Day three of Better Together caucus and conference. This is my favorite sign here.

Sometimes because of how people look, they aren’t allowed to use the toilet. We can do better.

Real Impacts: There are real impacts when toilets are labeled for women or men only.

Trans and Gender non- conforming people often face discrimination, harassment, arrest, or violence in toilets!

Everyone should get to do their makeup, change their clothes, change their babies, and use the toilet failures in peace.

Everyone who needs help should be able to use the facilities with their family members, friends, or guardians.

It’s important that we proactively work to create safer spaces whenever and wherever we can. We realise sharing a toilet could feel new and different, we appreciate your understanding.

The Equality Project

What it is to be different, to not fit the boxes and structures and assumptions of the world around you. I’m here to learn more, to better represent and include the types of queerness and diversity I know less or knew nothing about. To question my own assumptions and challenge my own internalized and unquestioned perspectives and norms and phobias.

What does best practice look like in inclusion work, in policy, in community engagement? Who can I learn from, ally with, and share my knowledge with? What are the range of differences, and how do they intersect with other communities?

It’s been my first queer conference. I’ve loved being here and met many wonderful folks. I’ve also found myself overloaded at times by noise, pain, fatigue, crowds. Having to be patient with my own limitations and let go of my desire to soak up all the knowledge, speak to everyone, justify my time here. Learning is a life long process. Community grows like a relationship, it cannot be forced or snatched.

Whoever I’m sitting next to knows something I can benefit from if they want to connect and share. I don’t need to chase anyone but to do what I need to be present.

Holding a space for my own sense of discomfort, the way I do and do not feel part of this community, my risk of self exclusion, the deep heartbreak of being a multiple in stealth mode, wishing we had this too, conferences and resources and pride. (we do, we are starting to, but that’s a post for another time)Listening to people glowing with a sense of belonging and remembering what it was to stand in Bridges and hear those feelings from other multiples.

What is it about conferences that makes me want to cry? That deep old wound of exclusion and rejection aches, fills up with tidal tear water and I’m a child again. Lost and terrified at school, trapped between anguished invisibility and agonized exposure. Loneliness that burned like fire. We were all that child, we all carry that child. Remembering another Sarah, at another conference, who first taught me this.

Someone walks up behind me and rubs my arm with affectionate welcome, our minds react on all levels, understanding it is prosocial touch, intended to bridge and create safety, wanting to touch back, needing to run, the screaming that starts beneath my skin. Keep breathing, loves.

Accepting that the path that’s open before me right now is about other more validated understandings of diversity. That it’s not a betrayal of my community to focus on the doors that are open and the opportunities that are sustainable. That this is my community too, that all identity is multifaceted and complex. That I do not owe suffering to the world. That mutuality is an essential aspect of community. That it’s okay to belong, to belong to more than one space, to hold membership across many communities, imperfectly and with gratitude and pain. To recognise the universality of these tensions and extend a hand to each other, the autistic folks struggling with the quiet space that’s not quiet, the folks in wheelchairs trying to get through the crowds to the lift, the young person standing awkwardly on the edge of the room.

Rose messages from far away and the memories of being on fire calm beneath her hand, go back to sleep. I write notes, share jokes, make space. Share meals, make connections, not – god forbid “networking”, but relationship. Nod through a talk, catch an eye and smile, hold someone’s hand when they cry, accept a hot drink with gratitude.

The wounded child in me begins to see the wounded child in everyone and the sense of being alone and on fire in the middle of the crowd passes like a breath. We all walk with ghosts too complex to put into words and in the end this is the essence of diversity, the fragmenting of experience into smaller and smaller categories until we stand alone, and the rebuilding into larger and larger overlapping groups and venn diagrams until we are all together under the umbrella of human. It is an oroborous of forming and breaking down and reforming, like a life cycle that honors both our difference and our commonality. Both need room to breathe and support each other.