With today marking the first day of Pride Month, I wanted to share a personal experience I had in recent months.
The LGBTQ+ community is a pretty diverse community itself. A diverse community I continue to work toward understanding and make an effort daily to be more mindful of my word choices and how they might be perceived by someone from the LGBTQ+ community.
I have many gay friends who identify as the sex they were born with, they just prefer relationships with people of their own sex. No pronoun changes involved.
The first transgender person I met personally was my daughter’s friend who, born female, preferred to identify as male. It took some effort to remember to use male pronouns in reference to him and to use his chosen male name. I didn’t always get it right in the beginning, but I kept working at it and eventually it became automatic to refer to him in his preferred way.
Recently, I met my first LGBTQ+ non-binary person who prefers to be referred to using the they/them pronouns. I admit this has been a bit more challenging for me to retrain my brain to use they/them in reference to a singular person.
A friend recommended a wonderful book to help me understand how a non-binary person experiences themselves and their sexuality. It’s called Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe.
I found this a helpful book to read and recommend it if you, like me, seek to understand those who identify as non-binary.
This book has become controversial and has been banned in places across the country. The Floyd County Library believes that free people should be able to read freely and will continue to offer this remarkable book.
So, exactly how did reading this book help me understand a non-binary person? It helped me see that a non-binary person considers themselves not just one thing. They prefer not to lock themselves in to one sex or be labeled as one thing. At least that’s my understanding.
At the end of the day it’s really just about all of us welcoming and accepting each other as fellow human beings traveling together along this crazy journey called Life. To see ourselves as part of the same family. The human family.
Because I do see the LGBTQ+ community as part of the human family, it’s important to me to keep working on my language, how I say things, and to think about how my words might be perceived (which is an important rule of communication in any situation). After all, I don’t want to cause hurt to any of my family members.
It’s been my experience that if LGBTQ+ people see the we genuinely care for them and that we really are trying to get it right, they are understanding. They appreciate our efforts.
All good things to keep in mind as we move through Pride Month 2023.
Happy Pride!
