Strength TogetHER 14 - Session 2
June 4, 2021
There is nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot wrong with the world you live in and being yourself is never the wrong thing to do. Let us understand that love is love even if it comes in different forms and let’s celebrate this month with pride.
With the motto of celebrating the June month with enormous pride and hoping for the reform, we conducted our second session “Celebrate with pride; let’s learn more about LGBTQI+” which was moderated by a very respectful resource person ‘Soph Lavinas’. She is a polyamorous writer, photographer and an advocate for equality.
This session gave emphasis on the awareness about LGBTQI+ among the people. Among the four speakers, each and every speaker presented their story and shared their own experience as we specifically chose people with queerness to clear themselves and talk freely on this platform.
The very first speaker on the session shared her story of being or wanting to be a member of LGBTQI+ community. She not only shared her experience finding out about her sexuality, she also shared her coming out story in her college and gave her valuable insights about her way of thinking about the community.
Our second speaker mentioned a story of her friend and her journey of finding out about her sexuality. She also mentioned about our constitution policies for LGBTQI and said “Our educational system never taught us more than two genders.”
Another speaker shared her story and could be so open about her physical intimacy and the endless romance with her partner during her schooling days. She also mentioned about the punishment after disclosing her relations with her partner in school. She also mentioned the story of Nikisha being harassed publicly and how it affected her mental health.
The fourth speaker mentioned how she was always curious about LGBTQI+ community, but none could give her answer of what it really was instead her Head of the college department said her class that, “LGBTQI+ is a trend and the community members should be severely punished.” She also mentioned how disturbing that was to hear out so loud in front of her whole class.
After exchanging the empathy, their sorrow and their story, our moderator gave her insights after every speaker and cleared out any queries about unfamiliar words like Pansexual, Polysexual and bisexual. One of the participants asked the moderator about the meaning of rainbow in the theme of pride month or when it comes to LGBTQI+ community. The moderator answered every question with utmost confidence and being very sensitive about the topic. Many questions were raised which led us to the following conclusion;
Being yourself is the best you can ever do.
You don’t need to tell the world and just need to be yourself.
One should never feel less because of her sexuality.
Being different is being the proudest.
We have to be very careful to not hurt others feelings when it comes to a diverse sexuality.
The world is beautiful when it is diversified by different people. Let’s embrace diversification with utmost respect and love and create a world safe for everyone.
Summing up, this session was a hit. We could not be more grateful to all those speakers who shared their story on a simple internet platform like zoom with almost 29 participants who were complete strangers. This bond of sisterhood may be cherished for the lifetime and our moderator who was very kind and helped us make the session very productive and memorable.
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