The bitch is back!

Kia ora koutou, e hoa mā.

I’d like to share with you a memory:

It’s late March this year, and I’m standing at the back of a crowd overlooking Civic Square. It’s the counter-protest against a TERF rally to spread transphobic hate in our city. In front of me is a sea of coloured hair and pronouns. I can’t even see the square.

I text a friend and ask him where he is. He says he’s in the square. I tell him that’s where the TERFs are. He says there aren’t any.

We’d won.

That rally was organised by an activist organisation called Queer Endurance / Defiance, and in the spirit of their excellent work I wanted this year’s Queerlient to be all about queer defiance.

From powerful protests and rainbow histories, to examining the smaller ways we resist cis-heteronormativity in our everyday queer lives, queer defiance covers a broad range of topics.

Seren explores the ideas of coming of age through a queer lens, while Kiran offers an alternative to ‘coming out’. Amelia regales us with the proud history of butch and femme lesbian identities, and we even have a quiz!

We are so lucky to have such talented queer writers and artists from our diverse student community coming together for something like this. The work we do here reaches many and is no small feat.

It’s been 40 years now since the first AIDS cases were reported in Aotearoa, the targeted discrimination that came with that sparked our country’s queer rights movement and brought us into the spotlight.

After decades of tireless battles, our predecessors built a world for us that, while far from perfect, allows us freedoms and opportunities they couldn’t have—from marriage rights, to name changes, to taking over the student magazine once in a while. Though we still have a way to go, it’s a real testament to the power of their defiance that I am able to write this to you all now.

‘Queer’ by definition means to be different, outside the mainstream. If we want our own spaces and better representation, we have to create them ourselves in spite of tradition. For us, by us, from the beginning.

So go forth and defy. Be unashamed and abrasive. Let’s make a world for us.

Yours in arms,

Goose (she/they)