Motor City Pride happened this past weekend in Detroit, and was our first time attending a pride event.
We’ve battled for the last few years to understand our gender and sexuality. We feared we weren’t truly trans because we didn’t want to transition from one end of the binary to another and hadn’t seen much non-binary representation in media or the world around us until recently, and we denied our bisexuality out of shame of how toxic our past relationship with a woman had been.
The experience last night was so beautiful that it blew our fears out of the water and I’m feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude and acceptance. We started volunteering with an organization called Stand With Trans within the last year and only last night were we able to meet everyone in person because of services being mostly virtual during the pandemic.
We feared that we wouldn’t “look trans enough” to be treated as valid in a trans space.
We were AFAB and present mostly feminine although we feel that we don’t belong to either gender. And because of that, we’ve spent the last few years spinning stories in our mind that people will call us liars, fakes, or confused. Yet, sitting at the booth and meeting these people, they treated us no different than anyone else in the group and made no questions about our identity. We were invited to a group outing, made a few new friends, and will be volunteering at Ferndale Pride in a few weeks.
My heart is still singing in realizing this.
I feel there’s still a part of myself that believes that we’re not trans enough or non-binary enough and it will take some time to heal that expectation. When we presented more masculine, we felt like we were more valid, but in all honesty that presentation was more for validity than ourselves aside from a few system members that had identified only as male at the time.
But I feel great things are coming for us ahead, of letting go of presentation expectations and embracing who we are even if that looks no different than before we accepted this label.
Has anyone else out there had similar experiences? I’d love to hear about fellow queer and lgbtq folx journeys to feeling more comfortable in their own skin.
Love always,
Weylyn
Outspoken & Awkward 