Pattie Gonia

Maybe it means leaving some relatives behind and building a new chosen family.

Maybe it meant realizing

that necessarily how I looked outwardly with my gender presentation wasn't always how I felt on the inside.

And the biggest gift that drag has ever given me is freedom.

Freedom to discover, freedom to play, freedom to create, freedom to say what I want to say.

I think a lot of people think that drag, like what I look like right now, is hiding something.

I'm like, no, babe, this is the one time I cannot hide.

Like this...

is me being who I am.

This is me wearing who I am on the inside on my sleeve.

And that's why I think that drag is a reveal.

And I think what drag can teach us all is the ability for us to give the gift to the world of healing ourselves and then wearing that healing on our sleeve, because all we're looking for in this world is permission to be a little bit more ourselves.

And what a gift to give our world.

And I think right now, a lot of people think that the world is dying, but what I think we also have an invitation to do right now is to birth a new world.

There's so much about trans people in that transition and this, just like you said, constructed world of binaries we made where trans people break that and remind us that nature is nothing but transition.

I mean, like, look at nature.

Like nothing in nature blooms all year.

We are constantly birthing, changing.

How beautiful.

But we can't accept that because this binary world we've created means that we have to be so rigid in who we are or we have to be like one side or the other when really there's so much more life in this in between.