gender + grief

With pride month upon us, I often find myself thinking about gender. And what it means to be prideful, not just in the month of June, but in choosing me, the queer trans non-binary human that I am, everyday.

The more I deepen into understanding myself, deepen in my queerness, deepen into transgressing the gender binary, the more I deepen into grief.

Gender work is grief work.

There is grief in being with our transitions of self, in the decay and death of past versions of self, in the nuance of changes in how we view ourself, in the nurturing and fertilizing our authentic self.

Oh and all the ways grief shows up when we take up space as our authentic self in relationship and how it changes relationships. I think about how coming out and advocating for my pronouns has forever changed my relationship to my family, initiating a closeness with some who I feel even more seen by, and widening the distance with others who struggled to hold or accept the truth of who I am. As aging creeps in, my relationship to my body, as a gendered body, takes on different forms and shapes. My relationship to self shifts as I continue to prioritize my worth and my weird. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of gender related changes and transitions that occur.

Change inherently marks the moment when an end meets a beginning, when a moment, experience, dynamic, identity ceases to exist and a new moment, experience, dynamic, identity is birthed. Change is constant, and change is grief. We are abundant with change, we are abundant with grief.

So for this month of pride, I am getting familiar with grief’s robust edges and grateful for the practice in grieving.

thumbnail photo credit IG @soleoado