After another late night of Netflix, reading, and catsitting, I woke up and checked my social media only to find some commotion and chaos going on in the Twitterverse. The hashtag #HeterosexualPrideDay was trending, and I could feel the headache of it all coming on quickly.
Many who posted in the hashtag had a question: Why are LGBTQ+ people ‘allowed’ to have pride, while straight people aren’t? Some asked this with genuine curiosity, a search for understanding. Some asked with malice, with judgment, with their eyes and ears closed and their voices yelling. This article is for the first group.
Many people have taken the idea of Gay Pride, and the backlash against #HeterosexualPrideDay, to mean that people who aren’t part of the LGBTQ+ community cannot be proud of themselves, or, to take it a step further, that they are being told that they must be ashamed of themselves. This isn’t the case at all—you should be proud of who you are, exactly the way you are.
It’s just… there’s a difference between pride and Pride, is all. Lowercase-p pride is what you and I feel, personally, on a daily basis. But capitalized Pride is something that you don’t earn by being good at what you do-- it’s what you fight for in a world that often ignores us, or worse, targets us. Capital-P Pride is a celebration in spite of what others will tell us, what others will say, what others will do. Capital-P Pride belongs to marginalized groups—so, for example, LGBTQ+ people, or people of color. Capital-P Pride is the way that many people in these groups fight back on a day-to-day basis, because in a world that tells you that straight, cisgender (meaning not transgender), and white is the norm, it is brave to be so openly and Proudly something else.
Is the picture a little bit clearer now?
The reality of it all is that if you’re straight and cisgender, you are exactly what the world expects of you in those regards. You will not face laws against you that forbid your marriage, your love, or your life. You will not have to worry that an errant county clerk will deny your marriage license, nor will you have to experience the reality of a nightclub, of all places, being your ‘safe space’, only to have forty-nine members of your community killed there. You will not have to jump through hoops to receive medical treatment that will align your feelings with your body, you will never be forbidden to use the correct bathroom which you feel comfortable in, and your doctors will never try to tell you that you caught the flu from being trans (a real scenario: you can look up “trans broken arm syndrome” for more information!)
You will not face oppression for being straight and cisgender the way that someone who is gay and/or transgender will. You may face oppression for other marginalized identities you hold, or face discrimination because someone doesn’t like that you are straight and cisgender, but these will not be the result of, or be exactly the same as, the oppression faced by the LGBTQ+ community. Capital-P Pride has become our way of fighting back, and for hashtags and movements, sentiments and statements such as those behind #HeterosexualPrideDay shows how little people tend to understand this.
Your pride and our Pride are different, and while both are beautiful, you don’t really need ours, do you? Be proud of who you are, and your experiences, but leave Pride to the people who need it, please.
