Pride (& Prejudice) Month

It’s Pride month, which is always bittersweet. While our generation is experiencing unprecedented privileges, the current backlash towards the queer community, and trans community in particular, is overwhelming. And while the queer community has been facing legal persecution, physical violence, and harassment for centuries, it feels especially tragic in times when we thought we were making progress.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what these ideas of “heterosexuality” or being “biologically female” even mean. I think we all exist on a spectrum of gender, sexual, and other expressions that is much more limitless than the binaries we were raised under. What’s interesting to me about these strictly defined ideas of self-expression is that they don’t account for the factor of time. People change. To not do so would be to live in a dusty tattered wedding dress, Miss Havisham style, until the end of eternity. And yet that’s what a lot of hate groups would have us do. Forever chasing youth and the male gaze and all the white colonialist “virtues.”