Sophie Morgan on Rights on Flights, Accessible Travel, and Representation

Karina Sturm: Welcome to the Global Disability News Network podcast, powered by GADIM, the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment. We are a disabled-led, accessible multimedia platform where disability isn’t the side note: it’s the lens. We report on how systems, culture, and everyday life affect disabled people around the world while centering lived experience and disabled perspectives.

I’m Karina Sturm, News Director of the Global Disability News Network and your co-host, and with me is co-host and fellow journalist Amy Zayed.

Amy Zayed: Hello, everyone.

Karina Strum: Today we’re talking about independence, representation, and the right to move through the world on your own terms, whether that’s exploring a new country, navigating an airport, flying, or simply seeing ourselves reflected in the stores we shop in.

Joining us today is Sophie Morgan. Sophie is a multi-award-winning broadcaster bestselling author, and a powerhouse advocatefor Rights on Flights. She also recently collaborated with Primark on their adaptive clothing range. Sophie, it’s such an honor to welcome you here, and I’m also a big fangirl.

Me too.

Amy Zayed: Thank you

Sophie Morgan: for

Amy Zayed: having me.

Karina Strum: Sorry, this was a very long intro.

Amy Zayed: I’ve read your bio and I was like, “Oh my God, I love this woman.” I’m absolutely, totally in love, because I’ve watched a lot of the shows that you’ve worked on, and I wasn’t sure it was you, and I thought, “Oh my God, I love her.”

Sophie Morgan: Oh, that’s so nice. Thank you.



Karina Strum: Should we start with a little bit of an audio description for our blind viewers?

Sophie Morgan: Shall I start?

Yeah.

I’m Sophie. I’m a 41-year-old white woman. I’ve got long blonde hair, which is very messy right now, and I’m wearing a green shirt and sitting leaning on a table. Behind me is a pale cream wall with a curtain.

Karina Strum: All right, should I go next? I’m a white woman. I have a very short, brownish pixie cut with some gray, and I’m wearing cat-eye glasses

Amy Zayed: Okay. I’m a 52-year-old woman of color. I’ve got my hair up in a ponytail. It’s usually black with a few streaks of gray

Karina Strum: Great. So shall we jump into travel writing? Because I always wanted to be a travel writer and never actually made it. I tried; literally my first published article was about my Hawaii vacation, but it was not very good. So Sophie, how does one become a travel writer?

Sophie Morgan: I fell into it in the best way, I suppose: accidentally. As a wheelchair user, I obviously have a unique way of traveling, and as we know, there are complications with traveling as a wheelchair user, but there’s also a lot of opportunity. Some of the places in the world that are doing the work to be more accessible had invited me to come along and experience some things for different reasons. One was for work, another was for fun. And while that was happening, I reached out to various publications, emailed the editors, and said, “Look, I’m doing these amazing trips. Would you like me to write about them? Because I think they’re newsworthy.” That opened the door to various editors, and now I’ve written for of different publications, magazines, and newspapers in the UK and in the US. It was an unexpected curve in my career, and it has just been the best thing. I adore it. It’s such a privilege and it’s so much fun. I wish I could say there was a plan or a route somebody could take, but my guess is I went the same route most people do, in the sense that I just had to email in and say, “I’ve got a story. Would you like to hear it?” and hope that somebody did. And they have. But I think it’s also a sign that there is an appetite for these kinds of stories, where we center disability in a positive and a negative way, both sides of the story. And I think that’s really reassuring for people, because often the bad news stories get more traction within the community, and I like to put some good stories out there as well as the bad.

Amy Zayed:

Sophie Morgan: the writing?

