Hannah Diviney On Disabled Representation & How To Be An Ally

July marks Disability Pride Month, a time to promote awareness of people with disabilities and to celebrate and champion those in the community. But as actor, disability advocate, and writer Hannah Diviney explained to Refinery29 Australia, we shouldn’t just forget about disabled people for the other 11 months of the year. Instead, if you’re able-bodied, allyship isn’t difficult.

“It sounds simple, but it’s about being willing to have disabled people in your life or to think about how to put them in your life, whether that’s for you personally, or if you’re running a business: who are you employing?” Hannah says.

She doesn’t mean going out and trying to make friends with disabled people to tick a box (that’s virtue signalling 101), but starting to see where disabled people might be in your life. “If they’re not around, if they’re not part of your everyday, examine why that might be,” she notes.

“Start to break down the biases of ideas that mean that people aren’t visible to you. You’ve got to remember there are loads of disabled people who experience life with invisible disabilities, so for them, the act of disclosure is something they have to consider.” Are you a safe person to disclose this to, and if not, why is that the case?

Allyship isn’t about being performative or advertising that you’re an ally. It’s not about feigning care for somebody while having ulterior motives. “Sometimes an ally is just someone who shows up or asks the sensitive question, or who makes someone’s reasonable accommodation without fuss, or who amplifies our content and decides to speak up,” Hannah explains.

“I find it really interesting how many wonderfully progressive people I follow on social media who will have so much to say for International Women’s Day or R U OK day, but then when it comes to International Day of People with Disabilities, it’s crickets.”

With the world becoming increasingly right-leaning and loud voices popping up everywhere, Hannah admits it’s uncomfortable. The world is already not built for those with disabilities, and there are people out there who want to make it worse. “I’m pretty terrified about that,” she says. “But I also know that for every loud individual who doesn’t think that people like you and me should exist, or whatever their rhetoric is, there are also so many people doing good work.”

The advocate references a quote from Mister Rogers, the host of Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood. “He would say, ‘In times of trouble, look for the helpers. Never forget that there are people helping.’ That’s something I turn to a lot. Even though it’s the voices who dissent and dissent loudly… there are still people doing good work who you never hear about.”

She acknowledges that change is a “long game”, and progress will take time. In her lifetime, Hannah may never see the true fruits of her labour as a fierce disability advocate, but that doesn’t stop her. “Just because you don’t get to sit under a tree and enjoy its shade doesn’t mean you shouldn’t plant the seeds,” she adds.

One area we need to improve on, especially in Australia, is more representation of disability in the media. Hannah has been at the forefront of this, as the first disabled person in Australia to do a sex scene on TV in Latecomers, and has consistently created content online. “Representation is always going to help, because the more people see something, the less they have to be afraid of,” the actor says. “A lot of times, fear is simply driven by not understanding things, or not knowing what they look like, or not knowing what to say, or how to react.”

Representing disability in the media creates a blueprint that helps people better understand what it might be like in real life. “That will help with the fear and the kind of natural instinct to lash out at what they don’t understand,” she says. “Unfortunately, progress has slowed down, or stalled, or kind of plateaued in a weird way [due to] the world becoming more afraid and more right-wing. The people who don’t feel that way have become more afraid of triggering people who do.”

Hannah says there are multiple things able-bodied people could stand to learn from people with disabilities, including more empathy, problem-solving and learning to ask for help. As a disabled woman living in a world that wasn’t built for her, the writer has had to learn how to advocate for herself. “It’s okay to lean on people, and I think something that disabled people have to get really good at by necessity is asking for help.

Being ready to freely admit that, ‘Hey, I can’t do that’, and in order for me to participate in X, I need this to happen. Whereas a lot of people who are able-bodied seem to have a lot more pride and confusion around admitting that they need help,” she notes. “Maybe, collectively, if everyone got better at asking for help, we could figure out a way to build a world [where] we don’t have to.”

The simple act of putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can also bring about empathy and problem-solving. “If I try and put myself in someone else’s shoes, I can generally see how they’ve gotten to where they’ve gotten to, even if I don’t agree with it,” she says. “The fact that people struggle to [do this], is not helping the world head away from the direction [it’s going right now].”

For those wanting to improve and become better allies, this Disability Pride Month, her advice is simple. “You can do a lot, even just in your own community. I think people get very caught up in what they think activism and allyship is, but it’s not about posting an Instagram Story or it being visible that you’re being an activist,” she says.

“It’s about doing little things in your community that then ripple out and impact others.”

You can follow Hannah Diviney @hannahthewildflower

This article was originally published on Refinery29 Australia.