Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Van Esk and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On today's episode, I'm joined by Carson Tuller, an LGBTQ plus and disability advocate, policy advisor and professional speaker, where I ask, what is ableism?

Welcome to Getting Curious says Jonathan Van Esk and it's so excited to be joined by our guest this week.

You are someone who I've followed on Instagram for a very long time, absolutely stunning, absolute, I mean, Carson Tuller is who you are, is your name.

But you have many commas, you are gorgeous, you are an advocate, you're an activist, you are really just someone who I'm so excited to meet.

Thank you, I'm so excited to be to you.

But so our question this week is, because every episode of Getting Curious is a question.

Question is of the day, what is ableism? It's a question we've heard, it's a term I've seen, I guess I like literally, I don't know what it, what, if I looked up in the dictionary, ableism is.

Yeah. So, and how you experienced or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, okay, so I define ableism as valuing able bodies over disabled bodies or non disabled bodies over able bodies if you want to say it that way.

So it's valuing them, it's discrimination against people with disabilities, it can look like a lot of different things.

But essentially it's prioritizing and valuing kind of your stereotypical able body over other bodies that don't function in the same way.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. And it's that radiates though into so many different facets of life.

Yeah.

Like accessibility.

I mean, like, yeah, how we think about like planning how to do anything in anyone's life.

Yeah, like any structural things we're going to have conversations about accessibility.

That all is inside of ableism, right?

In terms of like, are we also making sure that people with disabilities have equal access?

But then ableism also seeps into other areas of life that we don't often think about like the fashion industry.

Do we have like clothing in fashion for people who have different bodies or clothing that's accessible for people who, you know, can't do buttons or who need, yeah, just kind of different kinds of access.

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