Ace:
Hi. My name is Ace. I’m 14. I live in Brookfield, and my pronouns are he/they. I moved to Brisbane with my family when I was eight. I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism and put in a neurotypical school where I was forced to conform to abled society. I knew I was queer from a young age, though I didn’t know more about the queer community or what it was to be queer, ‘til in grade five to six, where I began experimenting with new identities and received homophobia for the first time from friends and other parents. In grade seven, I tried new pronouns and came out as trans to my friends and peers in July 2024 before coming out to my parents later that year, and although it was expected and they were supportive, it was still a large change in which they were to go through the process of grieving, the version of me that they thought that they were losing by my transition. During this time, I learned to play guitar as well as write and sing my own music, getting more involved with the performing arts, and in doing so, I shaped a lot of myself and explored parts of my social identity in many ways. In the future, I hope to create music and art that inspires others as much as it continues to inspire me. I want to continue to grow and learn more about myself and others around me, and I hope this exhibition gives others more confidence to explore and love parts of themselves.

Ash:
Being born physically disabled and chronically ill, my life has come with its fair share of challenges. However, all of these experiences have made me a better person and taught me a lot of important life lessons at a young age. Although some of these experiences hold a negative connotation in my mind, I am glad that I went through them and made it out the other side, because now I can help advocate for others in similar situations. My lived experience is a massive part of why I’m so passionate about social justice and activism work. I am so grateful for the life that I have built for myself in Magandjin, since moving here at the beginning of last year. I have been a part of so many amazing opportunities through the queer, creative and activism scenes here. I am looking forward to wherever life takes me next and whatever new opportunities arise. I have met so many interesting and beautiful people, and I finally found my chosen family, and I am eternally grateful for their love and support. One thing that I want people to know about me is that, as well as being a multi-disciplinary artist, I eat, sleep and breathe music. When I experience music, I visualise colours and shapes while the vocals and melodies swim around me. As a neurodivergent person, listening to music and singing are a massive part of how I self-regulate, and are one of my main sources of creative inspiration. As I generate ideas for creative projects, I often listen to music simultaneously.

Grayson:
Without the labels and titles society has given me, I’m a person like everyone else. I’m someone who’s very artistic and enjoys creating all sorts of wonderful and funky things. I’m an avid reader, and happen to be enjoying romance books right now, and I’m a parent to the most beautiful black cat that has ever existed, and no, I’m not biased. I also enjoy the ocean but really don’t like the feeling of sand. There’s been a few lessons that I’ve learned that have helped me navigate life. One, don’t compare yourself to others. Everyone is unique and has their own journey. Two, push yourself out of your comfort zone, because you learn the most about yourself and grow the most when you’re sitting in this space. And three, it’s okay to ask for help and receive support. There are so many people in the world who are there to listen and support you. I know you can feel alone in this world sometimes, but I promise you that you’re not alone. Community is all around you, and they’re ready to support you.

A simple pleasure that brought me joy recently was receiving some more yarn in the mail and casting on a new shawl. I really enjoy knitting, so picking out a new project, finding the right yarn in the right colour, and then casting on, knitting away and seeing the finished project is always super rewarding for me. Being able to see something I’ve created with my own hands is always such a magical feeling. One thing I’m looking forward to finishing is my second bachelor’s degree and then later going on in the future to do a PhD and possibly some other higher education as well. I’m very grateful to be doing this, though, because I’m only here due to my younger self deciding to keep going through the hardships they were experiencing, just taking it one day at a time. Something I think people can do to make me and others feel hopeful about the future is being kind. Kindness is something that can be hard to find at times, but I think a little bit of kindness and empathy towards others and yourself can go a long way to making the world a better place to live in for everyone.