For people who may not know my story: on the day I left school, I had a car crash and became a wheelchair user. I was paralyzed from the chest down, and I woke up in hospital, as anyone with any kind of acquired disability will understand, completely clueless as to what on earth I was going to do with myself and what was going to come next. I accidentally, which is a theme you’ll hear me mention often, fell into a career in television. I was actually pursuing a dream to become an artist at the time when the BBC messaged to say they were looking for disabled people to go on an expedition across Nicaragua. They were doing a format that followed a group of 11 disabled people going across the whole of Nicaragua on foot. That was in 2004. So I stepped into TV, like I said, accidentally, and I ended up doing a show on the BBC, and that basically became the beginning of my career in TV. I did another reality TV show a few years later, then became a presenter, and that’s a whole other story. But the presenting has always been the main job, and on the side have been these other bits of work, whether it’s the travel writing or advocacy in general. The real reason I got into TV in the first place was that I was overwhelmed by how poorly disabled people had been represented and how much I wished I could shift that, for myself and for anyone. I had a point to prove about what we as disabled people are capable of, and I really wanted to use television to help me share that point. That’s why I got into it. So the minute I actually did start getting a profile and more opportunities to speak, I would often turn the lens around and say, “Look, come and have a look at what we’re actually dealing with,” again, good and bad. That’s what led to some of the campaigning work. That was 20 or 22 years ago, so it’s been a long journey.

Amy Zayed: I’ve watched some of it, and as I said, I loved it. One of the things I would ask myself is this: you say it was 22 years ago. How did you deal with all the internal and external ableism? Because it’s still there. It hasn’t changed much, I sometimes feel.

Sophie Morgan: Oh,

Amy Zayed: you’re

Sophie Morgan: so right.To answer that, I’ll split it into two parts. The first one: the external ableism that exists everywhere. To be honest with you, I’ve truncated that story; that’s the abridged version. Trying to get into television with a visible disability 20 years ago was absolutely impossible. I got so many people saying, “No, you can’t. We can’t. Why would we have a disabled person on telly?”

Honestly,

Amy Zayed: don’t get me started. It’s still not possible in Germany. I remember back in the day when I did my traineeship at WDR, which is one of the biggest German broadcasters, a public regional broadcaster. We’re a federal country, so we have one national radio station, but it’s probably not the most popular one; the most heard are the regional public ones, and WDR is the biggest. I remember them denying me access to TV seminars because I would be “in the way” of my fellow trainees. They thought a blind person wasn’t allowed on television anyway and shouldn’t be in front of or behind the camera. Twenty-five years later, nothing has changed.

Sophie Morgan: It’s heartbreaking, isn’t it? It’s something we know if we’ve been in the industry. We’ve all got a story, haven’t we? It’s rife. And like you said, that was two decades ago, and we’re still dealing with many of the same challenges. To answer your question about how I dealt with it: I don’t know how you dealt with it, but I just had to. You don’t have a choice. You just have to get on with it, fight it, take the hits, and keep pushing and finding a way. It took me about six or seven years from when I first thought I’d love to do this as a career to getting in the door. And then it wouldn’t be until 2016, a good 12 years after my injury, that I actually got a proper break into television, and my career took off. It’s not an easy industry to crack. The ableism is rife. It exists in front of the camera, behind the camera, in every decision-making room, everywhere. I’ve had viewers tell me I shouldn’t be on TV. I’ve had executives tell me I shouldn’t be on TV. It’s everywhere. And then, separately, the other part of the question: I’ve had to deal with the internalized ableism. That’s going to take another hour. How do we all deal with it? It’s taken me a long time to understand it, unpack it, and deal with it, and I think it’s a life’s journey. Many influences in your life can shift the journey for better and for worse, and it just doesn’t end. I constantly think I’ve got to grips with it all, and then something happens and I go, “Oh no, turns out I’ve still got work to do.” So it’s hard. But who would change it?

Amy Zayed: Sorry, I didn’t want to

Karina Strum: interrupt.

Oh, go ahead.

Amy Zayed: I just wanted to add something. I think the worst part is not knowing what you’re actually able to do, because sometimes you believe it. I was born blind, and I should know what I’m able to do and what I can’t do. But I believed it, because I didn’t know of any other blind people who did it, so I thought it was true.

