“It is essential that we teach the next generation about the history of disability”

I had a very different weekend to my usual weekend, I was in Manchester at the Disabled Members Conference. Of course, I'm not an educator, I was there as a keynote speaker - with an icon of the disability rights movement and one of my personal heroes

For those unfamiliar with Barbara, in the 90s she was instrumental in stopping the ITV Telethon, a bi-annual event which relied heavily on the trauma of people with disabilities to raise funds for charities, like Children. in need.

The campaign used the slogan 'P*ss on Pity' to draw attention to the fact that we don't need pity, we need support.

DAN members, including Barbara, chained themselves to buses and lay in the middle of roads to protest the inaccessibility of public transport and ultimately led to the passage of the Discrimination of Persons Act disabilities - although DAN and many campaigners agreed that the law had too many loopholes that still allowed discrimination.

More recently, you may have seen Barbara played by the equally amazing Ruth Madeley in Then Barbara Met Alan on the BBC last year.

So it's safe to say that I love Barbara very much and that sharing a stage with her this weekend was a dream come true.

Many topics were covered during our onstage discussion and Q&A, including how people with disabilities are portrayed in the media and how that needs to change for each of us to be able to flourish.

However, the main takeaway for me was the importance of a history of disability.

When children with disabilities see themselves and adults with disabilities portrayed in the media, it is usually in three ways.

There's the inspiring way: raise money for charity, if they can do it, what's stopping you? Trauma extraction - where the worst moments of our lives unfold in excruciating detail for clicks. And finally the false narrative - that people with disabilities all lie to defraud taxpayers and the most recent attacks that ADHD isn't real and you're all doing it for attention.

What we don't see very often are people with disabilities thriving in all walks of life, unless they're rich and famous or can be used to inspire again. Often in these cases they are described as succeeding "in spite of" their handicaps, "overcoming" their condition or overcoming obstacles.

I was six years old when the DDA came into effect, but it wasn't until my adult life, when I started researching disability rights myself, that I discovered our story.

From the dark and horrifying days of Akton T4 and how Hans Asperger differentiated between good and bad autistics, to incredible disabled activists like Ed Roberts and Brad Lomax. I have been interested in the women's suffrage movement and women in war since I was a child, but I was shocked to learn that Rosa May Billinghurst was a crippled suffragette and that Noor-Inyaht Kahn, l one of our most famous female spies was disabled.

It wasn't until months before her death that I discovered Stella Young's incredible work, her inspirational porn TED talk changed my life and the way I talk about myself.

>

When I interviewed Cerrie Burnell about her documentary Silenced: The Hidden Story of Disabled Britain, I fully realized how little I knew about how we were treated until recent decades .

Of course, I knew we had been locked up in asylums in the past, but that seemed like a very long time ago, not that it still happens today. I also learned for the first time that in the 60s children with disabilities were subjected to torturous treatments to try to "fix" them and that in the 80s and 90s we still...