During this year’s Pride Month I want to try to explain what PRIDE means for me. Whilst researching for this blog text, I noticed that there are so many different meanings for PRIDE, but many of them were actually made up of sentences. But for me, each letter should have a separate, yet joined, meaning. Why? Because each person is an individual, and for each person, pride can mean different things.
P is for People
We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups.
Deborah Tannen
Back in the 1990s, when I was a teenager and was getting ready to become a young adult, we didn’t really have Internet like we know it now. Most of the research for school work was still done in libraries, and Google was still a dream. Instant messaging meant connecting to Internet via modem and logging in to IRC servers and not with WhatsApp. Connecting to Internet meant that no one could use the landline as your connection used the land lines. And at that time you had to physically go to the office of the LGBT organisation to join, or to participate in their activities. At the time that was so exciting and scary, because obviously anyone would know that you were entering the LGBT organisation when you went in through the door, right?
But in retrospect, at that time the whole LGBT movement was more about the people, maybe it was because the people, and maybe it was also for the people. Something that might have changed over the course of years. Why?
In most of the western world, the LGBTQ rights are in a relatively good level at the moment despite countries like the USA trying to backtrack themselves into 1800’s.
Of course there is still lots of work to be done for equality and normalising our way of life to the level that our straight counterparts have it. But in general, the work since Stonewall riots has been tremendous. Personally, I wouldn’t have thought of writing about this back in my teens because the world and the views were different then.
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But what has changed since then? In Europe, many countries have given equal marriage rights to same-sex couples, adoption rights have become more and more common, we have become accustomed to address person’s significant other as a “spouse” instead of “wife” or “husband”, and so on. In some countries, pride movement has turned more into the human rights movement, absorbing a bigger field for themselves to be advocating for.
But even if it seems that we are moving forward as a humanity, even in the “enlightened West” countries are taking steps backwards; it was just a few years ago, that the Pride organisation in my native Finland caused a commotion announcing that one of the political parties was not welcome to be a Pride Partner for the pride as some of their MPs voted against reformation of the Finnish trans law.
It may be so that times change for the better for us people, but there still is some more work to do. We, the people, need to educate other people and companies. Being an ally means more than just changing your logo on Facebook to rainbow coloured one for one month of the year.
In many countries laws concerning LGBTQ community are not complete, or are far from complete. Whilst in many countries in Europe the legal matters move forward, in the USA, like I mentioned earlier, the picture is more bleak. Some of the states, like Florida, has passed laws that effectively force trans-people to de-transition, or move out of the state.
If we, as humans, do not care for the rights of our fellow humans, what does that make us? Yes, as LGBTQ person, I feel it as my responsibility to stand with and speak out, but is it just my responsibility and that of my community? Should it not be our responsibility instead? The way I see it is that only when we as a community and not as individuals stand for the rights of those who need our assistance, we can become strong and better. Do you agree?
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Travelling Thoughts 
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