Sophie Morgan: hundred percent. Exactly. Sometimes I reflect on it: as we all know, ableism comes from multiple sources. Your family, your society, your friends. It can come from anywhere, can’t it? It can catch you off guard how much you don’t know, how much you’ve embedded, how much you have internalized. If ever I’m asked how to deal with those things, I always come back to the same answer: you’ve got to constantly check your conscious and unconscious biases. You’ve got to keep asking, “Why do I think that? Why do I think I can’t do that? Maybe I could do that. Who told me I couldn’t?” It’s this constant scrutiny of your feelings: “Maybe I was wrong about that. Maybe I could do it. Hold on, maybe I’ll try.” Yeah, it’s a lot.

Karina Strum: Have you always been such a badass? My first idea after an injury like that wouldn’t be to go to Nicaragua and walk through the whole country.

Sophie Morgan: I know, right? Honestly, I look back on it and think, “What was I thinking?” But to answer your question: yeah, I probably was that much of an idiot. I think badass is a nice way to put it; you could call me many other words. The truth is, at the time, like I said, I had a chip on my shoulder. I had a point to prove. I didn’t want to be underestimated by people. I didn’t want to feel disabled. I had all these hang-ups about that. So when presented with an opportunity to completely shift my own thinking and other people’s thinking, I took it. Of course, doing any kind of work addressing your internalized ableism while on national television is extremely complicated. And being in the jungle as a physically disabled person is extremely complicated. So I don’t seem to do things the easy way, but I learned a lot.

Karina Strum: Do you regret it?

Sophie Morgan: I don’t, because I don’t tend to regret anything. It’s more a case of “I can’t believe I did it.” But I’m sure we all feel the same about things we did when we were kids. I was only 18.



Karina Strum: Okay. But then you traveled literally all across the globe, and here’s what I was always wondering when I see these articles: they look very nice, but they also feature, let’s say, more expensive hotels. And that’s the one thing that always really annoys the shit out of me. Whenever I try to book a vacation that’s accessible, it always costs double whatever a non-disabled person would pay.

Sophie Morgan: A

Karina Strum: hundred percent.

Sophie Morgan: So there’s a reason, and I’ll answer that in two parts again. The reason I deliberately target luxury properties or destinations in a lot of my articles is not just because it’s a really nice holiday. Of course it is a really nice holiday, but the reason I do it is that I want to have as much impact on the world as possible with the power I’ve got. And I don’t have a lot of power. I don’t have a huge following. I don’t have all the power I want. But what I do know to be true is that within the travel industry, there are influencers who have more power over the industry than I do. So I go to the places that are most respected by the industry, so that the industry will look at them and go, “Oh my God, they just made that thing accessible. Wow, look, they’re doing it. We could do it.” I very much try to leverage the brand power within the brand so I can piggyback off it. And it’s been successful, to be honest with you. One of the things that happened quite early on is that I started writing for a very prestigious and respected travel magazine called Condé Nast Traveller. Condé Nast Traveller might not be read by every disabled person, but what I do know is that the magazine is read by everyone in the industry. So when stories go out in that publication about, let’s say, a hotel in the Maldives that has just made a seaplane accessible, or put ramps and beach chairs everywhere, or trained their staff in accessibility awareness, or when I profile another traveler who’s gone somewhere amazing, the reason it’s so impactful is that it lands in a magazine like Condé Nast Traveller, and guess who else reads it? Other brands. Other luxury spaces. What happens then is a trickle-down, because those luxury spaces influence not just each other; everyone wants to be like them. They are the influencers in their space. So all of the mid-range and lower-range brands look and go, “Wow, I’ve just seen they’ve done it.” It has this powerful trickle-down effect, which I deliberately go for. But I am aware that it’s not accessible in the affordable sense for everybody. That is definitely a negative side of the work I do, because I know not everyone can use it. But I also try to position it this way: the industry needs to recognize that we exist in every category of traveler. We do travel to luxury places. We do want honeymoon destinations. We do want to have a really bougie time.

Amy Zayed: What I always would like to know is this: we know that disabled people get mistreated, especially on flights, and it’s even worse when you’re in a wheelchair. A good colleague of mine, Christiane Link, who is German but lives in the UK, writes a lot about the mistreatment of disabled people on planes and trains, even the destruction of mobility equipment. How do you deal with that, and how do you actually address the problem?

