No One Is an Island: Disability and Polyamory

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LINDSEY WELLS, HOST: From KVMR and in partnership with FREED, this is Disability Rap. 

LEANNE YAU: I think in a world that's becoming increasingly more individualistic where people are like, "I don't need anyone," and whatever, people with disabilities don't have that option a lot of the time. They need to need people and we all need each other. No man is an island. 

WELLS: It’s our annual Valentine’s Day special, and today we’re exploring the intersection of disability and polyamory.

ALYSSA GONZALEZ: As far as I'm concerned, someone who hears that their partner is interested in dating someone else and thinks that, "This is fine, I'm excited for you, let me know how it goes." That's the test. Once a person can do that, they have already cast off monogamy in every way that matters. 

WELLS: That’s all coming up on Disability Rap. Stay tuned! 

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WELLS: Before we air the show, a quick note for our listeners: There are a few mentions of sex in today's episode. Listener discretion is advised.

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CARL SIGMOND, HOST: Welcome to Disability Rap. I'm Carl Sigmond with Lindsey Wells.

WELLS: It's February, and Valentines Day is around the corner. We have a tradition here on Disability Rap, of doing a show focused on love and relationships at this time of year. We're continuing that tradition on this show with a round table guest to talk about disability and polyamory. Polyamory takes many forms. For the purposes of this show, we're going to focus on consensual non-monogamy. Which is a philosophy and practice of having romantic and/or sexual relationships with more than one person at the same time, with the full consent of all involved.

We're going to use the terms, consensual non-monogamy and polyamory interchangeably on this show. Why do a show about polyamory on Disability Rap? There's actually more overlap than you might think. In polyamory, there is an acknowledgement that no one partner should be expected to meet all of someone's romantic or sexual needs. As people with disabilities, many of us are used to getting our needs met by multiple people. The extension to the romantic arena isn't that hard for some people with disabilities.

For more on all of this, we're joined by round table guest. Alyssa Gonzalez is a Biology PhD, public speaker and writer. She writes about biology, history, sociology, and her experiences as an autistic ex-catholic Hispanic transgender immigrant to Canada on her blog at the Perfumed Void. Alyssa's first book, Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity was included in the More Than Two essential series. A collection of books on topics related to polyamory. Dr. Elisabeth “Eli” Sheff has studied sex in gender minority families for over 30 years. She has written four books on polyamory, including The Polyamorists Next Door; Inside Multiple Partner Relationships and Families, and When Someone You Love is polyamorous; Understanding Poly People And Relationships.

Leanne Yau is a British award-winning polyamory educator, writer, speaker, certified sex and relationships educator, and a training psychosexual therapist who's work is all about non-monogamy and sex positivity. She creates multimedia content about creating healthy and sustainable non-monogamous relationships. Katie Tastrom is a disability justice activist and writer who has worked as a lawyer, social worker, and sex worker. Her work has appeared in the anthologies, Burn it Down; Feminist Manifestos for The Revolution and Nourishing resistance; Stories of Food, Protest, and Mutual Age. She's also the author of People’s Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice. Her 2018 article, Here Are Seven Reasons Why Polyamory Is More Difficult When You're Disabled appeared in Everyday Feminism.

SIGMOND: We welcome you all to Disability Rap. It is so great to have all of you with us. Alyssa, I want to begin with you. In some of your past interviews, you have said that you wrote the book that you were surprised had not been written. We just did a whole show on neurodivergence last month here on Disability Rap. As briefly as you can, can you say a bit about why you wrote the book and the connections you see between neurodiversity and polyamory.

GONZALEZ: Absolutely. For why I wrote this book, I'm not quite convinced I've met a neurotypical non-monogamous person. I'm almost completely convinced that every non-monogamous person I've managed to come across so far is either self-identified as one of the many flavors of neurodivergence or overdue for their awakening along these lines. It's a topic where the intersection feels very obvious to me from the inside, but that has perhaps alluded some other folks.

I suspect when people are self selecting their communities along these lines, there's a lot of stuff that just works that doesn't even feel noteworthy until there's a name for it, and then all of a sudden you see it everywhere. At the same time the fact that this thing wasn't necessarily getting as much attention before as I expect it is now, it meant that there were some thoughts and resources that ideally would have already been around and just hadn't yet been articulated. Like this connection that seems fairly intuitive to me, that had not yet received a book-length treatment for all that this very small book counts as a book-length treatment.

