A woman born with a rare condition that left her without arms or legs has opened up about how completely her outlook on online hate has transformed.
Briel Adams-Wheatley, a social media personality with a massive following, lives with Hanhart Syndrome — an extremely rare condition that affects fewer than one in every 20,000 births.
She came into the world in São Paulo, Brazil, and was later welcomed into a family in the US state of Utah after her birth parents were unable to care for her.
When the coronavirus pandemic brought everyday life to a standstill, Briel started posting makeup tutorials online. The very first time she uploaded footage of herself doing her makeup from the chest up, the response genuinely surprised her with how well it landed.
In a conversation with People earlier this year in March, Briel recalled: “But all the comments were like, ‘Why aren’t you using your hands?'”
Today, she commands an audience of 5.3 million followers on TikTok and a further 1.3 million on Instagram, and has always been refreshingly candid with her devoted community about the realities of her daily life.
Last year, Briel tackled a question she said had been coming up constantly: how her husband responded when she came out as transgender.
Instagram/@no_limbs_
She publicly came out as transgender in 2023, a full year after tying the knot with her husband Adam Wheatley. She described the moment she shared that news publicly as one where she could finally feel like she was able to breathe freely for the first time.
Briel and Adam’s love story began on Tinder back in 2020, and she has frequently described him as her greatest cheerleader and most unwavering source of support.
“He was nervous at first,” Briel admitted. “But I told him, ‘This has always been who I am. I just need to be fully myself’. And once he saw that, he was completely on board.”
She elaborated further in an Instagram video: “I had told him a little bit before we got married, too that I was having feelings about it, but I just wasn’t sure if it was something I was comfortable with, actually fully going into and just keeping suppressed. And if he was comfortable with it and everything.”
Adam, for his part, shared his own perspective: “I’m very happy that she found who she is. I fell in love with her and not what she was, just who she was.”
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More recently, Briel turned her attention to the trolls who flood her comment sections with negativity — and her message to them was anything but what they might have expected.
She spoke about how a fundamental shift in the way she thinks helped her reach a point where hateful remarks simply no longer have the power to reduce her to tears. Rather than letting cruel comments drag her down, she now welcomes the engagement they generate for her platforms.
“When I first started posting, I let everything affect me,” she said. “I’d be crying in the bathroom over comments. But eventually, I realised you have to protect yourself mentally.
“Now I’m like, ‘Thanks — you’re paying my bills!’ If I could talk to my younger self, I’d say, ‘It’s just not that deep’.
“People are either going to love you or hate you, but it doesn’t need to make or break you. You decide what makes or breaks you.”
A huge part of what keeps Briel showing up and posting is the desire to prove her doubters wrong. There’s a real satisfaction she gets from demonstrating to skeptics that her physical condition places no ceiling on what she’s capable of.
“That’s one of the reasons I do social media; to show people that disability doesn’t mean what they think it means,” she continued.
“I never had friends with disabilities when I was younger, so I always felt like I was facing everything alone.”
Featured Image Credit: Instagram/@no_limbs_
