Is Steemit ready for the LGBTQAI community?
Many of you are probably wondering… LGBtq… what?
What do all those letters mean? Yes, I know… even I had to look it up as I’ve seen many variations. I happened to recently meet @sykochica in the Steemit.chat platform and noticed her profile says "LGBT Advocate", so I asked her about the community here in Steemit as I have not organically come across any related content. While waiting for her to reply I came across this post of hers offering 500 Steem Power to be delegated to 2 lucky people that want to assist in curating LGBTQAI content on the platform. We continued to chat and I realized I had less than 24 hours to write a post and submit my post for consideration!
Photo on Foter.com
LGBTQAI
More details of this explanation can be found here!
L - Lesbian
G - Gay
B - Bisexual
T - Transgender
Q - Queer, Questioning
A - Asexual, Ally
I - Intersex
I don’t think it really matters whether or not Steemit is 'ready' for our community. We’re already here, whether we have been open about who we are or not. I’m very new to this platform and did not include in my #introduceyourself post that I am gay. I am openly gay however, but it’s not the first thing I tell people when I meet them.
My battle between Acceptance vs. Rejection
Being gay is a part of who I am, but it’s not everything that I am. I have always been hesitant to share that I am gay with others because of the fear I have of being rejected. Even being raised in Canada, a relatively safe and welcoming country for people of all backgrounds, I came from a Mennonite infused Christian family and the initial response I received from my parents when they asked me if I was gay was emotionally scarring for many years to come. I’ll be sharing that story with this community in greater detail at a later point.
The hurt that I felt from my parents reaction to me being gay made me feel like something within me was intrinsically wrong, as if the wiring in my brain had not been laid out correctly by 'God' my 'creator'. I felt like I couldn’t be loved, that my life was one big massive ‘sin’ and from that low point in my life I decided that since I was going to ‘Hell’ anyways, I might as well enjoy the ride there. I then proceeded to get lost in a world of drugs, alcohol abuse, random casual sex, and a constant search for acceptance among my peers… or maybe I should use the word ‘love’.
I’ve come along way since those days in my early 20’s, and so have my parents. We have a really loving relationship and have all gone through a lot of healing. The theme of "Acceptance vs. Rejection" still runs deeply through my life though and all I know is that loving oneself is the most important thing for healing, and I’m trying to love myself more and more every day.
How can we make Steemit a more inclusive community?
I think that opening up the dialogue is the first step to making people feel welcome to share of their experiences on Steemit. I think that @sykochica is making a great initiative to support this community and I believe that’s the kind of spirit Steemit intended to foster among its users.
One of the really interesting things about Steemit is that it’s a VERY internationally used platform. I’m seeing huge communities of people sharing content from places I have never even heard of. Many places in the world that are being represented on Steemit are not friendly towards the LGBTQAI community, in many places it’s even against the law! We have a very unique opportunity to share our stories and bring understanding to people from places that have traditionally been very intolerant towards our differences. This won’t happen overnight, as acceptance still isn’t as widespread as we would like it to be even here in North America or many other progressive countries around the world.
I believe that the backbone of our movement must come from a place of love. It must come from within us, learning how to love ourselves for who we are, learning how to love our neighbours for who they are, and sharing that love indiscriminatly to those we encounter. I have to admit, this is something I’m working on within myself, as there are pockets within the LGBTQAI community that are so different from myself that even I have a hard time understanding them, and sometimes I’m afraid to get to know them. This comes from a place of personal insecurity though and I know that when I hear their story, their true and honest story… that I will have nothing but love and understanding for them.
So let’s create a place where people can share their true and honest stories with the world, so we can experience more love and understanding.
If I were to be delegated Steem Power to be a Curator in this niche…
Another little secret about me… I’m a healer. Again, I didn’t ‘out' myself as a healer in my #introduceyourself post. This also will have to be more fully explained in a future post but in short, I believe that now is the turning point in my life where I start living more aligned with who I truly am. I believe that in the work I am doing to heal myself, I can help others. I still have a long way to go but I believe that from my personal experiences I can help a lot of people overcome the internal battles that they face. Our community still needs a ton of healing!
Curating in this community will only help me to do work more closely aligned to my true calling in life. I have pursued creative projects in the past to bring the community together through sharing our truth with the world through video. Now has never been a more opportune time in my life to bring these creative projects forward with love and energy.
Being immersed in this community will allow me to help share some of the great stories I discover from people all around the world. With more and more of us finding this unique content, up-voting it, re-steeming it, and commenting on it we are ultimately going to be able to help attract and retain great content creators within our community. I think that one person can do great things, but together we can change the world.
Let’s start here in Steemit!
I think we have a really opportune time to start encouraging our friends to join Steemit and start sharing their stories. We'll be able to make Discord groups and Steemit.chat rooms where we can meet together and share strategies to engage our community more. If it's hard for anyone to share their stories to the whole world at first... let's at least start in the chat rooms to see how our stories can help others.