I wanted to make sure that the things I observed, or come across, or read about, or lived on my own as a non-monogamous neurodivergent person that it could reach more people. When Thornapple Press asked me to write this book, I was delighted to accept that and make sure that all of these thoughts could hit print e-book, audio book, and whichever other forms it's in by now. It got translated into German recently, so that's exciting.

WELLS: Leanne, can I bring you in. You identify as autistic, is there a connection or tie in to what Alyssa just said for you?

Leanne Yau: Yes, definitely. I'm autistic and ADHD. The ADHD diagnosis came a little bit later, because they overlap quite a lot. Alyssa's book is great, highly recommend everyone listening to give it a read. I think it's very comprehensive. It's very concise as well, and so very easy to get through in an afternoon for sure. The connection does seem very obvious to me as well. I think that the polyamorous community-- people in it obviously have diverted from monogamy and are more likely to have questioned societal norms, but also probably a lot of them were already existing outside of societal norms anyway because of the people that they are. The polyamorous community overlaps a lot with the queer community, also overlaps a lot with the kink community, both communities which are in various ways marginalized.

If you already exist as part of one community where you're being othered for who you are, then you're much more likely to just question everything around you, and go, "Well, how else could I customize my life to what works for me and what actually makes me happy?" I think that's why there are so many polyamorous people who are also neurodivergent, because societal norms don't make sense or it's not something that they can take for granted like everyone else. Monogamy was certainly confusing to me when I realized that it was a thing that everyone else just seemed to be doing. I started practicing non-monogamy at quite a young age when I was around 16 or 17. Absolutely, I'm seeing a huge overlap. It's very obvious to people within the community, I think.

KATIE TASTROM: This is Katie, jumping off of that, I also am neurodivergent and ADHD and autistic, which I didn't find out until way too recently. Like Leanne is saying, the way that my brain thinks about sex is so different than neurotypical in all this way. It always seemed like everyone was making such a big deal about it in this way that I didn't understand. Especially the idea of sexual fidelity. I just still can't wrap mind around like if my partner is gone for two hours, why does it matter to me what they're doing or not doing? When they come home and then we have a nice time as long as my needs are getting met.

I think there is also too this part of like-- obviously, we're all different, but there is jumping off that part of, I think even neurodivergence in general, that there's this expectation of just understanding these things like monogamy. That's not to say I don't struggle with jealousy or other things. I'm a person, I'm in this culture, but that you can see the way our brains just do sometimes have a hard time grasping certain things and that seems like one of them.

SIGMOND: Eli, I want to bring you in here. You also identify as ADHD and have been researching this stuff for years and years. As other people were talking just now, I saw your head keep nodding. Yes, come in here. Welcome. Talk about your experience.

DR. ELISABETH SHEFF: Thank you. I definitely think this idea of being already on the outside of society contributes to a willingness to engage in polyamory Absolutely, or any other form of consensual non-monogamy. I think that's one of the reasons, as one of the guests already pointed out, this overlap between queer communities BDSM and as well with non monogamies as well as sacred sexualities, interestingly enough. Another guest just said that for them they don't understand why it matters if their partner is not with them, then what does it matter what their partner is doing? I think that is such a non-monogamous statement for someone.

In my opinion, people can be wired or oriented towards non-monogamy as a permanent feature of their identity or a permanent feature of their personality. Much like other forms of sexual orientation, I think it's something that people can't control if they are wired for non-monogamy. It's not something they can turn off even if they want to and they shouldn't have to. Conversely, I think some other people are wired for exclusivity. I myself have tried to be non-monogamous for about 30 years. I tried and tried and tried and have just finally accepted that while I adore non-monogamous people. I think that I seem to have a thing for polyamorous people. Not only do I love them as partners, I fall in love with them, but I love them as friends. The vast majority of my friends are polyamorous.

I don't mean that in a, "Oh, some of my best friends are polyamorous way," but they're truly, they are. It's my natural social circle. I feel like if I could have been polyamorous, I would've been much happier if I could have just chosen to feel comfortable in a non-monogamous relationship. I think part of it is that my experience of ADHD, is that my brain is very active and I think that's pretty common for people with ADHD, it's so active that I generally don't feel lonely. There's so much happening in here. I'm a lot to handle for myself. I can manage one partner and I really love having a very close relationship with a partner, but I'm too much in here.

