Why Pride Matters So Much To Me 🏳️🌈
June 2025 marks a monumental occasion: my first Pride as a post-op nullo, a non-binary trans person finally at home in their own skin. This isn't just a celebration; it's a defiant roar against decades of trauma and a testament to the enduring power of self-acceptance and creating chosen family.
My childhood in Southeast Wisconsin was a crucible of conservative evangelical dogma, a theocratic right-wing bubble that suffocated any sense of belonging. From my earliest memories, I felt alien, a queer kid in a world determined to erase me. The only escape I craved was literal – I started studying German at ten, dreaming of a life anywhere but there.
The collision course with my parents was inevitable. In January 2005, at 17, I came out to them as gay while a freshman at UW-Madison. Their response was catastrophic. Financially cut off, I was told my life would be "miserable, incomplete, unhappy," inevitably ending in "death by AIDS." This wasn't concern; it was a hateful prophecy, a weaponized fear designed to break me. This insidious rhetoric, designed to condemn and isolate, is etched into my memory.
The same hateful voices that attacked me as a queer kid are now orchestrating a grotesque moral panic around gender-affirming care. These fascist morons aren't concerned with anyone's well-being; they're deploying a classic strategy of distraction and division. Their failures of leadership are masked by manufacturing outrage, pitting segment against segment, all to maintain their decaying grip on power. This isn't about protecting children or upholding values; it's about control, about demonizing the vulnerable to consolidate their own crumbling authority.
Let me be unequivocally clear: there are no "gay rights" without trans rights. The fight is indivisible. To surrender on trans rights is to concede ground on all queer liberation. We witnessed this in the fight for marriage equality. When I married my first husband in 2011 in New York City, Wisconsin still treated us as second-class citizens. We paid an extra $250 for a court-ordered name change, endured extensive legal planning just to gain a shred of recognition for our union. The battle culminated in Obergefell v. Hodges, and suddenly, "gay marriage" was no longer a controversial social issue. This rapid shift illustrates precisely how easily societal acceptance can be won when we stand united.
Pride, therefore, is not a quaint parade; it's a stark reminder that the struggle for queer rights is ceaseless. It’s a call to arms against those who seek to roll back our progress, to deny us our dignity and our very existence. In this fight, we must stand in full, unwavering solidarity with every single member of our LGBT family. We are bound not by blood, but by shared struggle, by resilience, and by an unbreakable commitment to a future where all of us can thrive.
You can’t pick your parents, but you can choose your Daddy – and in the queer community, we choose to lift each other up, to protect one another, and to fight for the liberation of all. For me, Pride is a sacred space, a chance to reach back to that scared, lonely younger self and affirm, with every fiber of my being: I belong here. No matter what the bigots and their hateful pronouncements have to say, I am here, I am real, and I am unapologetically myself.
