Introduction:
Despite South Africa's progressive constitutional protections, LGBTQIA+ learners with disabilities remain largely invisible within policy, pedagogy, and sexuality education discourses. These youth not only face dual marginalization, on the basis of disability and queer identity, but also structural silences around their sexual rights. In an educational system that is predominantly heterocentric, ableist, and pedagogically repressive, participants demonstrate agency and resistance, creating affective and discursive spaces where their identities can be affirmed.


Purpose:
This study explores how visually impaired LGBT+ youth navigate, resist, and challenge cisheteronormative norms in South African schools for the blind.


Method:
Drawing on crip theory—a critical framework that interrogates the intersections of disability, normativity, and sexuality—the research centres the voices of 15 LGBT+ youth from four schools through focus group discussions. Their narratives disrupt dominant able-bodied, heterosexual schooling logics and reveal both the psychological toll of erasure and the resilience embedded in peer solidarity and everyday negotiation of power.


Results:
Visually impaired LGBTQIA+ learners expressed a desire to openly affirm their identities but felt misunderstood and unsupported by teachers and peers. Their experiences are shaped by the intersecting forces of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality, which marginalise non-normative identities and reinforce their invisibility. A pervasive culture of denial and silencing among teachers mirrors broader societal attitudes, positioning schools as microcosms of wider exclusion. However, even within the face of rejection, some learners used informal communities with other LGBTQIA+ learners for belonging and resistance against oppression, wherein older LGBTQIA+ learners became key sources of guidance, fostering a sense of camaraderie, resilience, and mutual advocacy.


Conclusions:
This research challenges existing pedagogical frameworks that exclude queer disabled bodies and calls for inclusive, participatory approaches to comprehensive sexuality education. Crip theory, in this context, proves vital in highlighting the ways in which normativities are both embodied and resisted.