I take a lot of maintenance internally to keep my shit together, basically. I just do not have not only the desire for multiple partners, I don't have it at all, but the capacity to manage multiple partners. I can have one partner and then managing myself. It's like I am 12 people in here and it's too much for me to try to take on another serious relationship. There's not room in here for anyone but one partner. I find it really interesting that at least for me, ADHD can have both opposing impacts.

For some people it's this overwhelming, like I'm too busy in here. I don't mean only overwhelming, I have to say it's fun too in a way. My brain is my favorite toy. I am never bored. It's got crazy shit. It's thrown out all the time. I'm not saying that it's this devastating, terrible thing. It sure keeps me interested in life, but it's so busy in here. For other people, I think with ADHD, the desire for novelty and newness and adventure and to explore really can come out in relationships. Again, nothing wrong with that. I think it's a great way to manage if people can find each other and find the way that works out.

Like for me, if my partner is meeting my needs sufficiently, I'm okay with them having other partners. I don't need them to only be with me, but it does cost me to a certain extent when they aren't with me and I know they're with another partner, I do need to distract myself. It feels different to me if my partner is with someone else having sex versus let's say they're at work or they're at the grocery store or they're doing something else. It feels different on the inside. I think that's a very monogamous outlook.

SIGMOND: Thank you. Alyssa, go ahead and then I have a follow-up.

GONZALEZ: Sounds good. I'm glad you mentioned that because in my mind, the key test of whether a person should stop thinking of themselves as monogamous. At least the way I see it, it's not whether the person has multiple partners or is interested in multiple partners or is actively looking. It is whether their reaction to someone they're partnered with having another partner is to pitch a fit about it or start thinking the relationship needs to end.

It is fundamentally this idea that a person should have sole command of another person's affections or not. As far as I'm concerned, someone who hears that their partner is interested in dating someone else and thinks that, "This is fine, I'm excited for you, let me know how it goes." That's the test. Once a person can do that, they have already cast off monogamy in every way that matters. Whether they actually find someone else to date on their own is a semantic question afterwards.

TASTROM: This actually brings up something quick that I have never really put together before. I thought about too much in the specifically neurodivergent context with this, but is around, so for me too, part of my problem with monogamy also is around the rules and not knowing what the line is, because of this thing about sex changing things.

For me too, another problem with monogamy was always this word like, "Oh no, is this too flirtatious or is this too?" I think too, the lines having boundaries that are clear for me also are more helpful or the boundaries not being there. I know when it's like, "Okay, this," whatever, which could be worked out monogamously, but I just wanted to add that into that, there's so-- I think the whole thing, in general, is just that we all are different and have different things that we want and need.

SIGMOND: Eli, you were talking about how there's just so much going on in your brain and I almost want to expand that framework. I cannot speak for all people with disabilities, of course, but for many of us we just have a lot more life logistics to manage than people without disabilities. It never really occurred to me before to link that fact with polyamory. I just wanted to get that in. Not so much a question, but Leanne, go for it and maybe you can tie that in.

YAU: I definitely relate to the whole thing around just having a lot going on in my brain. It's constantly going a mile a minute, lots of different things at the same time. Also, random songs that I know from childhood playing the same-- it's a mess in there. I think for me personally, polyamory is a really great way for me to externalize those thoughts and bounce off different people because some of them will be able to relate to some of those thoughts and some of them to others.

The desire for novelty and variety and excitement and dopamine, et cetera, is a really, really big draw for me when it comes to polyamory, but there are definitely challenges. A while back, myself and another ADHD polyamorous creator Gabrielle Smith, whose work is fantastic by the way, we did a workshop together about polyamory and ADHD.

We specifically focused on the struggles that people have around, I think it was time management, emotional management, and conflict management. Time management, just like people with ADHD and also neurodivergent people, but the focus was ADHD at the time, struggle with managing time, scheduling, double-booking themselves, prioritizing things, task management, and all that administrative stuff which makes it very, very hard in the day-to-day. Scheduling is really, really important for polyamory because you have to be very, very clear about time expectations with each of your partners. We talked about that. Emotional management like rejection sensitivity, I think is the thing that a lot of neurodivergent people experience.

