The Duality of Pride

Happy Pride to my LGBTQIA+ community members everywhere! Despite the horrors, here we are persisting, resisting, and refusing to give up our authenticity. The resilience of the queer community always fills me with admiration and immense pride. Combine that with the spite I feel towards those who fear-monger and try to legislate us out of existence, and this June becomes my new favorite time to speak our truth and celebrate who we are. Especially in such tumultuous and oppressive times as the ones we’re living through, I feel a deep appreciation and love for my queerness and that of my community. 

This hasn’t always been the case, though. Reaching the point of pride has taken years of intentional and laborious work. In fact, even with this ongoing work, there are still days when my pride feels overshadowed by the less joyful aspects of being queer. You wanna know something else? I bet that you, my fellow queer person, may feel the same. At least a tiny bit, and at least some of the time. The reality is that none of us can endure this homophobic, transphobic world completely unscathed. None of us can stay immersed in hateful, doubtful, and discouraging narratives about who we are — for years and decades —  without internalizing any of it. So, hot take and/or food for thought: you and I (and every queer person we know) all live with some level of internalized homophobia and transphobia. How could we possibly not? 

To add another layer of complexity, we are continuing to live in the age of social media and polishing our online presence. Yet another complexity is that we also face pressure as a minority to ‘act right’ in public spaces i.e. conform to what the rest of society considers ‘normal’, put on a happy and/or grateful face, and put only our best foot forward. These pressures, together with the countless others we face, result in a very narrow expectation of what pride “should” be. We’re supposed to be proud, but not arrogant; be authentically ourselves, but not “rub it in your face”; suffer to ‘earn’ our basic rights, but show no anger to our oppressors. There is so little room to be a whole person, even amidst one another. On the rare occasion that I see queer and trans folks online sharing anything but joy about their identities, I inevitably also see a freight train of shame directed at them — the very same emotion that was meant to be alleviated by being spoken. 

Did you know that one of the manifestations of emotional intelligence is the ability to hold multiple conflicting emotions at once? This is what I’m challenging you to practice. Yes, pride is a time for celebration and visibility. It can also make the painful parts of queer identity feel more pronounced. Is it possible to feel both joy in being trans, as well as envy towards your cis counterparts? Can you feel gratitude for your supportive family while feeling isolated by their lack of thorough understanding? How about appreciation for your belonging with queer circles alongside the grief of exclusion from society at large? I would say, yes, absolutely. I have witnessed and even experienced my own iterations of these head spaces. 

I invite you to give yourself room to feel your own complex feelings this pride. You don’t have to feel them concurrently, either. I won’t judge you if you tell me that on most days, you wake up wishing you weren’t trans. I won’t judge you for feeling anxious and preoccupied with ‘passing’ as cis/straight in public spaces. I won’t judge you for choosing to exist secretly, but safely, in non-affirming spaces rather than risk losing all your support systems by coming out. There are as many ways to experience pride as there are queer people. To pigeonhole pride into the expectation that you “be yourself unapologetically!” reads to me as mimicking the harmful normative expectations from which we try to break away. Why restrict yourself to just one dimension of expression when you can allow yourself, and the other queer and trans people in your life, to experience the full range of emotion? 

This pride, and in every season of our lives, let’s allow ourselves as queer people to be whole. We can feel proud, joyful, and resilient while also experiencing grief, frustration, and hardship. If these experiences resonate with you, therapy can be a space to explore these complexities with compassion and to gradually let go of any shame around them. I work with queer and neurodivergent adolescents and adults navigating identity, anxiety, relationships, and the realities of trying to live authentically in a world that does not always welcome that. I am currently accepting new clients and would be honored to support you in your healing journey.

-Waseem Amin, LPC