It Was Complicated

As Pride Month comes around again, I am reminded about how dismissive I was for so many years because it made me uncomfortable.

I think it had to do with how I saw gender-variant people were treated, which I internalized. It all had to do with my own insecurities.

Long before “transgender” became part of everyday language, society had already turned people like us into entertainment. Jerry Springer once claimed that some of the highest-rated episodes his show ever aired featured transsexuals, drag queens, cross-dressers, whatever  terminology was being used at the time.

People watched by the millions, apparently.

But those shows rarely treated trans people with dignity. The audience was expected and encouraged to react to the spectacle, not listen to the human story underneath it. Behind the makeup and sensationalism were often stories that went unheard.

That’s part of the irony I can’t stop thinking about now when I hear people complain that trans identities are being “shoved down their throats.” Society has been consuming gender-variant people as entertainment for decades. Daytime talk shows. Tabloid TV. Movies. Comedy routines. Talk radio. Podcasts. Endless punchlines. And yes, porn that is monetized and consumed as adult entertainment.

But something important is lost in all of that.

Those shows often created this carnival or freak-show atmosphere. The mockery, the shock, the uncomfortable laughter, all of it drowned out the reality of what many of those people had actually lived through.

Behind the makeup and the sensationalized introductions were stories of kids being thrown out of their homes. Stories of homelessness. Stories of survival sex. Stories of rejection by parents, churches, employers, spouses, and entire communities. Some were trying to survive at the absolute margins of society with almost no safety net at all.

But television rarely slowed down long enough for people to sit with that.

People became obsessed with what made them uncomfortable, but totally missed what had happened to these people to bring them there in the first place. I honestly think a lot of people absorbed those images without ever realizing how distorted that lens was.

Because the truth is, many of the same people begrudging our existence today grew up consuming all of this as entertainment. Or their parents did. Society spent decades turning trans lives into spectacle while denying our humanity at the same time.

What changed isn’t that trans people suddenly appeared. What changed is that trans people increasingly started speaking for themselves, instead of being reduced to punchlines or shock television. That unsettles many. It’s not our visibility that unsettles them, but our insistence on our right to exist, to have hopes, and to live safely—even as voices try to erase us or push us quietly out of sight.

Yet, being visible is not the same thing as being understood.

While it could be argued that Springer tried to understand his guests, I suspect he was more concerned about ratings. Because what many people absorbed from that era was not understanding, but caricature.

And honestly, I think some of that got into me too.

That is why, for years, I had a complicated relationship with Pride — and with drag. Not because I thought people shouldn’t express themselves however they wanted, but because growing up, femininity outside the norm was so often mocked, exaggerated, or treated as artificial. And as sinful. And as perverted.

Somewhere along the way, I internalized the fear that if I accepted being trans, people would see me as a caricature and judge me.

I didn’t attend a Pride event until almost four years after my transition, and I transitioned in my late fifties. The first Pride event I attended wasn’t even in Vancouver. It was in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I had gone with Kathy Baldock to stand up to the far-right preacher Michael Brown and his army of fundamentalist crusaders who had declared war on Charlotte Pride that year.

And if I’m being honest, I felt very uncomfortable at first. Especially when I saw some trans women around my age who struck me as overly flamboyant. Heavy makeup. Bright lipstick. Clothes that seemed exaggerated to me at the time. Internally, I judged them. I projected all my insecurities on them while also feeling hypocritical for doing so.

Then later in the day, I forced myself to approach these three trans women and introduced myself. One had been a truck driver. Another was an auto mechanic, and the third one was now retired and living a secluded life. They explained that Pride was basically the only time all year they felt safe enough to express this part of themselves publicly.

They hid for the rest of the year because secrecy was survival.

They talked about fear of losing jobs. Fear of ridicule. Fear of violence. Fear of losing family. Some lived in a place where even small signs of femininity could put them at risk.

And as we talked, I began to see them differently. What I had first interpreted as “too much” started to look like relief. Release. Decades of suppression cracking open for a few hours in an elusive sanctuary.

For the first time I understood and appreciated that if someone has spent forty or fifty years burying softness, colour, femininity, beauty, and self-expression, maybe it makes sense that when the opportunity finally comes, they lean into it hard.

So what?

That interaction has stayed with me because it is what helped me realize I had absorbed some of the same messaging that wounded me in the first place. I had spent so many years trying not to become “the joke” that I had unconsciously started measuring other trans women against that fear too.

I understand Pride differently now.

For some people, it’s celebration. For others, it’s protest. And for some, especially older folks, it may simply be the rare experience of existing openly without fear or apology.

It is not performance. It is permission to breathe and claiming the right to exist.

Happy Pride.