What the Disability Justice Principles Ask of Care: Notes on Putting It Into Practice

The ten principles of disability justice are not decoration. They were written by disabled people, for disabled people, as commitments that ask something specific of how care gets offered and received.

I am a disabled therapist in Vancouver, working online across Canada, and I have been quietly living with these principles for years now, sometimes well and sometimes badly. One of my ongoing practices is noticing where they ask more of me than I want to give, and where they are already holding me up in ways I had not named.

This post is for anyone who has come across the principles and wondered what they actually ask of the rooms where care happens. It is not a re-explanation of the list. The list already exists, beautifully written, by the people who wrote it.

Where these principles come from

Credit first, because the principles have specific authors. They were written in 2015 by Patty Berne, with editing by Aurora Levins Morales and David Langstaff, on behalf of Sins Invalid, a performance project and movement organisation led primarily by disabled people of colour. Sins Invalid coined the term "disability justice" in 2005, with Berne, Mia Mingus, Stacey Park Milbern, and others, as a framework that could name what disability rights was not quite naming.

If you have not read the principles before, here they are: intersectionality; leadership of those most impacted; anti-capitalist politic; cross-movement solidarity; recognising wholeness; sustainability; cross-disability solidarity; interdependence; collective access; and collective liberation.

Much of my own thinking about what these principles ask of care has been shaped by the writing of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/them), whose books Care Work and The Future Is Disabled are, in my view, the most honest existing writing on what happens when we try to live these principles out in actual relationship. I owe them real gratitude. What follows draws on their work without pretending to speak for it.

What they refuse

The principles refuse a few things that mainstream ideas of care often take for granted. It is worth naming these out loud, because until I noticed them, I was quietly reproducing them in my own work.

They refuse the deficiency model. The assumption that disability is a lack, a defect, something to be corrected. The principle called recognising wholeness names it in five words: "Disabled people are whole people." Care shaped by this principle does not treat a person as a set of symptoms to correct. It treats them as a full person who has always been whole.

They refuse the productivity test. The assumption that someone's worth depends on what and how much they can do. The anti-capitalist principle names this specifically. A person who cannot produce on schedule is not worth less. Care shaped by this principle does not quietly measure progress against output.

They refuse the independence narrative. The idea that the goal of care is to make someone self-sufficient. The principle of interdependence reframes the goal entirely. We are all held by webs of care, all the time. Independence, as the principles describe it, is often a polite word for isolation.

What they ask of care when we try to live them

Once these refusals are named, the principles ask something specific about how care gets done.

They ask us to follow the leadership of those most impacted. In therapy, that means the disabled person in the room is the expert on their own body, their own pace, their own access needs. Not the therapist, not the research, not the manual. The therapist's job is to build a collaboration with that expertise, not to override it.

They ask us to take access seriously as care work, not as accommodation. There is a difference. Accommodation is what you add on after you have built the thing. Access, in the disability justice frame, is part of how the thing gets built. If a therapy practice only figures out access when someone asks for it, it is doing accommodation. If the practice is built around the range of bodies and minds it hopes will arrive, it is doing access. Piepzna-Samarasinha has written about this distinction with real specificity, naming it disability justice and collective care when it is working.

They ask us to pace ourselves for the long haul. Sustainability, in the principles, is not a wellness word. It is a movement word. It means the work of care and liberation will not be finished in our lifetimes, and burning ourselves or each other out accelerates the very abandonment we are trying to end. For a therapist, sustainability is something built into a caseload, a week, the decisions about what kind of work to take. For a person receiving care, it is permission to move at your pace, to rest without apology, to trust that the work can pause without collapsing.

They ask us to refuse to throw each other away. This is the principle of cross-disability solidarity, and it is also the principle of collective liberation. When pressure rises, who gets dropped from the care circle? Who gets forgotten? Whose access stops being prioritised when resources get tight? The principles say: none of us. Not the cranky ones. Not the ones whose access needs are inconvenient. Not the ones who take a long time.

What this looks like from the inside

Piepzna-Samarasinha coined a phrase in Care Work that has stayed with me: crip emotional intelligence. It names the texture of what care between disabled people looks like when it is working.

It looks like not taking it personally when someone cancels, because you understand the cost of the cancelling. Waiting for someone to finish a sentence on their communication device. Knowing that when someone says they are having a hard day, the response is not problem-solving but presence: "I am sorry. What feels possible today?" Understanding that beds and houses and cars are worlds. Knowing that offering help a dozen times is sometimes what it takes before another disabled person trusts you will not disappear.

These are not therapy techniques. They are the cultural fabric of care that disabled people have been building for each other for a long time, often without funding, often without being noticed. What the disability justice principles ask of a therapist is that we recognise this fabric already exists, and that our job is not to replace it with something clinical. Our job is to practise care that does not quietly undo it.

I have written elsewhere about being trans and disabled and what the texture of that daily life looks like. The therapy version of this is: I know what it is like to leave an appointment with more to recover from than I came in with, and that knowledge shapes how I try to run a session now.

What this means for finding or offering care

If you are looking for care shaped by these principles, you will not find a clean credential for it. There is no disability justice licence. What you can listen for, instead, is whether the care already treats you as whole. Whether the practitioner is pacing the work to your body, not a schedule. Whether access is built in, or grudgingly added. Whether the practitioner can acknowledge that the framework they are trying to honour was not created by them, and that they are accountable to its lineage.

If you are someone offering care, whether as a therapist, a peer supporter, or a friend, the principles ask a similar kind of listening of you. Not that you memorise the list. That you notice, over time, whether you are treating the people in your care as whole or as a problem to be tidied. Whether you are pacing yourself sustainably or burning toward a collapse. Whether you can stay in relationship with disabled people you find difficult, or whose access needs inconvenience you.

These are not pass-fail questions. They are practices. I fail them regularly. The principles are not less true for that. They are more useful because of it.

The disability justice principles were not written to be easy. They were written to honour disabled people's wholeness, to name what has always been held at the margins, and to open a path toward care that no one has fully built yet. Putting them into practice is a slow, humbling, specific kind of work. The principles are a map. Like any good map, they do not walk the road for us. They show us where a road could be.

I am grateful, still, to the people who drew it.