Disability, Gender, and the Right to Sexual Expression

The Desexualised Subject

Women with disabilities occupy a peculiar cultural position: they are simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible. Invisible in the sense that their sexual and reproductive lives are treated as non-existent; hyper-visible in the sense that their bodies are constantly subject to medical scrutiny, charitable intervention, and public curiosity.

The dominant cultural script casts disabled women as asexual, as children in adult bodies, as objects of care rather than subjects of desire. This desexualisation is not benign. It has material consequences: women with disabilities are denied sex education, denied access to contraception, denied the right to make reproductive choices, and subjected to forced sterilisation at rates that would be recognised as human rights violations if applied to non-disabled women.

A society that denies a woman's sexuality because of her disability is not protecting her. It is erasing her.

The Indian Context

In India, where disability and gender intersect with caste, class, and religious norms, the consequences are particularly severe. The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act of 2016 provides legal protections against discrimination, but it says nothing about sexual or reproductive rights. The cultural attitudes that desexualise disabled women are deeply embedded in Indian society.

A woman with a physical disability is often treated as a burden — someone to be cared for by her family, not someone with desires, needs, or the right to form intimate relationships. Women with intellectual disabilities are even more vulnerable: they are routinely denied the capacity to make decisions about their own bodies, and they are at significantly higher risk of sexual abuse.

The statistics are damning. A 2018 study published in the *Indian Journal of Medical Ethics* found that women with disabilities in India were three to four times more likely to experience sexual abuse than non-disabled women. The abuse is perpetrated by family members, caregivers, and community members — the very people who are supposed to protect them.

Disabled women are not protected by being desexualised. They are made more vulnerable by it. When no one believes a woman can be sexual, no one believes she can be violated.

The Reproductive Rights Gap

The reproductive rights of women with disabilities are systematically denied. In India, forced sterilisation of women with intellectual disabilities remains widespread, often carried out with the consent of family members or legal guardians and without the informed consent of the woman herself. The justification is invariably framed as protection — protection from the consequences of menstruation, from the burden of menstruation management, from the risk of pregnancy.

This protection is a euphemism for control. The decision to sterilise a woman without her consent is a violation of her bodily autonomy, regardless of her disability. The fact that it is carried out by families and sanctioned by medical professionals does not make it ethical. It makes it institutionalised.

Access to contraception is similarly unequal. Women with disabilities are less likely to receive comprehensive sex education, less likely to be informed about contraceptive options, and less likely to be able to access contraception independently. The result is either unintended pregnancy — which carries higher medical risks for women with certain disabilities — or the complete absence of sexual activity, not because the woman has chosen abstinence but because she has been denied the information and access needed to make informed choices.

The right to reproductive autonomy does not come with an asterisk. It applies to all women, including those with disabilities.

Sex Education and the Erasure of Disabled Desire

Sex education in India is, for most people, inadequate. For women with disabilities, it is essentially non-existent. The assumption is that disabled women do not need sexual education because they do not and should not have sexual lives. This assumption is doubly harmful: it denies women the information they need to protect themselves, and it reinforces the cultural narrative that disabled women are not sexual beings.

Research from other countries has documented the consequences of this erasure. Women with disabilities who receive no sex education are more vulnerable to sexual abuse, less likely to identify abusive situations as abusive, and less likely to seek help. They are also less likely to experience healthy sexual relationships when the opportunity arises, because they have never been given the tools to understand their own bodies and desires.

In India, where conversations about sex are already taboo, the addition of disability to the equation creates a double silence. A woman with a disability who asks about sex is not met with information. She is met with shock, confusion, or ridicule. The message is clear: your body does not do that.

When we deny disabled women sex education, we are not protecting their innocence. We are ensuring their vulnerability.

The Abuse Crisis

Sexual abuse of women with disabilities is a crisis that receives almost no attention. The prevalence rates are staggering — studies from multiple countries consistently show that women with disabilities experience sexual abuse at rates two to three times higher than non-disabled women. In institutional settings, where women with disabilities may live for extended periods, the rates are even higher.

In India, where institutional care for people with disabilities is often poorly regulated and under-resourced, the risk is acute. Women in residential institutions are particularly vulnerable to abuse by staff, other residents, and visitors. The lack of oversight, combined with the communication barriers that some women face, creates conditions in which abuse can occur with impunity.

The response to abuse is often inadequate. Women with disabilities who report abuse may not be believed — particularly if they have intellectual disabilities that affect their communication. The legal system is often inaccessible, both physically and cognitively. And the stigma surrounding disability and sexuality means that many women never report abuse at all.

A woman with a disability who is abused is failed twice: once by the abuser and once by a system that was not built to see her.

What Inclusion Looks Like

Including women with disabilities in feminist discourse requires more than acknowledging their existence. It requires dismantling the cultural narratives that desexualise them, fighting for their reproductive rights, and building systems that protect rather than control their bodies.

This means sex education that is accessible to women with all types of disability. It means contraception that is available and accessible. It means the end of forced sterilisation. It means a legal system that takes sexual abuse against disabled women seriously. And it means a feminism that recognises that the fight for bodily autonomy is incomplete if it does not include all women.

Feminism that does not include disabled women is not feminism. It is selective liberation, and it is unworthy of the name.

The right to sexual expression is a fundamental human right. It does not disappear because of a disability. A feminism that cannot say this clearly has failed in its most basic obligation.