As you probably know, the month of June is known as Pride Month and is a time for celebrating LGBTQ+ identities. The month began with pride parades, and events are continuing throughout the month at various locations. It’s a time for standing up and being seen as a part of the community. And so, in honour of pride month, this post will be a discussion of my queer experience and my thoughts. Let’s just get into it and see where this goes.

First off, let me introduce myself properly. My name is Kit, and I am a genderqueer nonbinary person. My sexuality is something like panromantic grey asexual – which is a fancy way of saying I don’t care about my partner’s gender and I don’t experience much sexual attraction. When I think of my place in the LGBTQ+ community, I think mostly of my gender identity, because that feels like the most queer part of me.

So let’s talk gender!

The concept of gender being a binary between “masculine” and “feminine” is difficult to unlearn, despite how many people don’t fit either of those descriptors. Even cisgender people. But the unconscious lesson we’re all seemingly taught from a young age is that in society, people are either man or woman, and anything else is an anomaly. That’s clearly not true. There’s historical evidence of gender-non-conforming people going back to 7000 BCE, and almost every single indigenous culture has words to describe third gender or trans people. It’s honestly beautiful when you look into it. (source, source)

I get frustrated thinking about modern society and the pressures of gender roles, and how far we still have to go. I want to fight and make a difference for normalizing people like me. Because I’m just a human, and I deserve respect just like the men and women do.

Yet I feel so powerless. I feel like I have no voice, no means of making that difference I yearn to see in the world. I feel like my words hold no authority and that they won’t change anything. And that may be true.

But I’m going to share these words anyway, and maybe someone will read this and feel inspired. Maybe someone will read this and consider gender for the first time, or maybe it’ll change someone’s opinion altogether. I can only do my part and write these words and share them to the world.

I don’t have a lot more I wanted to write, partly to keep this post short and partly because I just don’t know how to tackle this subject. It’s so big, and so intense, and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I’m honestly struggling to put into writing. I’m going to come back to the subject again in future posts as I grapple with it, but hopefully you got something out of what I wrote today.