Sophie Morgan: It’s so bad, isn’t it? Again, it’s one of those things where you can ask any deaf or disabled person and they’ll have a story. They’ll all go, “Yep, I’ve got one of those.” It drives me up the wall. I had my wheelchair broken in 2024, I think it was. I had my wheelchair broken three separate times by three different airports, three different airlines. And it enraged me. I couldn’t even put into words how frustrated I was getting at the time, because obviously you can’t just have your wheelchair broken and wait for it to get fixed. You’ve got to get on with your life. It was extremely challenging. Anyway, I ended up making a documentary about this very issue. It’s called Fight to Fly, and it’s on All 4 in the UK, if you’re listening to this in the UK. Fight to Fly was our fighting film: let’s expose the airlines and share the truth with people who might not know what’s happening. But I didn’t just want to educate non-disabled people about what’s happening; that’s not really my agenda. I wanted the airlines to wake up, and I wanted to show them that we really do deserve better. There must be a way to raise awareness of the problems, sure, but also to come up with some solutions. So I set up a campaign called Rights on Flights, which was established around the time the documentary was filmed. It was an amazing start to the campaign, because I used my profile on TV to start talking about the problems, and an MP, a Member of Parliament in the UK, contacted me and said, “Look, I’d love to help.” We got a lot done in a short time, and it was really fun and really impactful, and it felt hopeful. But we’ve had so many changes of government in the UK, changes of leadership, changes of ministers, changes of everything, that it’s been incredibly hard to get any real, lasting change enacted. At the moment I just need a breather from it, because it’s exhausting, and I’m not paid to do any of it. I’ve got to earn a living, and it’s a lot to do all at the same time. And it’s ongoing. It doesn’t matter that I run a campaign group; I still encounter all the same discrimination as anyone else on a flight. Even the other day I had problems on a flight, and it’s just so tiring. It never stops. And in all the campaigning work I’ve done over the past few years, I’ve come to the realization that the airlines know full well how badly they treat us, and they do not care. I don’t care what they say out loud in the media; they do not care. Because if they did care, it wouldn’t be happening. That’s the cold truth of it. I thought maybe they didn’t really know, that we just needed to tell them. But oh, they know what they’re doing.

We’re

Amy Zayed: not paying less than anyone else as

Sophie Morgan: customers.

No. If anything, we’re paying more, because they won’t let us take our carers for free, even though they insist we have to travel with carers in some instances. And there’s a premium, like you said earlier, if you need to travel in business class because your body can’t actually travel in economy. Honestly, there are so many things. Don’t get me started. I hate it. I ableism feels like, fly. Because there’s so much in that experience that tells you how disabled people are treated. We have to go in our special lanes. We can’t integrate with other passengers. We have to be loaded on first and taken off like we’re hidden from everybody else. We suffer indignity, we suffer fear and anxiety, we suffer confusion, and we’re abandoned. There are stories of deaf people being left behind because the tannoy is inaccessible and the gate gets changed, and blind people being mistreated. There are so many stories. If anything, an airplane is a microcosm of society: all the wealth discrepancy, everything that’s wrong with this world is there in an airplane. And until they redesign the thing so we can travel in our chairs, and until they start designing for everybody, not just for one type of person, we are going to continually run up against problems, and the systems are not going to change. It’s just going to be another story, another day, another issue, forever and ever, amen.

what

Karina Strum: do you guys think about these invisible-disability sunflower

Sophie Morgan: lanyards?

There’s some controversy around them, isn’t there? I don’t know how easy they are to get. I’m not too sure, because I don’t use them. But I’ve heard people say they can be misused, and that’s a problem for everybody involved. In principle, I think the idea is solid and helpful, but it needs to be trustworthy. What do you think?

Karina Strum: You know what really annoys me about those? The fact that I even have to wear them. Why do I have to show that I have a disability?

Sophie Morgan: I couldn’t

Karina Strum: agree with you more.

It shouldn’t be necessary. They should treat me like anyone else. Anyway.

