Maybe it’s your first Pride as an open LGBTIQ+ community member, maybe it’s your tenth and it’s time to spice it up. If you want to discover new landscapes while meeting new people for a fun celebration, here’s a few suggestions to spend your June with peers: Amsterdam Pride’s parade takes place on floats on the canal, Berlin’s Pride is simply enormous as it attracts around half a million people each year, Taipei’s Pride is the biggest in all of Asia, New York Pride is where it all started, Sao Paolo holds the Guinness World Record of the largest pride celebration as well as one of the most colorful ones. Get your Pride on! Or start your own ;)
From the Women’s Suffrage Movement to the Stonewall Riots, all the way to present time, strides in social and political progress has been made when activists organize strategies to effectively push their demands through authority systems. And while there is much to accomplish on many fronts for true equality across all identities, incredible change has happened: the 2010s represented a shift in public views, with the novelty of social media and digital mediums of communication, and emphasized what people wanted most: equal opportunities and equal outcomes, regardless of who they were.
Queer and feminists changemakers
The best part of social media is how connected to great minds a simple platform allows you to be. Someone like Rachel Cargle is an intersectional feminist writer and academic continuously pushing the conversation further on changing oppressive systems, or Malala Yousafzai, who highlighted the right for women and girls to be educated as essential to equality. Blair Imani is a Black Muslim American queer activist who created resources to uplift women and nonbinary people. Other influencers are more centered online, through social media platforms, for their activism. People like Chella man, the Jewish Chinese trans masculine individual documenting his transition as a deaf and genderqueer, or Matt Bernstein, aka @mattxiv, who uses clever visuals and inspiring texts to explain gender identity and sexual orientation.
Intersectionality and Inclusivity
Although intersectionality, or the conscious analysis of identities as they are in relation to others, has been described for decades as a necessity in making socio-political progress. However, we have witnessed greater visibility to this aspect of progress with the digital age, acknowledging the importance of different narratives, particularly by queer people of color. The urgent epidemic of black trans women being murdered has been documented far more accurately by activists spreading the awareness through their platforms than by mainstream media for example. This change in perspectives has shown that news sources, when well-researched, should still be diverse and varied to maximize perspectives.
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