What Pride Means to Me

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What does pride mean for you?

You’re likely to get a different answer depending on who you ask. Hell, some people will give you multiple different answers.

Pride isn’t about wearing flashy clothes, dressing in drag, walking in parades, or waving flags. That’s what you do at Pride. To understand what it means, we need to take a step back and look at why Pride is even necessary.

Why we need Pride ⚓

I won’t go into the full history of Pride ( you can learn about that here 🔗), but here’s the gist: society is built around the idea of discrete genders and sexualities. You are assigned a gender at birth based on your genitalia, and you are expected to only be attracted to the opposite gender. If you’re born with a penis, you’re a boy, and therefore can only be romantically and sexually attracted to girls, who are people with vaginas. That’s the contract society puts in front of every newborn and expects them to sign, no questions asked.

This isn’t how humans work, though. We can fall in love with anyone, regardless of their genitalia. We don’t always feel comfortable slotting ourselves into society’s rigid definitions of “man” and “woman.” Sometimes a person with a penis wants to wear a dress, and sometimes a person with a vagina wants to wear a tie. And sometimes our ideas of who we are and what gender we align with change.

Someone can feel masculine one day, like after several hours of heavy weight training at the gym; and spend the next day getting their hair done at the salon. Conversely, someone can go from wearing makeup and painting their nails to shotgunning beers with their buds on a fishing trip.

Both of these examples break traditional gender boundaries, and in a society where gender boundaries are clearly defined, this kind of deviance throws a wrench in the system. It breaks the contract. It trips people up. What do you call a person who has a penis and painted nails? It’s inconceivable!

Our social systems push back against people who step outside gender boundaries. We try to cram them back in, force them to get back in line. But again, that’s not how humans work. You can’t force someone to think of themselves a certain way, or fall in love with certain kinds of people. Some people will cram themselves back into the box, but there will always be internal pressure to break back out. They’ll always resent their state, and always long for the freedom that society denied them. Too many people have died old and full of regret, wondering how things would’ve been different if they had just been their true selves or dated the person they truly loved instead of settling. It’s cruel, it’s sad, and worst of all, it’s completely unnecessary.

Pride as an expression of freedom ⚓

So what does this have to do with pride? Well, as it turns out, everything!

In order for people to feel comfortable expressing themselves and breaking these boundaries, they need a space where they can feel safe doing so. A place where they won’t be judged, ridiculed, or attacked for embracing their freedom. Historically these have been bars or clubs, places out of sight of the general public, places reserved for those people. The Internet opened this up quite a bit by giving non-conforming (i.e., queer) folks a way to find others like them and become part of a community.

While the Internet and private bars helped, there are still people who don’t know there’s a place for them to be themselves. There was no public acknowledgment of queer existence, nothing that would show privately queer folks that “you have a place in this world.” Pride helped change that.

Pride isn’t just a gay event. It’s not just a party. It’s a celebration of self-expression, of freedom, of love and joy. Yes it’s commonly associated with gay folks due to its history rooted in Stonewall 🔗. Yes there’s music and dancing and drinking and laughing. But the real reason for pride is freedom.

Freedom to love who you want, freedom to dress how you want, freedom to show the world who you are and why you think traditional gender are bullshit. It’s not an attack on traditional genders, nor is it exclusive to a certain kind of queerness. It’s open to everyone, as long as you agree by the golden rule: treat others the same way you’d want to be treated.

It’s not hard to understand, yet for some reason millions upon millions of people refuse to see it that way. They think it’s something nefarious. They think it’s a way to indoctrinate kids. They think it’s just for antisocial sex-driven deviants. What they cannot realize is that Pride embodies something they never knew they wanted: personal freedom.

What does Pride mean to you? ⚓

This blog doesn’t really have a point. It’s really just stream-of-consciousness thoughts I wanted to get down while my city’s celebrating Pride weekend. What do you think? Let me know on Mastodon 🔗 or start your own conversations!