I want to live in a queer world and I want to take responsibility for my part in creating this world. For me this has meant that I have spent time in recent months reading books by authors, who have shared their queer journey. It also means that I want to proactively be an ally to anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+.

Right now, just as one example, all over the world, trans people are seeing their hard-won rights reversed. Trans people are being persecuted, attacked and shamed every day. We cannot just stand by and believe this is not our problem. Because it is.

Maya Angelou said it:

‘The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.’

I want for every human to be able to determine freely who we are and how we choose to live our lives. This includes our gender, or no gender at all, our sexuality and orientation and anything else that relates to our identity. No one has the right to impose any of this on anyone.

My body, my choice.

For the longest part of my life, I have called myself a feminist, but my activism was still chained by the binary divide of woman and men. But to create the change that motivated my feminism, I know I need to envision a completely different world. And to do this, I need to imagine it and then move towards it from that imagination, not using the tools I acquired by living in the world I want to change. When I connect with queerness, I feel that it is showing me the tools to create that change. When I connect to queerness and I look at the world I can see the binary categorisation of our world today fundamentally shaken up. And amidst the deep pain that goes alongside this process for the queer warriors who are so bravely standing up for their lives and in the process for all of our lives, there is this startling bright hope that this utopian world I have dreamed of is actually possible. I can see and feel a new, diverse, multi-coloured, inclusive and freer way of living when I connect to queerness.

As I write this, I feel shame that I haven’t been more proactive as a LGBTQIA+ ally, that I have let my fear of saying the wrong thing interfere with speaking up.

One super important thing I have learned in the last few years is that whatever change you want to see in the world starts with you. It starts with a process where you go inside and you find your inner racist, your inner bigot, your inner homophobe etc. Because that which we see play out in our society also lives in us. Activism starts with an inner journey of healing and of accepting that these parts live in us. From that place we can then move with humility and compassion for ourselves and for our fellow humans. I am inspired by every single human who is doing this work, who wakes up every morning willing to be uncomfortable, willing to question the norm, willing to define their own identity on their terms and make peace with themselves.

Writing this makes me reflect again, as I so often do, that language is limiting. Words define and in that way can contribute to the caging and the divide that is precisely what I don’t want. So even though I choose my words carefully, I worry that I am creating a divide between them and us. Me as an ally and you as a queer person. And I don’t want that. I want to be queer too, but I also don’t want to appropriate something that isn’t mine to appropriate. So this is part of my reflection process and I will accept that it is incomplete and evolving. I am sharing this now, because the process is where the interesting things happen… the final product (if that even exists) is never as juicy as the process. And I think that’s because the process is where the vulnerability is, and it’s where we can actually connect with each other.

My wish is that you read this and you share with me how you feel and what comes up for you. And that in that sharing, we learn something new about ourselves, and that this knowledge will incrementally create the change we want to see in our world.