Call Your Girlfriend · Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow

Disability, Fragility, Vulnerability

October 1, 2021·1 hr 6 min·6 clips

Listen in as disabled writers Emily Ladau and Kelly Dawson discuss friendship, vulnerability, and pushing past Disability 101.

Aminat and Anne step back first. They name disability as the agenda, then complicate that frame by passing the conversation to Emily Ledao and Kelly Dawson. This is not Disability 101 all over again. The setup nods to their 2019 appearance and makes clear that the world, and their friendship, have changed since then. Friendship is the way in. Emily and Kelly arrive as writers, activists, thinkers, and people already held close in the CYG orbit. That warmth matters. The excerpt keeps circling the way shared disability can make friendship feel clarifying inside an ableist world. There is praise, but it is not sanded smooth. The cold open sounds eager to let listeners hear a dynamic that already exists, rather than staging a formal interview from scratch. Then the conversation gets heavier. One speaker talks about the strange comfort of knowing that circumstance and nature get a vote in what happens to a body. The comfort is real, and also complicated. It does not make the hard parts easier. It does push back on the shameful fantasy that every bodily change is privately controlled. The political point comes through personally. Society does not prepare people to become disabled, even though anyone can enter the disability community at any time. The episode treats that less like a warning than a reason to be honest sooner. Emily and Kelly want people to move past the basics, while admitting many people still have not absorbed them. So the episode stays in the tension: richer conversations are possible, but the unfinished groundwork keeps getting in the way.

As heard by us

A disability conversation shaped by friendship, visibility, and what comes after Disability 101.

Call Your Girlfriend gives Emily Ledao and Kelly Dawson room to talk about disability as something lived, shared, and negotiated in public. Their friendship adds warmth and credibility, and the conversation keeps its focus on ableism without turning the women into people…

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Why you'd press play

You want disability talk that starts with real friendship, not a lecture.

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