Speech for the “Take Back The Night” demonstration in Dresden
Hello everyone! We from Queer Pride Dresden welcome you here at Gomondai Square and look forward to a militant demo. Because we queers have a fundamental problem with patriarchy. We have a problem with the forceful division into two opposing genders. We have a problem with the attributions, the enforcements, and the oppression that come from this division. We have a problem because this oppression is also very specifically directed against queer people.
We’re tired of homophobia that portrays gay men as less masculine. We’re tired that men should define themselves in distinction to femininity and also degrade it.
We are tired of lesbophobia that pours out on women who defy reproductive logic. We are tired of some insecure men taking a personal affront that women might even dare to not find them attractive.
We are tired of reactionaries of all sorts wanting to frame trans people as a bogeyman. We are tired of non-binary people being systematically made invisible.
One thing actually is true: We are a threat – a threat to the dominant system. Our very existence threatens to expose the arbitrary nature of gender division. Our love and our lives threaten the symbiotic pact between capitalism and male chauvinism. And so our resistant queerness is always met with authoritarian suspicion.
In deadly form, this suspicion hit Ella in Berlin, Malte in Münster, and Brianna in Warrington. But in Saxony, too, queerphobia is carried out openly. The NPD whips up hatred on the streets of Döbeln. Their comrades from AfD in the state parliament are inquiring about the numbers of trans people, wanting to make lists again. They want to distress us, displace us, make us disappear.
Yet we stand here as who we are. We will not hide and we will not hush. On the contrary: we are still proud, we stay perverse and provocative!
And we will be loud with you. Loud for freedom, for feminism and international solidarity!
So let’s everyone hear it: We’re here, we’re queer – we’re fabulous, don’t mess with us!