We’re Just Friends
Friendship is a means of survival for my community, but it can also be the source of your learning
Abby Hughes, LLM International Law 09/12/2024
The unfortunate reality for many young queer, and especially trans/non-binary people, is that the right to be yourself is not always easily won. The price of authenticity for many members of my community is our relationships with our biological families. It is very common for friendships to replace those lost familial connections; however, this network of support goes largely unseen and unacknowledged.
I owe my life as it is now to the unconditional love and support of my community. My friendships, especially those with women and femme queer people, have allowed me to define myself for myself. They have created a space for me free of judgement to truly explore my identity, without which I don’t know if I ever would have realised I was non-binary. There is no problem in life that isn’t lessened by their company and insights. I am frequently moved not just by their intelligence and humour but by their endless compassion for others. Ultimately, my friendships make me feel brave since there is no expectation for me to be anything other than my authentic self.
The intensity with which I talk about my friendships might seem unusual or even strange to some. This doesn’t surprise me, as I’m aware that more typical notions of friendship can sometimes present as a juvenile form of connection that’s most important in adolescence.
Friendship is conventionally framed as a transitory relationship that holds the most significance when a young person’s closest relationships stop being with their biological family, but they are yet to meet their future spouse. This idea of reproducing family units is, of course, a very Western and capitalist concept of a life progression that is not universal. Thus, the idea that your friends can be your life partners, a web of connection that is never traded up for a single romantic partner, feels distinctly queer to me.
Queer friendship has given me permission to stop trading away parts of myself in the hopes of winning the prize of connection. Treating my friends as my life partners has provided me a way to recognise the people who have been the most significant and consistent relationships in my life all along. The foundation of friendship is freedom. This dynamic holds all the joys of connection without being possessive. To be cliché, it is a relationship that can bend but doesn’t break. There’s no pressure to sacrifice what you really want in order to coordinate your life goals with someone else’s, a problem that has been posed to women and AFAB people since time immemorial.
It’s interesting that queerness often does not remove the pressure to be in a romantic, monogamous, and companionate relationship. Of course, by all means, one can still be queer and married with children. This is a hard-won right and, in many ways, a privilege that is not to be disrespected. Yet, at the same time, it’s important to question why normalcy is so seductive. Perhaps, it reproduces queer romantic and sexual partnerships in a format that is palatable to heteronormative societies. But what if trying to fit into a heterosexual society that was never built for you is leaving you with the same problems historically faced by heterosexual women? What if you would then need marriage as a marker of your adulthood and, without it, you lack a social cache?
‘Queering’ your understanding of friendship, whether you are queer or not, can be a useful way to appreciate the connection that is actually present in your life; rather than lamenting familial or romantic relationships that never lived up to your expectations. This is something that queer people frequently have to do by force due to the rejection of their biological families. Friendship is a means of survival for my community, but it can also be the source of your learning. The ‘queering’ of friendship is a gift from my community to yours.