Disability and the Sexual Politics of Fascism

Abstract This article investigates how disability's plurality of meanings—its contradictory associations with harm, protection, accommodation, and cure—makes it a valuable asset for a contemporary sexual politics of fascism. Disability's plurality allows it to differentially substitute for both trans and intersex. In turn, these slides between trans, intersex, and disability fuel trans-exclusionary medical and policy protocols. The article addresses these off-balance slippages between intersex, trans, and disability in three sections, first examining how ideas of intersex as a disability catalyze trans exclusion in US state health-care bans; then how concern about women's athletic injuries renders disability as material evidence for trans sports bans; and finally how shifting discourses of ability link trans and intersex athletes in international athletic regulations. This analysis focalizes three qualities of contemporary fascism's sexual politics—its recombinant tactics, claims to vulnerability, and coloniality—that each wield ideas about disability. The conflation of disability, intersex, and trans is facilitated by racial-sexual conceptions of disability that differentiate between the rehabilitatable and the disposable. Ultimately, while this slippage between trans, intersex, and disability has been weaponized, it also affords new sites of solidarity on the front lines of a sexual politics of fascism.