Ariel Mendes
Sep 21, 22 | 6 min read
Non-binary trans day
Reading time: 5 minutes
I'm Ariel Mendes, a non-binary and gender non-conforming trans activist from the big Brazilian city, Belo Horizonte, and my pronouns are they/them.
I was born and raised outside of general gender roles in a typical middle-class family made up of cisgender and heterosexual members, except for me. What a challenge for me and my family in terms of dealing with expectations.
As a child, I loved my mother's high heels and makeup, of course, secretly from her, my two brothers and my father. I also preferred having friends and playing house and with dolls. Mariana Linhares was my first accomplice and we were only 4 years old.
From my earliest childhood, I took the women in my inner circle as role models, starting with my mom, then my aunts and teachers. The feminine has always meant the greatest power to me!
I have always been passionate about list of sweden consumer email languages, humanities and social sciences, because there I found a space to write, speak and create. All of this literally made me feel like a fish out of water in conversations with my male friends. It is a fact that from my early years I was not conforming to my gender and I did not have the mental strength to accept it.
Like every gender non-conforming person, my childhood was part of the statistics and I suffered harassment, discrimination and bullying at school. That's why I don't have many friends from that time, maybe I was too different for most people.
Today I understand that my colleagues and I were not educated to deal with that kind of diversity , even with access to a private school in a large, wealthy city.
First steps, discovering and wanting to do more
It was not an easy process to leave school and start from scratch, even after several years of difficult experiences. This condition may have helped me live a successful journey through the Faculty of Law at the second best university in my country.
I wanted to study law because freedom of expression and being who I am were already part of my values , and not by chance, I came out publicly as a gay man with a public kiss at a freshman party and, for the first time, I felt like I had a place in this world outside of home.
From my perspective, the process of coming out as a person was never a journey, so I questioned what I could have done to improve the experience of my community at the University, since many of my colleagues still had not dared to come out.
From that challenge, I am proud to have taken the initiative to inspire people who occupy spaces traditionally dominated by cis and heterosexual men, becoming the first gay man to be president of the Athletic Association; then, the first President of the League of Athletic Associations of my State; and I also co-founded Fanta Uva Deportistas Unidos, the first gay soccer team to compete in internal tournaments (a very masculine sport in Brazil).
For 10 years of my life, alternating between gay and bisexual orientations fulfilled me and that fluidity was never a limitation for my adventurous spirit.
I remember living happily and naturally as an LGBTQ+ activist wherever I lived: around 10 different cities in Brazil, the US, and Mozambique, and visiting over 20 countries.
I still don’t know how I overcame the challenges of travelling and crossing borders in countries like Ethiopia, Zambia and Zimbabwe, where being gay is still a crime. I also don’t know how I managed to live with a male partner in Mozambique, a country where gay relationships had stopped being a crime just a couple of months before I moved there. Which means that society was not yet ready and was resistant.
