Without a doubt, the one question I get asked constantly is “So how did you get into all of this?” The “this” being everything that I do around disability rights; activism, journalism, writing a book about disability rights history – and to be honest with you, it’s probably the hardest question there is to answer.
I’m not a trained journalist, but it’s a job I’ve wanted to do since I was 14. Dreaming of being an author goes back even longer than that, but nobody dreams of being an activist when they’re a child, do they? Nobody dreams of having to fight every single day for the rights of themself and their community to be treated with dignity and to have the basic respect and support they deserve.
I got into it, I suppose, because I was still accepting that I was disabled and I wanted others to feel that tiny bit less alone, and more importantly, believed. I fought for a long time to have my conditions believed, especially my gynaecological ones, the joys of being a woman in a medical system that treats us with contempt. I also struggled for a long time to identify as disabled as a young person after growing up in a society that treats disabled as the worst thing someone can be and drills into us that to be disabled is a burden.
When I first began writing about disability, it was about my own experiences of my different conditions. Mostly because I wanted to give a voice to so many out there going through fertility issues, struggling to accept who they are, depression and anxiety, addiction due to pain and a whole myriad of things. As well as personal essays I gave advice on managing particular conditions and wrote about the ableist portrayal of disability on TV.
It wasn’t until COVID that I accidentally became an activist through my work. At the start of COVID, I was publishing in smaller indie publications and lifestyle magazines plenty, but I couldn’t make the mainstream media care about the fact that so many disabled people were being left to die. At this point in October and November 2020, the public had moved on, and the media were focusing more on the desperate need of (non disabled) people to go out and see their families. They saw those of us who were staunch supporters of staying home and protecting everyone as naysayers and fearmongers; all because it was better for businesses that advertised in the papers, for people to believe that it was safe to go out.
From a professional point of view, the first few years of the COVID pandemic were the best of my career. I was on a more level playing field with other journalists because working from home became much more normalised, and I did find myself in the mainstream media more. But it was still a hard battle to get editors to care about the rising death toll of disabled people.
When the news that 6 in 10 covid deaths were disabled people broke, I was actually told by an editor at a top paper that “the news cycle had moved on”. At this I screamed, slammed my laptop shut and text my best friend in a rage that nobody was interested in hearing disabled stories unless they were inspirational or turning us into scroungers. In reply to this she said the words she knew I couldn’t turn down: “Mate why don’t you do it yourself?” This is how The Unwritten was born.
The Unwritten is one of the things I’m most proud of. We had one mission – to allow people to tell their stories without them being filtered for the non disabled gaze- and to be paid for it. If trauma is at one end of the scale and inspo porn at the other, The Unwritten sat in the middle, we told the real stories that disabled people wanted to read. I won a British Journalism award for creating The Unwritten, and across the two and a half years that it ran for, I do believe we made a small change to the way some of the media covers disability.
Off the back of The Unwritten came my work with the Daily Mirror. Disabled Britain was the first time a major tabloid had run a series on disability that was not only created by disabled writers and editors, but that focused on our lives and the challenges we faced without the lens of trauma, inspiration or private medical details for clicks. We were nominated for a Press Award and I wrote a weekly column for The Mirror for a year and a half after that. Sadly, I no longer work with the Mirror, however, because like the rest of the mainstream media, I still think there is far too much clickbait written about disabled people that others us, and I didn’t want to be their token disabled writer whilst they demonised and traumatised my community.
One thing my Mirror column gave me was the space and confidence to massively bully the DWP and other parts of the then Tory government, something I was able to grow on after leaving the Mirror. Since then I’ve been quoted in the House of Lords and appeared regularly on TV and radio.
After my reporting on the various ways the Tory government consistently failed disabled people, I found myself at The UN with disabled people’s organisations as the government were hauled over the coals for their treatment of disabled people. This was such an empowering moment, but it was also massively dispiriting because not a single mainstream publication wanted me to cover it, despite my being one of two disabled journalists who were there. It was from this that I went ranting to Steve Topple at The Canary, and he bit my hand off when I asked if I could write for them permanently.
Working at The Canary is the best job I’ve ever had, it allows me to rant about the government’s treatment of disabled people whilst working to a schedule that suits my needs as a disabled person. It’s also allowed me to grow as an activist. Using The Canary’s social media I’ve ran online protests and in my column, I’ve effected change, which has allowed me to feel strong enough to co-found my own campaign group. In the spring of 2025, Labour announced the harshest cuts to disability benefits that we had ever seen. In response to this, I, along with other with other disabled people in the public eye, including Cherylee Houston, Lisa Hamilton and Natalie Amber, launched Taking The PIP. Oiginally an open letter signed by over 130 disabled people in the public eye calling on the government to stop the cuts, the campaign grew and we created a tool which allowed thousands of people to email their MPs asking them to oppose the cuts. Our work, combined with efforts from other activist groups led to the Labour rebellion which saw PIP cuts paused.
All of that could’ve influenced me to write my book Ramping Up Rights: An Unfinished History of British Disability Activism, but it was actually one particular moment. In May 2023 I was honoured to interview the legend that is Barbara Lisicki on stage at the National Education Union, but it was then that I had an awful realisation, I knew next to nothing about disability rights history. It was a lot to contend with, the fact that even as someone whose job it was to make a change for disabled people, I knew so little about our history – because I’d never been taught about it or exposed to it in media.
I felt like a fraud. Was I the right person to cover disability rights when I didn’t know our history? But then I realised that wasn’t my fault. I grew up in the 1990s and 2000s when you would regularly see non-disabled parents crying on TV about the fate of their disabled kids or the horrendousness of Benefits Street.
It was then I vowed to change that, not just for me but for other people both disabled and non disabled people. I didn’t want another young person growing up feeling alone, and at the same time, I wanted disabled adults to feel empowered. In writing Ramping Up Rights, I set out to learn as much as I could about the people who came before me, and I wanted to bring others along for the ride. The book is not an encyclopedia, but rather something that you can dip in an out of and learn something new, in an accessible way. It’s been an absolute joy to tour the country and speak to so many disabled people about activism and our history.
The government and media has worked hard to erase the history of disabled activism, because they want disabled people to feel isolated and like they can’t fight back. My aim is to show disabled people that by learning from our past we can fight harder than ever before.