Sophie Morgan: It’s customer service. They should treat all of us with care and consideration. And I always say this to them: assume that every customer has some sort of access requirement. If you start there, you assume we all might need slower boarding times or faster boarding times, help with our bags, guidance or navigation support, whatever it is. If you assume the baseline customer has access requirements, you can’t go wrong. But they assume the average traveler is non-disabled, probably a man, probably a certain age. If you assume the other way around, you’d catch us all. So I couldn’t agree with you more: why do we have to identify ourselves as disabled and have special assistance and special lanes and all this?

Karina Strum: Yeah. And it feels really strange. It feels weird to sit there and literally have to wear it so that everybody can see it, so they don’t discriminate against me.

Amy Zayed: We’ve got that as blind people. I don’t see it in the UK as often, but in Germany it’s fairly well known: this three-dots badge, similar to the sunflower. and a lot of blind people wear it. I just refuse to. When I need my white cane, I’ve got my white cane on the street, when it’s dim enough for me to see. But in an airport, I’d rather have my suitcase in my hand than my cane. If I’m with an assistant, I don’t carry my cane, because I’ve maybe got a suitcase to carry. I remember my dad wanting to force me to wear the badge, and I said, “No freaking way. It looks like a freaking stigma.” And here’s my problem with it. I don’t want to speak for someone with an invisible disability, but my problem is always this: okay, what are people supposed to do? They see this, and yes, with the sunflower you can add a card that tells people what to do, but a lot of people don’t see that card. It’s the same with the three-dots badge. So for me it was: okay, what are they supposed to do? What would happen if I wore it? Because I know that even with my white cane, people come and do things they’re not supposed to do. Either they grab you from behind, or they start shouting

Sophie Morgan: it.

I hear you. It’s a really interesting one, and of course everyone will be different. In a world where we have to label ourselves to get the help we need, why can’t it just be assumed that people need help, and those needs be met, without us having to put a big branded label

Amy Zayed: on ourselves?

Sophie Morgan: But at the same time, somebody suggested something to me recently. In fact, the woman I work with on the came up with this brilliant idea, and I love it; I don’t know what you two will think. Instead of us wearing labels and badges, what if allies, non-disabled people who are disability-aware, maybe with some sort of training, wore a little thing saying, “I’m a good one. I’ll give you a hand if you need it”? I thought, that sounds so much better.

I

allyship. I thought that was a really lovely idea, and I’d much prefer something like that to the labeling. But I come with a label. I’ve got my wheelchair; it goes everywhere I go, so I can’t hide.

Amy Zayed: When you travel, especially when you fly, I’ll tell you what makes people react even worse: when you are visibly disabled and have an Arabic name and look Arabic, a person of color. Oh my God, it’s an absolute nightmare. It’s even worse in my case. My parents are originally from Egypt, and when we became German citizens, someone messed up my ID card and passport. My father’s middle names were put in there as my middle names, and I don’t have a middle name. My first name is Iman, and the short form of Iman in Egypt is Amy. So on my ID it’s Iman Mohamed Rie Zayed, which is the name of my dad. The minute they see that: “Oh, a blind terrorist. This is interesting. We have to be really careful with that woman.” And then the ableism really starts, a mixture of “we have to be really careful.” They took my microphone. I was traveling as a radio reporter, and they thought it was a bomb, so they took it apart.

Karina Strum: Oh

Sophie Morgan: my God.



Amy Zayed: there.

Honestly, I swear to God, they took this microphone out, took it apart, and then had to put it back together. And at the same time, they offered me a wheelchair, because blind people usually can’t walk, as we know. And then they started talking to me like I was a kid: “You know that you are flying to Vienna, don’t you? This is an airport.” I said, “Oh, I thought I was at the Louvre.”

Oh

Sophie Morgan:

Karina Strum: you pretty much got all the intersectional discrimination one person can get in one day?

Amy Zayed: Honestly, I’m not kidding. This really happened a couple of years ago. To be honest, I laughed about it, and it was all fine. But I thought, the good thing is that I’m fairly outspoken and I have this big mouth that usually nobody can shut. What if I didn’t have that?

Sophie Morgan: This is the problem, isn’t it? You learn to have a big mouth.

