We Want Extra Disabled Palms in Adverts and Magazines

The shapes my arms make when they’re sitting naturally are delicate and sleek, as if they’d not be misplaced in a Renaissance portray. After I say delicate and sleek, I’m not referring to the fragile and sleek you may affiliate with lengthy, slender-fingered arms adorned with high-quality jewellery in shiny magazines, as a result of these are actually not areas through which I see my arms mirrored or represented. The fragile and sleek of my disabled arms refers to a radical softness, an influence that comes from adversity and the mild, tender care with which I method the world.

My disabled arms permit me to protest, talk, and mobilize my physique. I exploit them to make artwork and meals, to construct areas and group, to adorn my physique. My disabled arms present care, consolation, safety, pleasure, and nourishment. I’m ambidextrous, which implies I maintain love for and inside each magic arms. And I’m excellent at doing my very own eyeliner.

As I write these phrases, I’m eager about Isabella, a woman who bullied me relentlessly all through faculty and nicknamed my pretty, twisted, curved, hyperextended arms “fish fingers.” She used this phrase like code to make jokes about me whereas I used to be listening, so I might be part of within the laughter, unaware that my very own sacred, disabled arms had been the punchline. In hindsight, I spotted my arms have presence sufficient to be observed (and named) by one other individual.

Through the years, many others haven’t wished to the touch or be touched by my arms, and I typically consider this as proof that my magic arms can defend me with out my information. Ableism, transphobia, fatphobia, and misogyny threaten my softness every day. Typically I exist carrying armor to guard myself from programs that trigger hurt. Not my arms, although; my magic, disabled arms are the softest elements of me when I’ve to be arduous and rough-hewn to outlive.

Disabled arms are magic.

Pictures by: Jonathan van der Knaap
Hair and Makeup: Ruby Allegra 
Nails: Holly Fitzgibbons

More love letters:

Makeup Is a Form of Empowerment

Thank You, to Big Legs, for Moving Me Forward

The Beauty and Pain of a Family Album

Now watch Molly Burke critique the worst beauty packaging for blind people: