148: Getting Sexy with Andrew Gurza

Andrew Gurza is an award winning Disability Awareness Consultant and the Chief Disability Officer and Co-founder of Bump’n, a sex toy company for and by disabled people. Andrew uses they/he pronouns and identifies proudly as disabled. Their work has been featured on BBC, CBC, Daily Xtra, Gay Times UK, Huffington Post, The Advocate, Everyday Feminism, Mashable, Out.com, and several anthologies. He was the subject of an award-winning National Film Board of Canada Documentary, Picture This. Andrew has guested on a number of podcasts, including Dan Savage’s Savage Love and Cameron Esposito’s Queery. He has spoken all over the world on sex, disability and what it means to be a Queer Cripple. He is also the host of Disability After Dark: The Podcast Shining a Bright Light on Disability Stories, which won a Canadian Podcast Award in 2021, was a Queerty Award nominee, and was chosen as an Honoree at the 2020 Webby Awards. The show is available on all platforms. Andrew  is also the creator of the viral hashtag #DisabledPeopleAreHot. You can find out more about Andrew by going to www.andrewgurza.com and connecting via social media @andrewgurza_.

Tune in as Andrew shares:

• how they were diagnosed with cerebral palsy (CP) at the age of one and a half
• their more recent diagnosis of IBS, and how it has presented its own challenges
• how COVID has affected their sex life, and why they hire sex workers
• where they can see room for disability discourse to grow
• how they emotionally process ableism from day-to-day
• the nuances of caregiving, and how bad management can lead to dehumanizing experiences for patients
• how care management can be improved from the top-down
• how they have cultivated their mindset — and how their #1 advocate, their mom, was key in encouraging them to develop a thick skin and a sense of humor
• a nuanced conversation about accessibility — and why it’s more difficult for disabled creators to create accessible content, even if we’d like to
• how we can work to get out of the public health crisis of bias in healthcare: by hiring those of us who are historically excluded to positions of power, to reshape the system from the top-down
• why and how they were inspired to create Bump’n — the world’s first disability-driven sex toy

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