Disability Pride 2025
- Jenna
- Jul 25
- 2 min read
Every July, Disability Pride Month is recognized as a time to celebrate the identities, contributions, and resilience of people with disabilities. It is a month of reflection, advocacy, and visibility; honoring both the progress that has been made and the work that still lies ahead.
This month holds special significance as it marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), signed into law on July 26, 1990, just 35 years ago. The ADA was a landmark piece of legislation that prohibits discrimination based on disability and is built on five key principles: equal opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency.
To symbolize the diversity and strength of the disability community, the Disability Pride Flag proudly features a coordinated set of colors:
Red represents physical disabilities
Yellow stands for neurodivergent, cognitive, or intellectual disabilities
Green symbolizes sensory disabilities, including visual and auditory impairments
Blue represents psychiatric disabilities such as depression and anxiety
White honors individuals with invisible or undiagnosed disabilities
All these colors are set against a black background, which represents the grief, loss, and systemic discrimination that people with disabilities continue to face.
Despite the ADA’s progress, barriers both structural and societal still limit full inclusion and equity. These challenges are at the heart of the disability justice movement, which expands the conversation beyond legal rights to include the intersectional experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals, people of color, and other marginalized groups within the disability community.
Disability Pride Month is not just a celebration—it’s a call to continue the fight for justice, dignity, and true inclusion for all. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a disability justice advocate, author and speaker discusses disability justice through the lens that most people will become disabled in their lifetime, either temporarily with an injury, or permanently.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic, many of the existing healthcare access disparities intensified, and many people became permanently disabled due to complications following COVID-19. Then again, a large-scale shift from a largely in-person world changed overnight to accommodate the need for quarantine. While this made many online options widely available for individuals with access needs, such as telehealth, remote work and social distancing, it was also a sense of frustration for many members of the disabled community, who had been advocating for these access needs prior to the pandemic.
In other words: what would it be like to design spaces and events to prioritize access and center community togetherness? COVID-19 serves as a mass-disabling event, but also is eye-opening in terms of mutual-aid initiatives, community togetherness, and interdependence. Disability justice aims to highlight resilience and interdependence, while also addressing themes of ableism and internalized ableism.
“It’s never just Hard, Activist Work. It’s disabled pleasure. It’s wild disabled joy. It’s us on the dance floor, throwing our heads back laughing. It’s the permission, the utter permission to be as we are. It’s the ways we create pleasure to both make the work sweeter and more accessible—pleasure as a form of access. It’s a lot easier to get people to sign up for the long struggle of changing the world if we have fun and disabled joy while we do it.”
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
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