Brides of Christ

Text by Ivan Kozlov 
Originally published in Russian by Reporters' Stories

One day, while Yevgenia Panfilenko was waiting for her husband outside a store, a man approached and started stroking her head. Yevgenia gets around in a wheelchair, and so it is not rare for strangers to pity her or force their help upon her. Such seemingly minor incidents don't make the news, but they do shape the quality of life of women with disabilities in significant ways. To be precise, this sort of thing is true for both sexes, but the problems women face are compounded by traditional Russian gender stereotypes. Their everyday life is interwoven with tactlessness and violations of personal boundaries. 

Optimus Prime

Damn, a little boy ran up to me and said, looking at me: '"It's Optimus Prime! Nobody's ever called me that before! :)

This tweet landed in my feed one day, which is where this story began.

I looked at the young woman in the profile photo and, out of curiosity, clicked through to her page to understand what she had in common with the Transformers character Optimus Prime and why the tweet had so many likes. It didn't take long to figure out: the author of the tweet gets around in a wheelchair. Three years ago she was still able walk, but now her myelopathy and polyneuropathy are progressing, and by all accounts her doctors' prognosis is not optimistic.

The young woman shared all of this with her followers on an open Twitter account, where, among other things, she described various encounters with people she knew well or barely at all. Some of the posts were funny, like the one about Optimus Prime, or this one: "Sitting quietly, not bothering anyone, next to a 'No Parking' sign, waiting for my mom to come out of the store, and some man walking by says, 'Breaking the rules, are we?' That put me in a good mood."

But most of the stories were nowhere near as lighthearted. There was the one about a stranger who started giving her advice supposedly meant to help her get back on her feet, even though that's impossible, given her diagnosis. Or the one where she told off a psychologist who, for some reason, felt compelled to assure her that she would definitely walk again. Or the time she cried for half a day after someone sent her an article about an equestrian competition, because it mentioned a horse she used to ride. But what struck me most was a story about a rather specific kind of experience only women face: the time her brother's friend invited her out on a fake date, only to lure her out of the house to mock and humiliate her.

Until that moment, I hadn't given much thought to the fact that, beyond the flagrant episodes of physical and psychological violence that women with disabilities suffer at the hands of both strangers and people close to them, there is also all of this: the everyday experience of humiliation, unwanted attention, and harassment. The cumulative effect of these daily situations produces a level of stress that most able-bodied persons could not withstand.

The members of the Telegram channel InvaGirls (Инвагёрлс) know this all too well – theirs is an online community of women from different Russian cities founded eight years ago, taking as their slogan three words: "Women, disability, feminism."

They came together because neither feminist communities nor disability communities were shining a light on the specific aspects of life faced by those who belong to both groups at once. One of the community's early posts read:

"We can't run away, we can't scream, we can't leave our homes, because our benefits and medications depend on the region we live in. We're tied to a place more than anyone else – we're tied to our abusers."

At the end of 2025, the organization Equality Now published a report finding that women with disabilities (in Central Asia, though there's no reason to think things are radically different here) face a heightened risk of sexualized violence, with perpetrators going unpunished. "Harmful stereotypes," the report concludes early on, are partly to blame.

What interested me in this story wasn't the acts of violence themselves, but the things that, on one hand, seem more "lightweight," even amusing at times — unwanted attention, absurd compliments — while, on the other hand, form the very foundation on which violence ultimately rests, since they feed the same misconceptions. Cringe, in short, in all its forms.

Unsolicited Help

"There's been a lot of cringe in my life," is how Yevgenia Panfilenko, a moderator of InvaGirls' support chat, begins her story. "There was, for instance, a woman who spent about 15 minutes asking me where my parents were and which accident they'd died in. Because obviously, if I'm out for a walk alone in a wheelchair, my parents must have died in an accident and I'm the sole survivor. But I was just out for a walk!"

That kind of morbid curiosity from random strangers can befall a person with a disability regardless of sex. But for women, there's a whole additional set of "bonuses." Some people, for example, are convinced that women in wheelchairs simply need a little bit of their warmth and affection.

