Abstract: QueerHandicap - de-normalizing disability, expanding the scope for action

Trans children and young people with disabilities often experience a double social hindrance: they are prevented from developing fully due to ableist and cisnormative structures. A critical QueerHandicap approach asks the question, ‘Disability or prevention?’, shifting the focus from individual deficits to social exclusion mechanisms and opening up new paths to three central outcomes.

• Happiness becomes possible when disability is understood not as a deficiency, but as a legitimate way of relating to the world and physicality, creating a space for coherent self-realisation.
• Altruistic quality of life develops when social relationships are characterised by mutual recognition and respect.
• Solidarity is created when disability and transness are considered together as the foundation of a political community.

This approach provides an explicit counterweight to the erosion of happiness by replacing self-evidence with structural recognition — not in spite of, but precisely because of, disability and transness.

Reference to the JBI model:

The QueerHandicap approach can be incorporated into the JBI’s evidence-based practices because it:

• takes the experience of disabled trans children seriously and does not ignore it;
• is based on reflective pedagogical and therapeutic practice that critically questions norms;
• Evidence is not interpreted as objective truth, but as a context-dependent, socially coded variable.

This provides not only individual support, but also enables structural support in the form of solidarity-based, multifaceted healthcare action.