Amy Zayed: Exactly. You

Sophie Morgan: have to. It’s part of surviving.

Yeah.

Amy Zayed: was just afraid of missing my flight.

Sophie Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. That’s the problem, isn’t it? You’re thinking, “I’ve got shit to do. You’re getting in the way right now with your discrimination.” So messed up.

Amy Zayed: “How can you be a journalist when you’re blind? This can’t be a microphone. We have to take it apart.”

Karina Strum: This doesn’t really have much to do with disability, but we use walkie-talkies as a means of communication when we’re on vacation, because my partner can’t really use his phone; he can’t hold it up. So we have walkie-talkies, and we went to Egypt for the first time this year. I did not read very carefully all the websites that give you the security and safety measures, so we brought these two walkie-talkies in our suitcase. We were fine flying in, but when we tried to fly out, they stopped us. It took two hours, and every five minutes a new police officer joined; at some point there were 15 police officers around us. And we had to explain: there’s this disabled guy in an electric wheelchair, there’s this girl with an invisible disability, and they’re traveling with an assistant from the United States. They were constantly on the phone, and I was only hearing “United States, America, blah, blah, blah,” and I thought, “Oh my God, what are they thinking?” It turns out we had brought the exact brand of walkie-talkies that was used for a terror attack a and we were completely unaware of it.

Sophie Morgan: That is really messed up.

Karina Strum: Yeah, it was really messed up. They wouldn’t believe that we were using them as a disability accommodation. I ended up showing them photos of us with the walkie-talkies, things like that. So



Sophie Morgan: Good to know. Walkie-talkies should come with a label.

Karina Strum: don’t bring walkie-talkies when you’re flying to Egypt.

Amy Zayed:

Karina Strum: Okay, so we got a little off topic. Sophie, you already talked about Primark, “Primark”? I always pronounce it “Primar.” How did that happen? I feel like you’re doing so many different things; I don’t even know how you manage it all in 24 hours a day.

Sophie Morgan: Oh, that was a really amazing story. When I came out of hospital, 20-something years ago now, I realized how little representation of wheelchair users there was in the shops. And I thought, this is really wild. Where are we? We shop, so why aren’t we anywhere? No models in wheelchairs, no mannequins in wheelchairs, nothing. It was just really weird. I was at art school at the time, and I decided to try to come up with an idea, something creative, and I designed a mannequin wheelchair for the shops. what happened was I got it made; I went to a manufacturer. And I started trying to get it into shops in the UK, with some degree of success. I got it into a couple of the flagship shops on Oxford Street in London, which is the main shopping area, and I was quite impressed. It’s not what I expected to be doing with myself, but it was an amazing project, and I could see that people could use it and benefit from it. But I was increasingly getting knocked back, and more and more retailers kept saying things like, “We don’t want disabled people in our windows. We don’t want that representation in our stores.” I was getting more and more demoralized and, to be honest with you, more upset than I wanted to be. So I parked the project. Then, about five years later, I got a phone call from a massive retailer in the US who said they wanted it. It would have been the most extraordinary project, and the ball was in motion, but then COVID hit. So there have been all these stops and starts. Anyway, fast-forward 15 years from when I first got it going but gave it up: Primark rang. They had been doing a lot of work in the UK with other adaptive projects. They’d been doing an adaptive clothing range and loads of work on accessibility. Their stores are really accessible, they’ve done lots of training, and they’re a really good, great retailer. They said they had a new range coming out, and they wanted to create a specific mannequin that looked like a wheelchair user, and a wheelchair for her to sit in. So we designed what’s now called Sophie the Mannequin. She is deliberately designed to look like a wheelchair user, so she’s got specific characteristics: stronger upper arms and thinner legs, a slightly more hunched sitting position, and legs deliberately seated in a way that makes clear they’re not moving. She’s got various traits of a female manual wheelchair user. We also designed the wheelchair she sits in, so she’s sitting in this beautiful wheelchair, which is just amazing. And then it went out in the shops. I think it’s now in about 30 different countries, or maybe that’s a bit much, maybe 15, but it’s in all the flagship stores in the UK, in five or six across Europe, and in some in the States as well. She’s just part of the collection of mannequins now in Primark, so it’s really cool.

