Managing Fit at Work: Disclosure, Accommodation, and Affective Labour Among Gender Minoritized Young Adults with...

Sexually and gender minoritized (SGM) young adults with disabilities navigate workplaces shaped by cisnormative, heteronormative, and ableist ideals of employability, professionalism, productivity and fit. However, little is known about how disability, sexuality and gender intersect in their employment experiences. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 10 SGM young adults with disabilities aged 20 to 30 years in Canada, we examined how participants navigated employment, disclosure, accommodation, and workplace inclusion. Through intersectionality‑informed reflexive thematic analysis, we developed four themes: (1) being positioned as unemployable through organizational ideals of capacity, qualification, and productivity; (2) managing disclosure, concealment, and passing in cis-ableist workplaces; (3) performing affective labor to maintain workplace fit; and (4) reimagining inclusion through universal flexibility, transparent policies and diverse workforces. Participants often avoided disclosure, self-accommodated, tolerated misrecognition, and managed others' perceptions of their identities and access needs to protect their employment. The concept of "managing fit" captures the labor these marginalized workers perform, and the costs they absorbed, to reconcile their bodies, identities and access needs with workplace expectations. These findings demonstrate how intersecting cis-ableist norms influence employability and highlight the need to replace individualized approaches to accommodation with organizational practices that anticipate and normalize bodily, gender, and access diversity.