Personally, I actually don't know if it's something that's inbuilt as in we just feel emotions bigger, or if it's partly because of trauma, because of the way that we've been rejected just in real life throughout our lives, that means that we're just more sensitive to rejection because it's happened so many times before. That's my personal theory. We talk about dealing with that and just how dating multiple people doesn't necessarily mean you have to deal with a fair bit of rejection just in the dating world and managing their feelings around that. Or dealing with other people being rejected, seeing your partners go through breakups and things like that.

Of course, conflict management which I think a lot of people generally struggle with, but I think combined with the emotional intensity, that's much more pronounced for neurodivergent people. It's something that we've covered as well. There's a lot going on. I think there are very unique challenges, but for me, it's really interesting how personally, my ADHD interacts with my autism. Because my ADHD is a bit chaotic, it's constantly all over the place. Whereas my autism, it's almost a different part of me. It wants structure, it wants clarity, it wants predictability.

Those two things are constantly at war with each other and so it creates a very interesting state in my mind. Some days I'm more governed by my autism and other days I'm more by my ADHD.

I think my autism comes out more with planning and organization, but then my ADHD comes out with actually sticking to those plans and communicating those plans and things like that. Sometimes I do too much and sometimes I do too little. That duality is something that I really struggle with. The inconsistency I think is something that I think a lot of people with disabilities can speak to.

Just not knowing what your body's going to do when you wake up every morning. Even people who aren't neurodivergent, people who have chronic disabilities, for example, really struggle with that. I've seen that in my personal life and professional life.

TASTROM: I also think that there's an opposite side to that coin as well that I think is important to look at. I've written an article before about why-- it's called Why Disabled People are Better at Sex, but this idea of-- so if we think about relationships, taking the sex aside, because what's weird to me is prioritize to have sex be this thing.

I'm a sex worker, so part of the way I think about sex is probably different for that as well, but basically if we're talking about intimacies, caretaking and helping each other things is a really fast, not that it needs to be fast, but is a way that intimacy really develops very strongly through caretaking and in the ways that we all do with families and stuff.

Families are the people that we take care of and whether sex is involved or not, but disability and this communities of disabled people whether depending how they think about their relationship or how their relationships are, we tend to be also very good at this and work really well because we can be-- in my article I discuss this a little bit where I talk about one friend whose partner who they live with, they have PTSD and don't want to do certain sexual things that the other person wants to do.

They can go get those needs met while also helping their partner with their needs and just these ways that we depend on each other and the way that interdependence is part of the disability experience I think, it can also in terms of both our sexual relationships and non-sexual, these disability and just bodies because sex and disability are both about bodies at the end of the day, whether they're brains or whatever part. It's really just about how we're supporting each other's bodies at the end of the day.

I think that that's something that disabled people or especially-- we've had to be especially good at. I agree with all that said before me as well, but I just think it's important too to look at both sides of the coin.

YAU: There's a real emphasis on community, I think, in the polyamorous community that I can absolutely see how it intersects with disability. I think in a world that's becoming increasingly more individualistic where people are like, "I don't need anyone," and whatever, people with disabilities don't have that option a lot of the time. They need to need people and we all need each other. No man is an island. Going back to that community aspect, interdependence is really important.

WELLS: Thank you all for having those great conversations like Carl brought out, but I have a question right now for Katie. Katie, you mentioned earlier about, and we're shifting gears just a little, but about communication. As people with disabilities, especially significant disabilities, many of us are used to being open and clear about our needs and desires. Can you talk about how that skill is translatable in poly relationships?

TASTROM: Thank you for this question. This is a really good question. We talk about RSD. I've had a partner with RSD before and I tend to be the opposite where I can be a little blunt. I need relationship where always the point of communication is to be understood by the other person. I think with any relationship, we're always trying to that we can make sense to the other person, the other person makes sense to us.

I think there's always some adjustment and I think disability-- I'm not that as Pollyanna as I sound about it, but I do think disability is really helpful in some ways partially, because the norms around communication are different in large part because of neurodivergence.

Obviously, this isn't the case for everyone, but when I'm around a lot of disabled people, we tend to be more straightforward about, "Oh, I need this, I need that. Can you do this or that?" Nothing's held and it's not just very like it is, everything's on the surface. It is what it is. I know as someone I struggle a lot when there's all this subtext going on. I also know too that sometimes if I'm mad, because of my-- once again, my own stuff, they might be right, I might be subtly putting stuff out that I'm being like, "No, no, no, I mean this straightforward," you know what I mean? It's always going to be a negotiation no matter what, no matter disability or not disability. I do think that understanding the way that we communicate is important in general for all relationships. Understand from myself, which is-- it's so recent, but understanding myself as being autistic, really it helped make so much more make sense.