I’ll

Amy Zayed: have to look out for it here in Cologne, because we’ve got a big one.

Sophie Morgan: Oh, she might be there. I’ll check. They gave me a list of places where she was placed, and I can let you know. But yeah, she’s so cool. It was such a beautiful project to be part of. Primark just did it the right way. When people work the right way, your heart just feels full. They were so kind, so considerate, and so willing to learn about the lived experience of a wheelchair user. They wanted to do it right from the beginning, and they consulted with me on everything. It was a dream, a real dream come true. An amazing project.

something I find interesting, because when you know the truth about disabled people, you think, God, we have such a brand problem, don’t we? People’s perceptions versus what we actually are. We need a whole new marketing team to sort us out. I was talking to someone about this, about how we consistently shift the dial. Because, let’s be honest, we are not where we need to be anywhere in the world. There’s so much work to be done in every country and every corner of this world: improvements on representation, on inclusion, on visibility, on legislation, everything. And I wondered, why don’t we have it? Why are we still fighting for this? It’s 2026. Why are we still…? Anyway, we came to the conclusion that one of our biggest problems is that as a community, as a demographic, we don’t have that many cool, culture-shifting, iconic legends. Take the gay community, which had Madonna, who adopted them and became this figurehead and pushed for gay rights and advocated for so many causes within the gay community. We don’t have anybody in our corner fighting for cool. We don’t have any pop stars who are disabled. Well, we do, but not enough. No one who’s super cool. And because we don’t have anyone cool, we don’t have this swell of people finding it cool to identify as disabled. Most people don’t want to; it’s not cool to identify as disabled. And change happens before law happens. Before legislation, change happens in different rooms, and we are not in those rooms, literally and figuratively. We’re not in the rooms where shifts in attitude happen. We need more artists, more musicians, more philosophers and thinkers and academics, real groundbreaking, cool disabled people, and we’d be better off. But we’ve got too many barriers everywhere we go.

Amy Zayed: And we’re actually being denied. It’s not just the barriers that are already there; we’re being deliberately denied access. Think about it. You just mentioned artists, and it’s so hard to get into that industry. It’s almost not possible.

It’s

Sophie Morgan: funny you say that, because I totally agree again. I’m a painter, and I’m a TV presenter, but I’ve gone back to painting, and I can’t even get into art schools that are accessible. I literally can’t get in. So there are reasons why we’re not further along. We know them all; there are multiple barriers. But I do think it would be great if we were considered a bit cooler than Absolutely.

Amy Zayed: The weirdest thing, though, and this is the big risk and the big trap we need to be aware of, is that when people ask us to talk about these things, especially non-disabled people, we need to be aware of the narrative. The year before last, in 2024, I was approached by German national television because they saw me on Instagram, and they said, “Oh, it’s so amazing to see a blind person into fashion. This is so amazing. We can’t believe it.” This guy sent me the concept, and I looked at it, and it was all about me being in a shop with some elderly woman telling the television people how amazing it is that she shows me the clothes, and how inspiring it is that a blind woman is into fashion. I looked at it and thought, “Oh

Sophie Morgan: God.”

Really?

Amy Zayed: I called him up and said, “Look, the eighties have called. They want their concept back. Would you mind?” I said no at the beginning, and then they pestered and pestered. And I said, “If you want me to do this, then I’m doing your job now and I should be paid for it, but I’m going to change this stupid concept. It’s going to be about why we aren’t more represented and why there aren’t far more Amy Zayeds out there, not ‘oh my God, it’s so amazing to have a blind woman who’s into fashion.’ This is stupid.”

