Pride, Disability, and the Fight to Be Seen: LGBTQIA+ Voices in the I/DD Community

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June is Pride Month!

A time of celebration, reflection, and recommitment to the values that have driven one of the most consequential civil rights movements of the modern era. At Impruvon, we've spent the past several months honoring communities whose advocacy, resilience, and leadership have shaped outcomes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). This month, we turn our attention to the LGBTQIA+ community and to the individuals who navigate the intersection of queer identity and disability with extraordinary strength.

For LGBTQIA+ people with I/DD, the margin is a place too many know well. They are caught between two communities — both of which have fought hard for visibility and rights — yet often overlooked within both. LGBTQIA+ adults with I/DD are less likely to see themselves reflected in media, less likely to receive affirming support from healthcare providers and family, and more likely to face compounded barriers to acceptance, autonomy, and connection. Humanizing people with I/DD, uplifting their stories, and providing comprehensive, consent-focused education are among the most powerful things our field can do. These LGBTQIA+ individuals below have dedicated their lives to exactly that:

Voices Leading the Way

Aariana Rose Philip (she/her) is a model, activist, and trailblazer who entered an industry that had historically excluded both disabled and transgender people — and refused to leave. A Black trans woman with cerebral palsy who uses a power wheelchair, Aariana began pursuing modeling in her mid-teens after scanning fashion magazines and never once seeing herself reflected back. Rather than accepting that absence as a verdict, she treated it as a vacancy she was qualified to fill. She went on to walk runways for Moschino and Collina Strada, land six magazine covers in a single year, and appear in V and Paper magazine. Her Moschino debut was a defining moment for an entire industry that had long told people with disabilities they did not belong on its stages. Aariana has said it plainly in her Vogue article, “I am a talented model who has a disability, who also happens to be a Black trans woman. I want to have the same level of success and opportunities that my peers have.” That insistence on equal footing and genuine inclusion is exactly the kind of visibility that changes what the next generation believes is possible for themselves.

Pauline Bosma (she/her) is the founder and coordinator of the Rainbow Support Groups, a network of support groups for self-advocates who hold membership in both the I/DD community and the LGBTQIA+ community. A transgender woman who is labeled with an intellectual disability, Pauline brings lived experience to every training and presentation she leads. She works with Massachusetts Advocates Standing Strong on the Awareness & Action peer-to-peer training, helping people with disabilities recognize, respond to, and report abuse. Her work is a testament to the power of peer leadership: when the people most affected are the ones building the solutions, the solutions actually work.

Ly Xīzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown (they/them) is a writer, attorney, educator, and community organizer whose work sits at the intersection of disability, queerness, race, and gender. As Director of Public Policy at the National Disability Institute, Ly advances financial freedom and economic opportunity for people with disabilities through policy research and implementation. They founded the Autistic People of Color Fund and co-edited All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, the first anthology of its kind. A faculty member at Georgetown University and a scholar of algorithmic injustice and disability, Ly's work demands that we see disability rights through an intersectional lens — because the margins of the margins are where the hardest, most necessary work happens.

Rosie Jones (she/her) is a British comedian, writer, and disability advocate who has turned her life with ataxic cerebral palsy and her identity as a proud lesbian into a platform for social change. Creator and star of Channel 4's Pushers and front-woman of Mission: Accessible, Rosie uses humor to dismantle ableism and invite audiences into conversations that the mainstream too often avoids. She is co-founder of the Rosie Jones Foundation, whose mission is to ensure that no person with cerebral palsy feels alone or unheard. In a field that can feel heavy with urgency, Rosie's approach of, “laugh, push, repeat,” is its own kind of radical act.

What connects these individuals is not only an LGBTQIA+ identity or a relationship to disability — it is their insistence on being fully seen. The values at the heart of Pride Month: acceptance, equality, and visibility, are the same values the I/DD community has been fighting for across decades of advocacy, legislation, and lived resistance. The Americans with Disabilities Act. The Olmstead decision. The push for community-based living. These milestones did not arrive by accident. They arrived because people demanded to be counted as full human beings.

At Impruvon, our work is not separate from these values. It is grounded in them. When we reduce documentation burden and eliminate manual errors, we give Direct Support Professionals more time to actually know the individuals in their care. When we build systems that work reliably and equitably, we contribute to the kind of healthcare equality that every person with I/DD deserves. Honoring the LGBTQIA+ communities and lifting all voices is a small contribution in the context of decades of hard-won progress, but it is a contribution we make with intention.

This month's blog series goes one step further. We are proud to share a guest post authored by one of our own: Kevin Johnson, an Account Executive at Impruvon and a gay man who brings both personal and professional perspective to this conversation. In “More Than a Month: Why Pride’s Values Are Still Changing Lives,” Kevin writes about what Pride means to him, how he sees its core values mirrored in the work we do for the I/DD community, and why belonging is something everyone deserves — not just a community, not just a month. We invite you to read his piece and sit with what he shares. It is honest, personal, and worth your time.

➤ Read Kevin’s blog: “More Than a Month: Why Pride’s Values Are Still Changing Lives”