Nalutporn Krairiksh (Nu) is a journalist, a writer and a strong LGBTI ally. She has worked at Prachatai news since 2016, focusing specifically on promoting gender equality in Thailand. She is also the founder of www.ThisAble.me — an online platform that publishes news, human interest stories and multimedia reports about disabled persons and disability rights. It is Nu’s belief that writing is a powerful and effective tool for raising awareness. Her writings touch on almost every aspect of human life, and at the top of her agenda are human rights and inclusion. In this interview, she emphasizes how LGBTI and disability rights activists can achieve wider and much more inclusive goals if they put intersectionality into practice in their advocacy.
How did you become so passionate about gender equality?
Nu: To be honest, not that long ago I did not know much about gender nor think of it as an important issue. Prachatai, a news agency that advocates for the rights of minorities, needed someone to write about gender equality and I thought why not. I still remember the first project that I worked on — it was about transgender people in the Thai military. While working on it, even though I don’t belong to any of the LGBTI acronyms, I found myself well connected to the issue. This is in the sense that persons with disabilities can relate as we often also experience discrimination and are the targets of verbal abuse. Our potential and abilities are overlooked with prejudice. We face and try to overcome quite similar problems. LGBTI communities not only became a new source of information for me, but also my family — a very warm one.
To what extent is a website for disabled persons relevant for LGBTI people?
Nu: You know, to a great extent the gender of disabled persons can be diverse too. Whatever problem LGBTI communities are encountering, we are too and also get affected. Moreover, these challenges are imposed on top of what we have to deal with on a daily basis. On the first layer, disabled persons are socially perceived to be pitied and unable to do or complete certain tasks like others. I know for a fact that this is not always the case. Then the second layer, I do not know why but it is a general assumption that having disability bars us from being anything else but heterosexual. That we are either men or women. That we do not have other sexual orientations or even desires. Some disabled persons are attracted to people of the same sex and this is not a new trend.