We Are All Just People

June 2025

Pride Month arrives every June, and with it comes colour, celebration, and community.

Pride was never just a party. It was — and still is — a declaration that some lives are not less than others. That visibility matters. That being seen, as you actually are, is not a luxury but a basic human need.

Stonewall, in 1969, wasn't a celebration. It was a riot. It was led largely by trans women of colour — Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera among them — who had simply had enough of being beaten and arrested for existing. The first Pride marches were held a year later to mark that anniversary. Not to party. To remember. To insist.

That lineage matters. Particularly now, when Pride is sometimes dismissed as trivial or provocative — it's worth remembering it didn't start as a festival. It started as people refusing to disappear.

In a climate where that visibility is increasingly contested, where queer identities are debated in parliaments and talked about as problems to be solved, that declaration matters more, not less.

But I think it's also worth saying something that can get lost in the noise of all that debate: LGBTQ+ people are not a political issue. They're people. With mortgages and bad days and complicated families and favourite biscuits and all the rest of it. The political framing — the endless arguing about whether their existence is acceptable — is something that gets done tothem, not something they are.

There's a concept in psychology called othering— the process by which we make people into categories rather than individuals, and in doing so, make it easier to dismiss or dehumanise them. It's not a new idea. But it's having quite the moment.

What we're seeing politically — the rhetoric around migrants, trans people, anyone deemed not to belong — follows a familiar pattern. First you make someone a symbol of everything that's wrong. Then you stop having to think of them as a person at all.

The antidote to othering isn't a policy position. It's contact. Conversation. Curiosity. The willingness to sit with someone who is different from you, to actually talk and actually listen — not to win, but to understand.

Which, as it happens, is also what therapy is.

LGBTQ+ people experience significantly higher rates of anxiety, depression, and trauma than the general population. That is not a coincidence. It is a direct consequence of living in a world that has, at various points, told them their existence is wrong, their love is shameful, or their identity is a phase to be grown out of.

That toll is real. And it doesn't disappear just because the world has, in some respects, become more accepting. The messages we absorb early go deep. The fear of not being safe doesn't switch off just because the law changes.

This is why visibility — real visibility, not just a flag in a corporate logo every June — still matters. Being seen, and welcomed, and treated as unremarkably human, is genuinely healing. Not metaphorically. Actually.

I don't have a neat conclusion to offer about the state of the world. The fracturing feels real and the anger feels loud and I'm not sure any of us knows quite where we're headed.

But I do think that the small acts — of welcome, of curiosity, of refusing to sort people into threats and allies — matter more than they might seem. Not as grand gestures. Just as the ordinary practice of treating people like people.

That feels like enough to try for, this June and beyond