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I’m writing this from Peterborough Pride. Or rather, I’m writing it knowing that by the time you read it on Saturday morning, Asha and I will be there – in the crowd, in the colour, in the noise of a community that has spent decades being told it doesn’t deserve to take up space and has shown up anyway, every single year, regardless. I want to talk about that. The showing up anyway part. The world doesn’t feel particularly safe right now for a lot of the people who’ll be at Pride this weekend. Our trans brothers and sisters are navigating a political and media landscape that has decided, with calculated aggression, that they are an acceptable target – that their existence is a debate, their rights are negotiable, their safety is less important than someone else’s discomfort. The hostility is real, it is escalating, and it is doing damage that most people who aren’t living it will never fully understand. They show up anyway. Every year, in every city, in every town brave enough to hold a Pride event, people who have every reason to stay home choose instead to be visible. To take up space. To say, with their presence alone, that they are here and they are not going anywhere. That takes something most people never have to find in themselves. It’s also, I’ve been thinking, exactly what building a business on who you actually are requires. The stakes are different – I’m not going to pretend that showing up authentically in business carries the same weight as existing as a trans person in 2026, because it doesn’t. What I am saying is that the fundamental act rhymes: deciding that who you are is worth showing up as, in public, in a world that may not be ready and may not be kind about it. Most of us building heart-led businesses have had our own version of this reckoning. The point where we decided to say what we actually believed rather than the safe version, to put our prices up and wait, to stop performing a version of ourselves designed to be palatable to everyone and start showing up as the person we actually are – knowing some people would leave, and deciding that was alright. That decision is an act of courage. We don’t name it that way enough. The people at Pride this weekend aren’t just celebrating. They’re making a statement about what invisibility costs – what it takes out of a person to hide, to perform, to make themselves smaller so others are more comfortable – and they’re choosing, for at least one day, to refuse that cost entirely. We get to make that choice in our businesses every day. Something to sit with this week. Where are you still performing the safe version of yourself? Where are you holding back the thing that actually makes you extraordinary because you’re not sure the world is ready for it? The world wasn’t ready for Pride either. It showed up anyway. |
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