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All rainbows aside -
Jun. 5th, 2023 03:19 pmTo me, Pride is important, and queer people of all types are important all year, because they make ALL of us think about traditional gender roles and sexuality norms and whether our cultures really need to be the way they are. Those are issues that too often go unquestioned.
(My undergrad degree was in cultural anthropology, so I can assure you that human cultures display LOTS of variation on these topics, and thus the answer is: nope, no culture has to be the way it is. There are countless alternate paths for gender and sexuality, if you look at all the world's humans and get your own biases out of the way.)
The questioning can be uncomfortable. It can rattle people. But the questioning and the understanding are ultimately going to do far more good than the sticking to "tradition."
I think part of the reason I've always been drawn to gender and sexuality topics is that I, too, have always felt like I did not quite fit into what a girl or woman was "supposed" to be, or "supposed" to want. My coming of age, and maturing, and figuring out I was demisexual and probably at least a little bi, involved nowhere near the courage nor the trauma of the coming-out of many of my queer friends. And really, it's thanks to them that I even learned this much about myself in the first place. So in my view, they absolutely deserve a month per year in the spotlight, though ideally they should get a lot longer than that.
This is why I love Pride Month. It's the type of subject my mind runs on all the time, and the kind of thing I'm always interested in learning more about as our culture (painfully, slowly) evolves.
I wish you a lovely month and peaceful self-questioning.
