Disability, mental health, sexual orientation and gender identity: understanding health inequity through experience and difference.

Background: This paper focuses on inequities in health in the context of disability, mental health, sexual orientation and gender identity (The authors' location outside of these identities is acknowledged as a serious limitation in discussing experience as a framework to understand health inequity in the dimensions of disability, mental health, sexual orientation and gender identity). These are dimensions that lead to health inequity primarily through the pathways of stigma and discrimination. The aim here is to distinguish the unique characteristics of these groups and thereby try and articulate a new understanding of health and health equity with identity and difference in the foreground.