I think for people that are unsure or just if some of this stuff makes sense to you whether you are or not, but just some of this stuff can be helpful just from a communication perspective which will help all relationships.

When it comes to jealousy, I realize so much of relationships is about how you feel in yourself. It's okay for some of our own stuff to get on other people. That's inevitable, that's going to happen. I think for me is really understand when I'm feeling jealousy what that mean. Is trying to understand what my feelings mean instead of trusting my feelings as facts. It's like, "I'm feeling jealous. What am I not getting that I need to be getting, and then asking for that." Instead of-- and going off to the side and trying to figure that out myself instead of going to my partner being like-- which could be fine as well, but like, just it's not my style, but to be like, "Oh, my gosh, no, don't do this I feel bad in this way." Trying to think about where, for me, those feelings were coming from and what I was missing.

Once again, to the point that it goes too far in this way where I isolate myself and have issues in relationships because of having so much a party in my head all the time. It's always fun up here. It's all layered. For me, I do think jealousy-- I do relate to it being my whole life, it being less of a thing for me even before I started working on it so that there is-- and I understand. I might not be the best to speak on that, but just understanding the things that I'm feeling as things about me that might involve the other person, but really at the end of the day, it's about how I'm feeling and what I need.

SIGMOND: Thank you, Katie. This is also good. You just mentioned RSV and Alyssa I'm wondering if you could really quickly define RSV for our listeners.

GONZALEZ: A rejection-sensitive dysphoria is a classically a DHD experience that also has a habit of showing up in the minds of a lot of other kinds of neurodivergent folks where experiencing rejection or criticism, sometimes even very mild rejection or criticism takes on this all-encompassing terror in a person's mind. It can feel like a wholesale referendum on a person's value as a thing that exists every time someone is rejected or criticized, even in a very specific way. This catastrophic internal cascade can be disabling in its own right, even separate from the reasons a person might have it.

It can make hard conversations on essentially any topic, virtually impossible if a person doesn't realize this is happening and can't get a handle on it while it's happening. It's very important for anyone that deals with this to recognize it and have some tools. It's even more important if a person is, say, adopting a relationship paradigm that almost necessarily involves experiencing a lot of exotic new emotions that the mainstream can't tell you about or that means that you're going to get rejected more often because you're going to keep asking for stuff even after you already have it.

SIGMOND: Thank you all, As we begin to wrap up, I just I'm wondering your thoughts about how we can make disability spaces more welcoming of polyamorous people and others in non-traditional relationships. Eli, I'll begin with you and then just go around.

DR. SHEFF: I think that's a great question. How to make disability spaces more accessible. One of the things is visual inclusion. There's lots of flags for all sorts of different identities. I think having those represented, there is a polyamory flag and that could be represented, I think, using more neutral language instead of couples. For instance, you can talk about relationships which doesn't feel so exclusionary for people who are in a relationship that's larger than a couple. I think including just mentions of it in any kind of resources, mentions of diversity of sexualities, diversity of relationships styles and among all the other kinds of diversity, I think would be great. I'm going to hand it off to Alyssa.

GONZALEZ: I'm honored. It's something that non-monogamous and disability spaces have in common, I think, is that there's this natural pattern toward people having larger networks of care, whether by choice or necessity. The people that will show up for someone if in need in this situation. In either of these situations can be substantially higher than in the classic one partner and 2.5 children or whatever decimal we left off on scenario. Just making it an easy and natural thing for someone's "plus one" to be two people, or to not even interrogate what exactly the connection is between a person who showed up to an event and the person they brought with them as someone they care about.

I'm close to someone who brings people to her work events and introduces them simply as chosen family and essentially there's the room to insist on asking what that means or not. There needs to be this expectation of that this kind of thing is okay when it happens within the limits of the fire code for the room that the event is happening in and so on. Just this idea, people have a lot more connections than the couple-centric model we assume tends to rely on. That's especially true in both of the communities that we're talking about.

Just not acting like that's weird and making space for acknowledging it when it's relevant seems quite natural to me. Similarly, it doesn't actually necessarily matter why the other person is around, maybe they're close friends, maybe they're the understudy of the person who would usually show up. It's fine. We can accept whatever the connections are and that there's lots of them. We all have more expansive hearts than I think the mono-normative paradigm would let us imagine and we can just start acting like it.