"There was one time I was just standing outside a store, waiting for my husband, because the store wasn't accessible to me. A man walked up to me without a word and started stroking my head," Yevgenia recalled. "I backed up half a step. He came closer and did it again. I backed away again. He looked at me like I was the most terrible, ungrateful person, and walked off without a word."

Drunk men are their own category. They're often convinced that a person in a wheelchair needs to talk to them and that, moreover, this is a kind of privilege, Yevgenia says:

"Once, a drunk man wouldn't leave me and my husband alone — he wanted to talk, to be friends. When we turned him down, he called us assholes, and other unpleasant things. The whole logic of, 'How could the disabled person refuse to talk to me! Ungrateful!'"

Women find it especially hard to protect themselves in these situations.

"If we made a cartoon or some kind of infographic showing how many times a month a woman in a wheelchair gets patted on the head — God, she wouldn't have any hair left," exclaimed Alyona Lyovina, one of the community's founders. "Hey, you're not the first person who wants to come over, pat me on the head and say something like, 'You're so strong, you're holding up so well.' Not the first — the thousandth!"

Alyona has progressive muscular dystrophy, gets around in a wheelchair, and regularly runs into all sorts of unpleasant situations. She noted that it can be hard to pin down the line where intrusive concern turns, almost on its own, into harassment.

Once she was waiting at a bus stop, a place, she said, is always a point of stress, because you never know how the driver will react to a person in a wheelchair. Some quietly follow protocol and help her into the designated spot for wheelchair users, while others start "acting out." There used to be more of the latter, she said, but for every wise guy like that she met, Alyona filed a complaint with Mosgortrans, Moscow's public transit authority. She said, drivers have become far more conscientious now than they were even ten years ago.

One day a bus pulled up to the stop, and a man standing nearby started asking whether Alyona needed help. Once it turned out that she needed neither help nor that particular bus route, the man struck up a long, agonizing conversation with her, and for some reason immediately suggested they go to the seaside together. Alyona no longer remembers exactly how he got to the point of making persistent proposals, so she can't say for certain what he had in mind — a spontaneous romance, or some kind of health retreat.

Unsolicited treatment advice is another common thing women in wheelchairs hear all the time. Oddly enough, especially from taxi drivers. Alyona's colleagues tell similar stories, and she herself once met a driver who insisted she absolutely had to see some healer he'd once driven a paralyzed relative to, after which the relative supposedly stood up and walked.

"So you're stuck in Moscow traffic for two hours, and the whole time someone's telling you about someone's miraculous cure, and there's nothing you can do about it," Alyona sighed.

You could avoid sitting in taxi traffic and just move through the crowd on the sidewalk instead, but that comes with, if anything, even more downsides said Maria Neupokoyeva, an active InvaGirls follower from Moscow:

"When I'm moving at my own pace [in my wheelchair] and, it would seem, not bothering anyone, there are still people who, to get past me faster, just grab the handles of my chair and push me forward. Or they run over to help without asking either. One time a man nearly dropped me off a ramp and kept telling me not to be afraid, because apparently he knew how to operate a wheelchair. In the end, it leaves an emotional residue. And sometimes, when you share your frustration even with someone close to you, you might hear something like, 'Well, they were just trying to help — why are you so unfriendly?'"

Maria has lived in Moscow for many years and constantly rides  public transit — it never occurred to anyone to question her independence. Until, one day, she ordered a taxi to meet a friend downtown. The driver who showed up decided to lecture Maria about how she shouldn't get around without an escort, that she should be calling a taxi service designed for people with special needs, and that he, as a rule, doesn't give rides to people like her.

"We somehow made it there in the end, and I later filed a complaint with the service's support team. They gave me a promo code worth a thousand rubles for my next ride," Maria recalled. "So basically, I paid for the privilege of being scolded by a taxi driver for my independence."

The Most Heavenly Heaven

In these kinds of inappropriate outbursts, people reveal their views on what place, in their opinion, ought to be reserved in this world for people with disabilities. And they often have opinions about the next world, too. Women are assigned their own special corner there — as presumed paragons of purity.

