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Witchcraft and Sorcery · 06-30-2021, 09:31 PM

TSPride 2021

Prime Minister's Remarks - TSPride 2021

Friends -

On this, the last day of June and the closing day of TSPride, I wanted to say thank you. Thanks to everyone who showed up and participated, but most of all thanks to those who shared their stories and gave us a chance to come together and celebrate.

I wasn’t sure what to talk about in this speech; I wrote several drafts and none of them got very far. But then I read through the TSPride stories another time and they gave me that little extra bit of courage to share some of my journey and what Pride has meant to me.

I don’t think it’s very much a secret that I’m nonbinary. I’ve always wrestled with descriptors because I felt that there wasn’t really a label that could capture who I am. For a long time I’d put asterisks after certain things or question marks or “idfks” because I wasn’t comfortable with any pronouns or descriptors of gender. I knew I didn’t like “he/him” and I wasn’t really comfortable with “they/them” or even neopronouns because I felt like no matter what I said my pronouns were, I was lying. For a while I got along fine, but it always nagged at me that there had to be something out there.

What I would come to realize later was the crux of the problem was labeling. We attach labels to everything, and assumptions to those labels. The clothes you wear, your hair, your speech, all of that gives you a label, and certain assumptions that come with that label. My trouble was that none of the labels fit me. Then in my last couple of years of college, I met a few people who had a different take on the whole idea. They were using multiple pronouns, and they weren’t really what my definitely queer but still very unaware brain pictured as fitting my idea of queerness. That’s kind of when it hit me - even mainstream queer culture was telling me that to be queer and to “fit in” you had to look and act a certain way. And I realized in that moment that those ideas were complete and utter bullshit.

Slowly the asterisks and question marks started to disappear. After college I started using “he/they” or just “any pronouns” instead of he/him and started to talk more openly about my uncomfortability with pronouns, gender, and the like. I haven’t really ever officially “come out” or said “hi y’all i’m nonbinary,” but I feel like it’s sort of gradually become public knowledge and that’s totally fine with me.

Unfortunately it's not that simple in my real life; that is a bridge I haven't really crossed yet and to be frank I'm not sure entirely how to explain all this to family and those I love. But it's also why I'm grateful, like Tsunamy mentioned in his story, that communities like this exist. TSP accepts everyone for who they are, we don't question, we don't judge, and for those of us who may struggle in real life to talk about our identity, it's an indescribable sense of relief to have a space where we aren't questioned and where assumptions aren't made about us as human beings because of it.

All of this is a huge tangent, but it has to do with what Pride means to me, or what I’m discovering what Pride means. Pride means throwing labels and assumptions out the window. Pride means embracing you. Free from pressure or burden, free from others assuming that X means Y one hundred percent of the time. Because it doesn't. Pride to me means aspiring to live in a world where one day people can look at each other and not immediately make value judgments based on what they think the other's sexual orientation or gender identity is. It means, slowly but surely, realizing that you don't need to apologize or make excuses for being yourself.

I’m going to end this speech by giving a special shoutout and tremendous praise for Seraph, who did such an absolutely fantastic job of organizing this event on such short notice, and whose own journey of coming out has been utterly inspiring. I’m incredibly grateful to call you a friend and to have met you through TSP.

That last goes for all of you. Thank you for making TSP such an easy place to call my home. I hope you all had an amazing time at TSPride and don’t let the pride end here.

Be yourself with confidence. Love with abandon. Those ideas aren’t a month - they’re every day of every year.

With pride and lampshades,

WS

Witchcraft and Sorcery

Former Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. Formerly many things in other regions. Defender. Ideologue. he/they.