Does marching make us proud?

Sunday August 2^nd 2009: So once again, the biggest yearly event in Stockholm has passed. This past week I have been quite occupied with Pride seminars and other events and it feels good now that it’s all over. Not that I have been involved in any arrangements or such, but I feel that I need to keep myself updated on what others are doing as it actually affects me.

The strange thing with these Pride parades in Stockholm is that they are expanding every year and especially this year. The Pride parades are basically controlled and arranged by the LGBT community here in Sweden and this year their official theme was “HETERO”. I was very surprised when I first heard about it and I got even more surprised when I got to hear and read about their various explanations. This was about “Hetero normative behavior” and as you can imagine this is bad.  It’s not just bad for the LGBT people, but it’s also bad for heterosexual people too as some initiated LGBT people exclaimed.

Some of you may think that I agree with this because I have changed gender and thus must be one of those T-people, but that is not so. I do support Pride in many ways, but not all. There are some things that are really bothering me and I have tried to figure them out for the last four years now. You know that feeling like something is wrong but you can’t put your finger on it and when you finally do, you find that there is something more basically wrong behind that and you need to understand that in the first place to get the picture? So this year’s Pride festival has been rather tiresome for both my wife Marianne and me.

So how did this Pride event affect me and why on earth do I expose myself going there gathering information when sometimes listening in on some seminars hurts badly? Well that’s a tough question to answer, but I will give it a try.

Okay! “ATTRACTION”

What most think, as have I, is that Pride and LGBT is about sexual expressions that differ from what we, the society, regard as normal. Strange is that all those Pride and LGBT people are included in that we society too. If I look at it, I see many small activist groups sorting and defining people being this and that and just like society in general, Pride and LGBT are just as condemning as society in general are and in some cases I have experienced, actually even more. So basically we are all hitting each other’s heads with morals and rules to live by. It’s very obvious that various groups within the LGBT community don’t talk to each other and they can be very discriminating and depreciative towards each other.

However, in this so called moral sex war about what is appropriate or not, we the society includes the issues of gender and friendship, but we don’t talk about it. Gender is basic and if a gay guy changes gender, she by her gay group definitions will be regarded as a heterosexual woman and morally disgraced, judged by their gay regulations and condemned to exclusion. But what about friendship? These guys were her mates for God’s sake and in some cases the only family she had. This we don’t talk about.

Somehow we the society (at least here in Sweden) have given up our gender to be discussed and classified by the LGBT people and other “QUEER” frontiers, like we just don’t want to talk about it. Heterosexual people don’t think of their gender as it comes natural to them; they sort of don’t have to. I didn’t either before changing gender, because there was no proper information and I felt shame searching. So instead I denied my gender and shut up too; I didn’t want to talk about it. Today I have learned about myself, I’m proud and I talk about my gender and it hurts when we the society excludes me, because we don’t want to learn about gender and our true selves. The perhaps saddest part in all this is how it affects our families and close friends.

ATTRACTION is not just about sexual orientation, it’s very much about love. In fact, love and happiness are the main forces making things happen and our gender is a vital part of that. I need my family and close friends as we all do and I need to enjoy and love them as the persons they are. It has become very obvious to me that this segregating labeling the LGBT community is engaged in and eagerly protects prevents love. I may be accepted (at a distance), but I’m not welcome.

Marianne and I do not hide and we do go out and meet people. Being at Pride Park last year, we got in contact with three gay guys, forced together in an open tent around a small table because it was raining. I would like to call it attraction the way we started to talk. It doesn’t happen all the time, you know, that Marianne and I start to talk to strangers and get back the response we did that evening. Today we are friends and we have been introduced to many of their friends and we love them for who they are. During a dinner at our apartment they had all read my book Behind Waves and we discussed gender, coming out and interacting with other people and all… till late; there were no problems.

Many times it seems we care and welcome people, but at the same time we fear what others might say and thus we try to avoid meeting. Marianne and I have met many new and different friends whom we wouldn’t have dreamt of meeting before my change of gender. The only negative reactions I have met seem to be from those who are group protective. Pride and the LGBT community are group protective by their moral rules and standards of sexual behavior fencing colorful people in and still, the issue of gender they don’t want to talk about. To me there is a coming out process needed for the Pride and the LGBT organizations, both in society and within their own groups.

Standing on a truck platform marching for equity I do support, but where and when do we meet?

To reveal ourselves as being different and variations in life, I think we need too attract each other and not raise walls preventing us from meeting. The walls at Pride this year were very apparent and the parade I just felt like drove it away. The Pride seminars didn’t attract or include heterosexual people in any way; instead there was a campaign suggesting hetero normative behavior being shit. Where and when do we meet, I wonder?

Marianne and I did go to the Pride House seminars to try to meet others, but most times it felt like being run over by that Pride truck. During the Pride Parade all the people marching were cheering and people standing aside along their way were cheering too. But where does this march ends, when do we meet?

Marianne and I did go to the Pride Park where people got off their trucks and gathered for rejoicing. There we once again met up with our three gay guys and we just love them. Their welcome is much more worthwhile to us than any Pride march has ever been. We met in life because of attraction for who we were being proud of ourselves. But even if we have found each other, I still wonder how far we the society have to go? Along the road, cheering at each other, we are just an arm’s length away from the final hug ending this sexual gender war. Why don’t we reach out for that hug?

I have hopes and I hope that the Pride Parade will survive as an event where we meet including us all, no one excluded.

Love Li