Disability Pride Month takes place every July, and every year the same thing happens: organisations post something. A flag graphic. A quote. Maybe a staff spotlight, if someone was willing to be visible for it. Then August arrives, and it’s gone until next year.
That cycle is worth naming plainly, because it’s not really about pride at all. It’s about visibility as a seasonal event rather than pride as an ongoing condition of how a workplace operates.
For me, disability pride isn’t a feeling I access once a year in July. It’s closer to a muscle I’ve had to build over time — the difference between being visible because I’ve been made an example of, and being visible on my own terms, because I chose to be.
Most years, pride shows up quietly rather than triumphantly. It’s less “flag-waving” and more the smaller, unglamorous decision to keep doing this work openly, as a disabled person, instead of packaging myself as neutral and leaving the disability part unspoken. It’s choosing not to make myself smaller, so the work is easier to sell. In some years, that choice feels obvious. In other years, it costs something to make.
What I don’t want Disability Pride Month to become — for me or for anyone else doing this work — is a performance of resilience for other people’s comfort. Pride isn’t gratitude for being tolerated. It’s the plain fact of being disabled and still being here, still doing meaningful work, without needing to earn that as a surprise.
What performative recognition actually looks like
The tell isn’t whether an organisation posts about Disability Pride Month. It’s whether anything they post reflects a truth that was already at work before July and will continue to operate after it.
A post that says “we celebrate our disabled employees” from an organisation that has no idea how many disabled employees it has, no disclosed accommodation pathway, and no disabled voices anywhere near decision-making — that post isn’t recognition. It’s a costume the organisation puts on for a month, then takes off.
Real recognition shows up differently: it’s visible in whether disabled staff already feel safe enough to be visible before the campaign starts. It’s visible in whether “pride” language shows up alongside actual structural commitments — pay equity data, accessible progression pathways, disclosure without penalty — rather than standing in for them.
The uncomfortable test
Here’s a blunt way to check which one your organisation is doing: if every disability-related post, plan, and public statement disappeared tomorrow, would disabled staff still feel like the organisation was genuinely theirs to be visible in — or would it revert instantly to how things were before the campaign started?
If the answer is the latter, the pride content was never describing the organisation. It was aspirational marketing wearing the language of celebration.
What to actually do this month, depending on where you sit
If you hold budget or policy authority, don’t greenlight a Disability Pride post without first checking whether the organisation can back it. Ask what disclosure rates actually look like, whether disabled staff have been asked (not assumed) what recognition would mean to them, and whether anything structural is changing this year that wasn’t true last year. If the honest answer is “nothing,” that’s worth knowing before the post goes out, not after.
If you’re doing this work without that authority, you can still shift what Disability Pride Month looks like from where you sit. Ask to be part of how it’s marked, rather than being used as the visual evidence of it. If you’re comfortable, name specifically what would make recognition feel real to you this year, rather than leaving that to a comms team’s best guess. And if nothing offered this month feels real, it’s fair to say so — even just to yourself, as data on where the organisation actually stands.
Over to you
What would it take for Disability Pride Month to stop being something that happens to your workplace once a year, and start being a visible sign of something that’s true the other eleven months too?
Reply or drop it in the comments — I’d like to know what “real” looks like for the people actually living this, not just the organisations posting about it.
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