Every year when June 28 rolls around, we see the same headlines:
“Day to respect that everyone loves whoever they want.”
And yes, it sounds nice. But it falls short. Very short.
Because the Pride fight was not born just for the right to love. It was born for the right to exist, to be, to express oneself without fear. To occupy the world with all possible forms of body, gender, desire and life.
🌈 More than love: dignity, freedom and existence
Reducing the commemoration of 28J to a simple “let everyone love whoever they want” is whitewashing history. It is forgetting that there were trans, racialized people, migrants and sex workers who fought at Stonewall not only to kiss someone in public, but to not be murdered, imprisoned or expelled from their home for being who they were.
Pride is not just a song about love. It is a cry of existence.
🧠 The right to be
What does the right to be really mean?
- Being able to go out into the street without fear of insults or attacks.
- Dress as you want without being called a “provocateur.”
- Change your name, your body or not, your pronoun and have the world respect it.
- Don’t fit into any tag if you don’t want to.
- Decide how to love, with whom and if you want to love or not.
Because it’s not just about respecting who you love. It’s about respecting your entire existence.
💬 No individualism can decide how we should be
We live in a society that sells us freedom, but at the same time requires us to fit into molds.
That tells us “be yourself” but if you do it too much, it points you out.
That celebrates Pride without flags and prohibits affective-sexual education in schools or forces these topics to be discussed by doctors, thus pathologizing gender and sexual diversity.
That is why it is important to remember: no individualism, political party or neoliberal discourse can appropriate freedom and tell us how we should love, dress or live.
Freedom is not choosing between A or B within what is allowed. Freedom is creating your own lyrics if you want.
✊🏼 The collective struggle: where your freedom ends and someone else’s begins
Sometimes the idea of individual freedom is used to justify hate speech.
“I think what I want,” they say.
But freedom of expression cannot be used to trample on the existence of others.
The freedom of a person, community or culture ends where the dignity of another begins.
Therefore, no political party should be able to decide who deserves rights and who does not.
No one can appropriate the word freedom and use it as a weapon to exclude.
🔎 Critical perspective: are we forgetting the political roots of Pride?
Yes. Many spaces have turned June 28 into a consumer festival.
The pinkwashing of brands, sponsored floats, aesthetics without discourse.
And although the celebration is part of the resistance, if we forget the political roots, we run the risk of turning Pride into a harmless parade.
A parade that does not bother, does not question, does not transform.
Are we willing to recover its uncomfortable strength?
📝 It’s not (just) personal, it’s political
Because when we talk about being who we are, we’re not just talking about personal decisions. We talk about laws, public policies, access to healthcare, education, housing, work, security.
We are talking about ensuring that no hate speech ever takes a person’s life away from them again.
That no queer teenager will take their own life again for not finding their place.
❤️ Let no one decide for you how you should be
This June 28, beyond the colors and slogans, let’s remember this:
Pride is not a permission to love. It is a right to exist.
It is not an invitation to fit in. It’s a reminder that you don’t have to.
Because the fight continues as long as there is a single body punished for its shape, a single gender denied, a single desire censored, a single person forced to hide to survive.
