Pride - Voices of Our Youth Advisors (Atlas)

What Pride Means to Me

By Atlas Ruth, 1Call1Click.ca Youth Advisor

As of today, I am a twenty-four-year-old pansexual, genderqueer Indigenous young woman. 

A lot of people get hung up on these terms as if it complicates life, but to me, it simply makes everything make sense. It took me these twenty-four years to identify what parts of the queer community I belong to, and I don’t doubt that I’ll change and grow into other identities, but today, this is me. 

I identify as pansexual because I’ve never cared about gender, sexuality, or any other factor than personality when it comes to romance; I fall in love with people, and their stories. I date people regardless of their past, current or future identifying gender or sexuality but I will always believe in that person’s identity. It doesn’t matter if they are a cisgender heterosexual male (a straight man who was born a man and still identifies as such), a bisexual asexual woman (a woman romantically interested in both male and female genders, but sexually attracted to none), or a trans lesbian woman (someone who identifies as a woman who dates women), I actually love learning how someone identifies themselves and how they came to that. It simply comes down to respect; we’re all unique people who deserve to be called by our name and who we are. That’s what Pride means to me, authenticity, self-discovery, and last but not least, community. 

We celebrate Pride with joy because queerness comes with fear, isolation, trauma and danger every day of the year. It baffles me that gay people have always existed, exist and will continue existing, yet homophobia is on the rise as if it’s a new fad. As an Indigenous woman, I appreciated the decolonized teachings of gender and sexuality because while some people say all of these terms are new and unnecessary, I know that 2 Spirit people and variations of gender have existed for literally thousands of years on this land. We have always been here, but it is up to society to determine how safe my LGBTQ2S+ brothers and sisters are. We are only safe to marry the person we love in 34 countries worldwide out of 195. Pride is not just a celebration, it is a protest. It is a funeral. It is a tribute. It is community. It is history and the future. It is there for people in and out of the closet. It is a chosen family. It is choosing love over hate, even if that’s what the world has shown us. It is Pride.