YAU: I definitely agree with Alyssa on the point of like-- yes, it doesn't really matter so much who a specific person is to someone but just that they matter to them. Why is it your business? I know the question was originally about how we can make disability spaces more welcoming of polyamorous people, but also I'd like to ask question reverse as well. How can polyamorous spaces be also more welcoming of people with disabilities? Because I think of anything that's a bigger problem. For me, I don't personally have any kind of physical disabilities, but a lot of polyamorous meetup spaces and things like that don't really care that much about accessibility.

In my local city, a lot of non-moral people typically meet up at club nights and sex parties and that kind of thing. I live in a very young city, so that might be why. I find it really overstimulating. I can't go because of my sensory sensitivities. I have to go and create my own spaces in my own community. I think it goes both ways. I think we definitely all have capacity for love and connection and intimacy. It's just for some people it looks like one romantic partner and multiple really close friendships. For some people, it looks like multiple partners or multiple, whatever, loves, babes, whatever. I think that's beautiful.

TASTROM: I think I'm going to take it. I agree. I don't repeat what people said. I'm going to take it to a little different place that goes along with all this, but stepping back a little bit and this idea too, that we don't know. There's this joke about like, "Oh, how do you know if someone's polyamorous?" "Don't worry, they'll tell you." We think that we know what polyamory looks like and we think of it as this-- At least in my head, the assumptions that I see is these privileged people that-- It's like these heterosexual couples that bring a person in or whatever, all these assumptions about what non-monogamy looks like.

I think that when we talk about how there is a relationship with disability and queerness and BDSM and all this stuff, we see all these things that go together. One of the biggest takeaways in my book, A People's Guide to Abolition and Disability Justice quick plug but I talk about this more from a criminalization lens, but my own experience with sex work and disability and seeing how many sex workers were disabled and how the criminalization of any divergent sexuality of any kind.

That includes, paid sex, queer, BDSM, all of these, everything, I think that we need to understand all of these things as a disability issue, talking about poly-- I do think it's more polyamory spaces, but also to this understanding of actually the polyamorous people might not be who you expect. It might be a disabled person and their caretaker and they might have a roommate or anything. You just don't know and it doesn't really matter.

I think it's weird that we are so focused on whether someone is having sex with someone else or not in terms of work parties or whatever, this idea that you bring your "partner" this person that you're having sex with and you show them off to your co-workers as like, "Oh, this is someone I'm having sex with," versus, "Oh my friend, someone I'm not having sex with." The idea that you would make that distinction between two people that you're not that close with is just weird to me.

So I do think there needs to be this intersectional understanding of sexuality and being also accepting of-- Obviously, there's a huge racial dynamic here as well in the way white supremacy enforces monogamy in these traditional ways. I do think that all this to say that there needs to be an intersectional approach and understanding that actually the people that are living in these, what we would call some non-monogamous arrangements, a lot of them are multiply marginalized and they're going to be disproportionately marginalized for the reasons we talked about a little bit. Just having that understanding that these things go together, and so it's incumbent on us to work on all these different intersections.

GONZALEZ: Along similar lines, a related issue is just how consistently disabled people get desexualized and just left off of the list entirely of people who are potential romantic partners. I would hesitate to say that specific thing is an issue within disability spaces. Probably is, it seems to be everywhere else. Making progress on that, I think, will make the leap to actually that disabled people can also have more than one romantic connection if they feel like it. That will be easier once people are over the hump of refusing to regard disabled people as this kind of desirable in principle.

WELLS: That was Alyssa Gonzalez, the author of Nonmonogamy and Neurodiversity which was included in the More Than Two Essentials series. We also heard from Katie Tastrom, Elisabeth “Eli” Sheff, and Leanne Yau for our conversation on disability and polyamory.

That does it for the show. Disability Wrap is produced and edited by Carl Sigmond and Courtney Williams. You can go to our website, disabilityrap.org to listen to past shows, read transcripts, and subscribe to the Disability Rap podcast. You can also subscribe to our podcast by searching Disability Rap on any of the major podcast platforms. We are brought to you by KVMR in partnership with FREED, and we're distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. I'm Lindsey Wells with Carl Sigmond for another edition of Disability Rap.

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