Pride and Curb Cuts

As we’re approaching the end of Pride month, I’m thinking about a simple idea: progressive and inclusive ideas about gender identity, gender expression, and sexuality benefit everybody, not just the most marginalized. It’s similar to the “curb cut effect,” where universal design has the side effect of helping everyone, not just the people most affected by it. There’s been pushback against the idea of the curb cut effect itself, boiling down to the argument “why not just help disabled people just because it’s the right thing to do, without having to justify it by how it benefits everyone else?” That’s valid, but it misses the point of the original argument. It doesn’t mean defining accessibility in terms of how it can also help non-disabled people. It means rejecting the entire idea that accessibility and inclusivity are a zero-sum game that requires sacrifices from the majority to benefit some special interest. There’s even more pushback against the idea of talking about Pride in…