Sophie Morgan: I couldn’t agree more. It’s so annoying, and it’s everywhere. The concept of us being cool or adventurous or brave: there are lots of ways in which the branding falls short. The stigmas are there, and it’s not our fault. There are so many things stopping us from being our full, authentic selves everywhere we go. I’ve had it recently with a TV show I’ve just been making. I’ve watched the edit, and it’s 2026, and this is one of the most progressive broadcasters, and they’ve literally whittled me down to “she’s a wheelchair user.” That’s how I’m described. They introduce me as “she’s a wheelchair user; she was paralyzed when she was a kid” before they even mention my credentials or my job. And I think, are we still doing this? I’m more than just that. And I’m not ashamed of it, of course; I’m very proud of my disability. But how can it be that we are still there? I wish there was one answer for how we could fix this problem, because we all know it’s there. It’s just too complicated to unpack.

Karina Strum: You know what I always see as a huge problem? A lot of people, even disabled people, would play a role like that. They would be Amy in that concept, and they would think it’s great to be on TV and to show “here’s a blind person,” because they have so much internalized ableism that they just think it’s okay.

Sophie Morgan: It’s funny you say that, because we were talking earlier about whether I’d regret anything about being on that TV show. One of the things I regret about being on TV so early in my disability journey is that I had too much internalized ableism to be given a platform. The thing about our community, as we know, is that anyone can enter it at any time. It’s taken me a long time to understand this culture that we have, this world that we live in, the way we speak to one another, the way we understand each other. There’s a whole language there. I had never met a disabled person before. I was very new to it. And there I was on national TV, spouting off all this stuff about disability. I look back and go, “Oh dear. What were you saying?” I did a disservice to our community. I was saying things like, “I don’t want to be called disabled.” And I think about it when I see people on TV now who are newly disabled doing the same thing. I wish that when somebody is born with a disability or becomes disabled, we all got together and spoke about it before someone goes and does that, because we set each other back. For my part, I wish I could apologize. I didn’t realize what I was doing, and now I know. But I totally see what you’re saying: sometimes we let each other down. It’s so complicated.

I

Amy Zayed: so understand you, because I’m running this workshop for disabled artists about how to deal with journalists, how to answer questions and so on. When I prepped the seminar, I questioned myself. And I was born with my disability. I remember when I joined grammar school; it was a regular school. Before that, for primary, I was at a blind school, and then I went to a regular school, which was very new in Germany back then. And I remember whenever the press came to do an interview, because there were 16 of us across the whole school, and I think in my grade we were only two, you felt like you had to. I wasn’t aware of it; I actually enjoyed it, because I was a child. But in the end, I felt like I was acting like a bloody parrot, or some zoo animal doing a nice little artistic trick.

There

Sophie Morgan: are two things. On one hand, you don’t know how to advocate for yourself and say, “I’m not going to do that.” And on the other, you get so swept up in it. You become a trope, and you don’t realize you’ve become one; you’re playing into a script that someone else has written for you. It’s really hard.

Amy Zayed: And then you learn. The older you get, the more you realize: okay, this is the story that I want to tell, and that’s it. That’s why, whenever I do these workshops, I ask, for example: when you’re not a disability influencer, when you’re just an artist, and maybe your disability is part of you but it’s not the first thing, why do you put it as the first thing on your Instagram account? Because that’s what you’re showing off: “I’m not an artist; I’m disabled first and foremost.” Why don’t you show off that you’re an artist, and then say that you’re disabled? People will only see the disability first. It’s not that you’re not proud of your identity, but who are you? What do you want to promote, your art or your disability?

Sophie Morgan: Everything is like that. “Disabled” is the word that precedes everything I do: the disabled presenter, the disabled this, the disabled that. And that’s fine, but over time you think, we’ve got to stop doing that. It’s the same way we’re moving toward better language with sportspeople. We don’t want to call her a female tennis player or a female football player; she’s just a football player, just a tennis player. We’re the same. And I find it’s a delicate balance, because on one hand I want other disabled people to recognize that this is a possibility. If I get called a disabled TV presenter, you can see that you can be a disabled TV presenter, and there’s a power in that. But I’m not just a disabled TV presenter.

Yeah. I know. A hundred percent.

Karina Strum: All right, I think we’re pretty much at the end of this podcast. I’m sorry; we could talk for hours. We should have a part-two episode.

Sophie Morgan: Thank you for having me. It’s been really lovely to chat.