Just a reminder, as we move through Pride Month: people are complex and nuanced.
That sounds simple, but it isn’t. The same month that celebrates the full spectrum of human identity also, every year without fail, produces some of the most reductive thinking I encounter. People who know exactly what it feels like to be flattened into a symbol will flatten others without blinking. People who have fought their whole lives to be seen as more than a label will reach for the broadest brush they can find.
I notice it because I live in the middle of it.
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I am bisexual. I pass as straight in most rooms. I have been told, by someone within the queer community, that the word “bisexual” is transphobic because it contains a binary, and that I should use a different word instead. My response, that my personal definition is “like me and not like me,” did not land well. The “B” has always been in LGBTQ. It is still there, and so am I.
I am also a Pagan-Christian with genuine religious trauma, which means I have read the Bible verses a certain fast food chain puts on their containers and wrappers. I know what they say, and I can tell the difference between a quiet expression of faith and an active campaign against my existence. That distinction matters. Collapsing it does not protect us. It makes us less able to identify what actually threatens us (and it’s not John 3:16, Revelation 3:20, or Proverbs 3:5).
I have been called a racist for reaching toward a bridge. I was comparing the lived experience of being a redhead, genuinely, the teasing, the being treated as other and suspect and strange, to a very small sliver of what my Black friends carry. Not equivalence. A bridge. It was not received as one. A few years later, I started seeing think pieces drawing exactly that parallel. Nobody circled back to me.
I am not telling you these things to relive the past; I am telling you because the pattern repeats itself. One can show up as a whole, fully actualized person and be reduced to a mere shadow of someone else's design.
If you scream for equity and inclusion, do not then turn around and actively exclude people in a passive situation that does not cause harm. If you cry out for justice, do not become unjust in the wide swaths of paint you broadly apply to groups of people that may also include your friends. If you plead for love and kindness, do not be unloving and unkind to those whose beliefs or opinions differ in nuance from your own.
Just as gender and sexuality are non-binary, so too are people. Each of us brings our own lived experience to the conversation, and that experience will not always look the way you expect. Sometimes it will complicate the story you were telling; sometimes it will complement it. At no time should those experiences be dismissed or reduced.
I have been building a world for several months now. Aestraea, where my novels live, was born in part from this exact exhaustion. I needed somewhere that holds people where they actually are, not where we wish they were. Not a utopia. Aestraea has violence and grief, and people who cause harm, and histories that will not stay buried. But complexity is the expected condition of being human there, and the question is never “are you pure enough.” It is “Where are you going, and can I walk with you a while?”
I built it because the world outside it keeps demanding I be simpler than I am.
I do not think I am alone in that.
We are allowed to hold the full version of each other. We always were. If you plead for your voice to be heard, you must also be willing to listen to those who sit with you at the table. The cause is big enough for all of us. The only way we lose that is by deciding it isn’t.
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