We can have brainstorming sessions and work together on awesome collaborative projects to build our community up. I feel such an incredibly magical feeling in the air about all of this blockchain technology entering into our lives at this point in time. I'm really optimistic that revolutionary change will be occurring in our lifetime that will be absolutely unreal to be able to watch unfold.
Great post! It is very true that our community still needs a lot of healing. I too have been scarred by the way my family and Church community talked about and treated homosexuality. I identify with feeling as though your whole life is “sinful” and that there was something wrong with you. For a long time I begged God to change me, to take away these feelings of love I had towards my best friend and now wife @betterbeing. I was told that it was just a sinful addiction, that I needed to repent and cut the relationship off. But in the end love won. And that is the message I want to spread. Love and acceptance should always be the priority and this should ring true in all nations and communities.
Well said! I know that none of these people in the churches mean to do wrong, they are all acting from a position of thinking that's the right way. Unfortunately in many cases they are not open to learning from others that see things differently than them. I have relatives that haven't cared to look into their beliefs so they still are totally against being gay. My parents however are stuck with me and they knew that they had to look into things that challenged their beliefs. I'm lucky they did, there are many parents out there that completely disconnect from their children because of this.
So true. I have a great deal of respect for the Christian community and I know most of them are very well meaning and have nothing but good intentions. Unfortunately, sometimes misguided beliefs can cause deep wounds. I spent most of my life as an avid believer and shared the same sentiments about homosexuality until I realized that it just didn’t make sense. Sometimes it takes a very real, personal experience for someone to change their perspective.
Absolutely, unless it's not very deeply personal why do they even have reason to consider challenging their beliefs? And one thing that so many people misunderstand is that they think their beliefs are absolute truth. No... they're just beliefs, and although they might seem right, they might not be.
If I was told that the sky was yellow my whole life and had never heard otherwise... I'd most definitely think that a person telling me it was blue was crazy. Just because you believe it, doesn't make it true.
I read the title, and my first thought was who gives a shit. As I think that exact thought 100 times a day when I hear someone regurgitating what they have seen on youtube trending pages or in the news. I opened the article though since I figured it is best to see what your thoughts were, something that if this was not steemit would never have happened. Since the other platforms are so damn toxic with inflexibility and concrete judgments.
My sarcasm came forth again when you said that you did not in your intro post state that you were gay
Then I read on and feel a bit shitty for thinking it was so simple. Imagining being gay is actually not simple, once you factor in the people you know their personas, general public attitude in your region, then depending where you live but still 95% of the world you are pretty much fucked.
I had to stop imagining due to the anxiety.
I hope to read more of your posts and see more as you state it articles coming from a peaceful or at least not outright attack the world position.
Hey man... thanks for establishing that you are 'male' haha! All joking aside, I think it's cool that you went ahead and kept reading even after your initial judgements were ready for you to just skip over it. I'm glad it could provoke some thought into what it might be like for a gay person... that's all we can ask for when sharing our point of view.
I've met so many people and it's incredibly easy to create a whole story of what their life might be like based on all of our first impressions of that person and seeing them through our perspective, not theirs. I may think "Damn... that person is so...." and attach a negative judgement. But when I have the opportunity to learn about their story - I see exactly why that person is that way and gain so much compassion and understanding.
Our lives are so complex and all of the experiences that we gain through a lifetime have such an interesting way of shaping us. The real beauty comes when we can see a person for who they really are.
Oh wow its gonna be so hard for her to choose!! I do not envy her! acceptance vs rejection has been a big theme for me too! I only was able to come out as bisexual like... 3 years ago??? People have been demanding that I'm gay for most of my life. It kind made me angry about it. Partially because they thought it was funny and weren't kind about it and also partially because they were highlighting my womanhood and my interest in shy men who are in touch with their feminine sides. I now know this is more due to the rest of my family not doing their OWN homework about sex and identity. They don't understand that humans are not ON or OFF . that gender is a spectrum, that sexuality is a spectrum.. and that society is usually way behind the ground movement.
But anyway, welcome! :) I think @sykochica has her work cut out for her.
Thanks so much! How has being delegated Steem Power influenced the way that you use Steemit?
Also, yes it's tough when people see things in black and white instead of the whole spectrum of color that is available in life. Keep being true to yourself and radiating your light among those around you!
Thats an interesting question. The first time i was upvoting like crazy. The second time, now, i am following chicas requests to support lgbt and transgender tags. Its opened me up to a huge amount of amazing ppl (and now you) that i might not have met because i stupidly wasnt following these tags.
awesome... that's a really great takeaway from it then!
Good luck! I think Steemit has the power to allow for more reasonable dialogues between those who don't understand each other completely and I hope that the more people join the more we can all learn from each other's experiences.
Thanks for sharing :)
Absolutely... I love how international Steemit is and I hope it continues to evolve into something that is inclusive for as many people as possible. It's really interesting to come across stories from places I've never even heard of. Super exciting times!