be overcome if one has the inner and outer strength to do it.”⁹ Disabled folks who do this then become “model minorities,” used as weapons against those who do not.

There are also psychological approaches to sexual and gender minority experience, and they are often related to the medical model; these approaches advocate therapy and dating people of the opposite sex, but also prayer for orientation change and faith healings. The blame for one’s sexual orientation or gender identity—and responsibility for change— is placed upon LGBTQ+ people themselves. As an example, I once had an earnest young Christian woman tell me in a conversation about my sexuality, “I believe that God always wants to heal people.” The implication was that if I was not “healed” of being gay, then it was because of my deficient faith. In other words, LGBTQ+ folks are trapped in an illusion, and all it takes to be free of this illusion is to learn to (or be given the grace to) think and act differently.

When LGBTQ+ folks do find some way to approximatecisgender heterosexual existence—even if it is an unconvincing performance, even if it is merely living a quiet life of celibacy—it can be praised as “an inspiration to us all”; it can become “inspiration porn.” Another example: I remember when working in campus ministry and sharing my story of reconciling faith and sexuality, people would sometimes thank me with tears in their eyes—which felt encouraging at first…until it started to feel like I had become a poster boy, “inspiration porn” that left sexual and gender majorities feeling thankful that they never had to live my life, a “model minority” used as a weapon against others (i.e. telling them “why can you not be more like that celibate gay boy?”). Sexual and gender minority experience, in these psychological approaches, is never a mundane reality—it is always a “temporary struggle that can be overcome if one has the inner and outer strength to do it.”

The Charity Model

The overwhelming attitude that characterizes the charity model of disability is pity; disabled people are “to be pitied and saved by both the medical and social establishments. The medical world will work to cure the physical, while the social world will work to improve the life of the disabled person through charity and magnanimous good deeds.”¹⁰ The charity model often works in tandem with, or orchestrates, the medical model and psychological approaches. Disabled folks, in this model, rely upon able-bodied folks for their happily ever afters, which they otherwise cannot attain. This emphasis on charity makes it so that society is never pressured to care for disabled people, merely encouraged to do so out of generosity—out of pity. But the problem with this is that it actually “functions as a way of reinforcing existing social structures” that marginalize disabled folks, rather than transforming them.¹¹ Disabled folks are portrayed as needy, but able-bodied folks do not need to help.

There is also a model of sexual and gender minority experience motivated primarily by pity; being LGBTQ+ is a tragic burden that pulls at the heartstrings of cisgender heterosexual people and encourages them to stoop down to help us who are “less fortunate.” Sexual and gender majorities may help us out of the goodness of their hearts…as long as they do not feel obligated, as long as the social structures that make their lives easier and sexual and gender minority lives more difficult are not altered in any way. However much I might be praised for my life of celibacy as a faithful response to God for a gay person, for example, the structures that marginalize those for whom biological family is difficult—ingrained tendencies to speak of “family” only in terms of the biological, to portray marriage as the height of human love, to provide little or no communal support for single people, or to actively distrust all same-sex love—remain as firmly in place as ever.

The Social Model

Finally, the social model of disability “holds that the disability of individuals is, in fact, maintained by systemic barriers, exclusion, and negative attitudes toward these disabilities more than the physical limitations of the conditions themselves.”¹² In other words, people are disabled by a society that is unwilling to accommodate certain kinds of bodies—and so it is society that must change, not the disabled person. In contrast to the other three models of disability, the social model “celebrates society’s collective power and responsibility to consider the needs of all, thus making disability an integrated element of the society in which we live.”¹³ The responsibility for change rests neither in the disabled person’s body nor in their willpower, but in the broader community—and this is a responsibility, not restricted to charitable acts motivated by pity. In the social model, society itself must be transformed.

It is important to note that the social model cannot explain every aspect of disability, and forcing it to do so can end up hurting disabled folks; Leduc writes, “it is not always possible to improve the social environment so that all aspects of a disability are accounted for and mitigated…the push for social adjustments that account for certain aspects of a disability but not all can often have the effect of silencing those who might speak about their pain or other difficulties but do not, for fear of seeming to speak against the social model itself.”¹⁴ The experiences of disabled people who deal with chronic pain or who truly need medical intervention keep the social model from being applied universally. But with these caveats firmly in place, the social model allows disabled folks to be understood as more than merely tragic, helpless, pitiable, or “inspiration porn”; rather, they can be catalysts of transformation whose lives are prophetic calls for radical societal change.

Leduc suggests that the social model of disability is the model which holds the most promise for many disabled folks—and by extension, I think it holds a lot of promise for LGBTQ+ folks. The social model forces us to ask: what painful aspects of LGBTQ+ experience are caused not by the specifics of sexual orientation or gender identity experiences that are outside the norm, but by a society that is unwilling to make space for us (or worse, that so often antagonizes or oppresses us)? Of course, the social model must not be used to silence those for whom their sexual orientation or gender identity constitutes a trial, or whose pain cannot be assuaged by societal transformation. These voices matter too! But in the social model, the responsibility for change is not placed on our sexual orientation or gender identity (as in the medical model), or on our faltering faith or willpower (as in psychological approaches), but on society—and this is a genuine responsibility, not a mere suggestion or plea (as in the charity model). It forces us all to ask: how must society change? 

Some questions flow from the social model of disability applied to LGBTQ+ experience: might LGBTQ+ people be something like prophets, catalysts of change, calling for a radical transformation of a society that does not yet work for all, only for some? How might LGBTQ+ people refuse to be limited by modified (i.e. lowered) cisgender heterosexual standards of excellence, and so refuse to let sexual and gender majorities slip into complacence and patronizing praise of the “less fortunate”? In societies in which same-sex love, tenderness, and intimacy—as well as friendship more generally—are so often viewed as lesser, how might sexual minorities reveal their particular beauty and importance? In societies in which an unconscious and pervasive acceptance of certain gender roles and stereotypes so often hinder the potential of many, how might gender minorities reveal those roles and stereotypes as socially constructed, and therefore malleable and open to change? And once these things are revealed, how might LGBTQ+ folks, with our lives and loves, gesture at a better, freer, more beautiful world?

1. Amanda Leduc, Disfigured: On Disability, Fairy Tales, and Making Space (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2022).

2. The reader may wonder why I have chosen in this piece to use “identity-first” language (i.e. “disabled person,” “sexual and gender minority,” “LGBTQ+ folks”) rather than “person-first” language (i.e. “person with a disability,” “person with same-sex attraction,” “person who experiences gender discordance”). My reasoning is complex (and, actually, deeply influenced by the reasoning of certain disability activists), and I will probably need to write more about it later, but for now: “person-first” language can seem to imply that personhood or personality is somehow separate from being disabled or being a sexual or gender minority, and furthermore, that it would be better for that person if their disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity was gone—while “identity-first” language gestures at the reality of the utterly intertwined relationship between experiences of disability, sexuality, and gender on the one hand and personhood and personality on the other. Of course, this reasoning is deeply personal to me, and I absolutely do not intend to impose it on either disabled folks or other sexual and gender minorities!

3. Leduc, Disfigured, p. 36

4. Ibid., p. 41

5. Ibid., p. 47

6. Ibid., p. 57

7. Ibid., p. 58

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 59

10. Ibid., p. 55

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid., p. 36

13. Ibid., p. 47

14. Ibid.