The invitation to share some reflections on Pride Month has caused me to reflect more deeply on my relationship to “pride” in a work environment than I have done, consciously at least, before.
The centring of “pride” by the Gay Liberation Front in the UK and US, and other gay liberation groups across the world, in the early 1970s marked a transformative rejection of the previous generation’s appeal for acceptability and assimilation, in favour of a politics of personal and community empowerment. Acceptability politics places power in the hands of those we are asking for acceptance from. Pride takes that power back, because it refuses to allow the shame others want us to feel to have any influence over us.
I joined Ashurst as a trainee, fresh from the London drag scene. Becoming a lawyer felt like moving in the other direction: away from a world where who I am is normal, anodyne even, and into a space where my career would depend on the willingness of others to accept me. Walking through the office doors for the first time, I felt like I had to choose between the power of pride and the safety of assimilation – between my identity and my career. I dyed my hair brown, bought five black dresses, and swallowed my pride.
In the four years that I have been at the firm, I have discovered that the risks I anticipated of being a queer person in a City firm are not as great as I had feared. Within my lifetime, lawyers have been fired from City firms for being gay, but throughout my career, I have been met with acceptance and warmth.
I have also learnt that success and pride are not mutually exclusive. By taking pride, you shift the onus onto others to make room for you, instead of carving away parts of yourself in order to meet someone else’s idea of what a good lawyer looks like. Inevitably, you will make people feel confused, uncomfortable, even offended by your refusal to feel the shame they think you should, and that does carry risk. However, it also frees you from the obligation to spend your time and energy trying to please people who were never going to accept you.
Once I no longer felt like I had to hide, I blossomed. I feel like myself – with my green mullet and cow print suits and nose ring – and when I feel like myself, I bring everything I have to my role. My passion for justice for my community has led to me becoming the lead Ashurst lawyer responsible for developing pro bono projects supporting LGBTQ+ people across the UK, Europe and the Middle East, a role I could not have imagined existed going through the electronic gates on day one.
Having had the chance to reflect on the ways in which these radical strands of pride have threaded their way through the choices I have made, I am honestly a little surprised to find that I still feel quite cynical about celebrating ‘capital ‘P’ Pride’, with its rainbow logos and little celebratory flags.
For me, my pride is in choosing to exist visibly and without shame as the only out gender non-conforming person that I know of in our office. It means being the first person like me most people have had a conversation with, and answering the same questions over and over so that every time someone reads a transphobic article about the “woke brigade” or the “transgender mob”, they have a positive example of someone they know to compare against the negative stereotypes being painted of my community.
It means giving my time to diversity initiatives, and in my personal life, it often means making sure that the people who come after me have space to grow without having to ask for it, and it means finding polite and cheerful rebuttals to culture war talking points, even when I am so tired of having these conversations, because letting those ideas go unchallenged risks feeding into the harmful discourse that, as we have seen in the US, can provide a mandate to homophobic and transphobic legislators and embolden protesters who are against queer and trans events.
I think the risk of Pride is that we focus too much on the things that are easy to celebrate, and avoid asking the more difficult questions about the burden that having pride everyday places on marginalised queer people. That’s not to say that celebration is not important, but my gentle invitation to allies is to spend some time this Pride Month thinking about ways to share some of that weight with us, in June and throughout the rest of the year.
Anna Burn is a pro bono associate in Ashurst’s London office.
