During the month of June, what a lot of us have come to know as Pride month, there’s an energy, almost a buzz in the air. It’s an energy of freedom, lightness, uninhibited joy. I think about pride and I remember moments of celebration surrounded by love and embraced in community.
I recognized at a young age that when I expressed myself in ways that were seen as ‘different’ it wasn’t received well. As a trans kid in this world, you learn pretty early on what folks around you believe to be right and what they believe to be wrong. Because difference in the Western world is often used as a substitute for wrong, I knew that to survive I’d have to hide parts of myself away. This experience, unfortunately, is not exclusive to me. There have been moments in all of our lives where we’ve sacrificed pieces of who we are for fear of being seen as different or ‘other.’
As we embark upon our personal journey inward we’re often met with the concept of connecting to our inner voice. We all have a unique way of connecting with and expressing our voice and no matter how we get there, we feel it once we arrive. This voice is a calling that transcends what words are capable of, it speaks in the language of our heart.
We’re living in a time that is reflective of imbalance at every level, whether it be in physical and tangible space, or reflected in the depths of energies within us. What the Western world has created is a society that favors specific qualities, often related to masculine energy, and shies away from other qualities, related to feminine energy. This carries out into our personal lives, in our relationships, actions, and interactions, and can also be seen on a much larger scale. The Western world has defined narrow lanes of existence, for all of us to participate in, through the lens of imagined binaries.
In this human experience, it can be easy to get caught in a world of binary 'truths', a world where two opposing forces or qualities exist with little to no room in between or outside of. We interpret these two sides to be unwavering qualities of opposition on a linear spectrum. With certain limitations in our ability to understand, this way of interpreting the world makes a lot of sense.
The world is still incredibly rooted in the gender binary, and it’s a revolutionary act to exist as yourself, wholly, in a world that so desperately tries to define you. Whether you identify with the sex you were assigned at birth or not, or whether you identify within the binary, outside of it, or have renounced its existence completely, you have experienced gender trauma. Here are some ways you can explore gender and how it shapes the world around you.