"Religious stereotypes are a whole separate story," laughed Ira Kutilina, head of InvaGirls' psychological support service, who herself gets around in a wheelchair. "Religious people often say about girls with disabilities that they're a pure angel, so to speak, who's never done anything wrong in her life. As if the mere fact of having a disability elevates her — no vices, not even impure thoughts. A close friend of mine had the ultimate cringe example of this: once, someone called her a 'Bride of Christ.' Apparently, since she supposedly can't do or even think anything bad, she's automatically bound for the most heavenly heaven there is."

The "purity" projected onto women with disabilities spills over into stereotypes about their sexual experience, said Yevgenia Panfilenko. There's still a persistent myth that if you're in a wheelchair, you don't need or want sex. But if, on top of that, you're a woman, then you're supposedly up for anything. Which means you can become the target of unwanted attention from men who see themselves as something like benefactors ("at least she'll get to sleep with someone").

And if a woman with a disability's right to a full sex life is acknowledged at all, then she'd better not get pregnant:

"That's the myth of 'don't give birth, don't multiply the disabled,'" is how Yevgenia Panfilenko puts it. "But not every diagnosis is hereditary, and a woman has the right to have children if she decides that's what she wants."

The Suffering Person

Still, it would be wrong to say that nothing is changing for the better.

"My first social media posts about disability went up in 2014," Panfilenko said. "Back then, the response was different — often positive and supportive, but there were also plenty of haters and just plain uninformed questions. Now I notice that new readers don't ask silly questions or give unsolicited advice, because awareness has grown enormously. The more information there is in the media, in film, online, the better this whole situation will get."

Darya Krayukhina, a psychologist with InvaGirls, said she sees the roots of this in broader social attitudes: people with disabilities have almost always and everywhere been subjected to segregation to one degree or another. Today, in countries with well-developed accessibility infrastructure, they are more visible simply because they can move through public spaces with far more ease:

"And then everyone can watch and see that these are people just like anyone else — people with families, people going about their ordinary business."

At the same time, Krayukhina stressed that people with disabilities are still underrepresented not just in public spaces, but in culture — in theater and film, for example. Or rather, there are few examples where the plot doesn't revolve around the character's disability. Try, off the top of your head, to name an example of such a person simply playing an ordinary character. Right. Good luck.

"At first, our image and perception of disability is shaped by culture — mass culture, first and foremost — and only later, once we grow up, does it become a political question for us," Alyona Lyovina said.

"The most stereotypical thing is seeing a person with a disability as a person who suffers," said Krayukhina. "It's taken for granted that these people want nothing more in the world than to recover, and that they deserve pity. And that kind of pitying attitude is treated like some sort of virtue. I think that's very much present in our culture."

According to Lyovina, unsolicited pity toward people with disabilities is just one part of a much broader spectrum of unwelcome attitudes. Another part of that spectrum — one that's talked about less, and often even considered acceptable — is admiration and glorification. Though, in absolute terms, it amounts to nearly the same thing.

On this score, there's a great meme video circulating in the InvaGirls community. In it, people in wheelchairs are showered with compliments about their singing, their hairstyles, but the "audience's" biggest ovation still goes to the king of all compliments: "In your position, I'd already be dead."

"There's a stereotype that a person with a disability exists to inspire and motivate everyone else," Alyona said, "but most of the people I know aren't trying to inspire or motivate anybody — they're just dealing with their own problems, that's all."

Ira Kutilina pointed to the TV show Scrubs, where one of the characters — a Black surgeon — suddenly finds himself made the hospital's designated symbol of inclusion:

"They put him on billboards, they feature him in publications, and he doesn't like it, because he's been dragged around like that his whole life, just because he's Black. It's the same with us. There are plenty of blogs by women with disabilities where they present themselves as perfect mothers who somehow manage to hold down a job and do community work on top of it, and it really does look beautiful, but it doesn't always show people the real problems."