In line with the 2024 Mardi Gras theme of ‘Our Future,’
I’d like to share with you how that would ideally be like for a
queer, non-binary, transgender person who lives with complex disabilities.
I’d like to experience a future that uses our collective experiences, a future that validates and values new ways of identifying for our up-and-coming LGBTIQA+1 identities and respects our emerging and current Elders. I’d like to create a future where our human needs and rights are honored regardless of ability, sex, gender, and/or sexual orientations and inclinations.
In creating an intentional, and conscientious future we need to reflect on our past. Since 1995 I’ve paraded at almost every Mardi Gras. Growing up near Byron Bay, in the pre-internet era I had no language or role models to guide me. During that very exciting first Parade I was 18, I presented as female, and I identified as a dyke.
It was the first time I saw how diverse, brave, and beautiful we are as Queer people;
I was overwhelmed with a sense of hope and belonging.
Mardi Gras has been integral in creating a cultural environment that’s supported the changes we’ve seen in addressing some of the ongoing gaps in how our basic needs and rights are honoured and granted.
These systems/cistems2 that ‘grant’ us our rights can oftentimes be seemingly beyond our control as individuals, this is why working collectively is so important. However, the systematic approach doesn’t always honour the grass-roots foundation of the Mardi Gras uprising in 1978, and this means casual ableism and practices that discriminate against LGBTIQA+ PWD3 continue. I experience this almost daily.
I’ve experienced a lot of discrimination and harm because of how I’m gendered and assumed as able-bodied, simply because of how I ‘present’, and how I’m ‘read’. When I access organisations and disclose my pronoun and honourific staff oftentimes won’t use them, they’ll refer to me as ‘Sir’ in a Women’s Health Center, or direct me to a gendered facility I can’t use. This is part of why I’d like to create a future where protective legislation is implemented and used in everyday practices so we can thrive, define our own joys, and accomplishments, and define where we create and take up space in the world.
Do you want to be part of creating our future?
As the future unfolds, we’re presented with opportunities to make decisions that can help ourselves and others. We can better transform ourselves, and our future in complimentary ways by sharing our stories; creating safe spaces; being kind yet curious; helpful yet unassuming, and by advocating for ourselves and others when we have experiences that don’t honour who we are.
Crafting our collective future is dependent on us accessing venues, services, and technologies that allow us to be connected with Community. United, we can bring about a future we envision that embraces diversity and difference.
Identity, much like our future, is an evolution; it’s not something we can hang onto, or necessarily hold as a tangible ‘thing’. It’s in flux and being reconstructed with, and alongside us. And whilst we all have different capacities at different times, I believe we can create a future that’s more inclusive, affirmative, and accessible.
We owe it to ourselves and others to, if not engage collectively, then to dream, pray, imagine, and if we can, dance and sing a better future into existence.
When we imagine an expansive future we can materialise it together, for everyone – I am hopeful in this dream, and I hope you are too.
Danny – Academic, Advocate, Educator, Public Speaker, and Volunteer
1 Lesbian Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer, Asexual plus 2 Based on the term Cissexist. And referring to systemic institutionalised forms of cissexism. Source:cissexism – Wiktionary, the free dictionary Accessed: 07.02.20 3People With Disability
For further information:
- Watch our Round Table Talk where Danny, together with storytellers Emily, Garth, and Dan share their experiences.
- LGBTIQA+ Disability Resource Hub
- Acon Here for Health
- The Gender Centre Inc
- 2024 Sydney Mardi Gras