Harper:
Hi. My name is Harper. I use any pronouns, and I am 13 years old. I was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of nine and started taking medication halfway through grade five. Being neurodivergent and queer is a very common combination in the queer community, which makes navigating your identity and feelings a lot trickier than it would be for a new neurotypical person. As a 13-year-old who has to navigate through much more than most people my age, it is very difficult to explain how my brain works and what my identity is. But over time, I have figured out that my life doesn’t need to be explained to everyone, because as long as people support me, I am happy. Many people have told me that I am not old enough to decide what my gender is, but it’s my mind and body, not theirs. My whole life, I have lived in a very queer family, starting off with two moms who both loved each other and an older sister. When I was two years old, those mums started to grow apart and found new partners to live with. Lots of people told me that my parents made me a lesbian, which isn’t entirely wrong. But they made me a lesbian through biology, not inspiration. My costume represents a knight who doesn’t have the same helmet as most knights do. This represents how I feel very different to my peers. They will never know why I was given a different helmet to them, so they begin to believe it was for a bad reason. In the beginning of my gender diverse journey, I thought I had to have a gender to exist in the world. Over time, I realized the whole purpose of being queer was not to fit in or not make sense. This brought so much hope in my heart. I identify as gender fluid, but on many days, I feel as though I don’t have a gender, which is confusing for many people, and that includes myself. I have figured out over time that I don’t have to wake up every morning and decide on a gender, because all I have to do to exist in this world is be myself. I hope that this inspires you to do what you want, and if you don’t feel like you fit inside of a box society has shoved you into, step outside of it.

Iris:
Hi. My name is Iris. I’m 20 years old. My pronouns are she/her and I live in Victoria Point. God, rest my soul. As a young person, I know that my challenges are normally minimized or misunderstood. I’m constantly worrying about the direction of my life, because despite working and having a freelance business, we live in a society that’s constantly building away from that, like self-sufficiency, and I’m not sure if I can sustain my dreams. In relation to like my gender, especially like as a trans woman, I feel I am very minimized. Despite being presented as like, oh, this big, bad, evil, I find that I’m always minimized and stuck in the background. Which is why I fight so hard to be like loud and obnoxious, because I just want to be seen honestly. I want to be seen for who I am. A lot of my joy comes from being around people I love and people who love me. It comes from, like, sharing my art and my music. I really love just being able to communicate things in other mediums. My gender joy is something that I find very expensive. I’m a big dress up girl. I love I love going into stores and wearing things I can’t afford. Honestly, just being completely free in my identity without being shoved into the background as it’s probably a joy that I’d really like to have. I hope that people know about the effort and the time that I put into my art. I hope that people know that I want to be appreciated and loved and that through all my art is me reaching out. I hope that one day I won’t have to worry about where I go next. I hope that one day it’s solid. I hope that one day I can be confident in where I’m going. Remember that everyone struggles differently. Everyone needs their own level of help.

Isaak:
Hi. My name is Isaac. I’m 19 years old, and my pronouns are she/her. I live here in Brisbane. I’m very interested in technology and public transport and stuff like that. So the biggest challenge I face personally is employment, and especially because I am gender diverse and transitioning, I personally am struggling to find what career path I want to do as transition has quite affected what type of work I want to do. Because I’m just concerned about, well, my safety and acceptance at work. But also because my previous job was a job that didn’t fit the gender identity of me. It felt way too masculine for me, and I much prefer to do something else than that. The other major challenges I struggle with is just mainly around transitioning itself. I personally have been fortunate enough to not to be lucky with medical transitioning going quite well. It’s moving easy, but just trying to find new styles and stuff, new styles, new clothes, learning to present myself in a more feminine way is a little bit of a challenge. Other people can do to make me feel hopeful about the future is just I find socializing with other people is really helpful, and people assisting me with the challenges, just I find socializing is very helpful for me personally. The other thing that makes me hopeful for the future is all the progress we’ve made on diversity and accessibility and acceptance of LGBTQIA+ members, as well as being good friends with other diverse people, and in general, being in queer spaces, I find is also very helpful. Also, just the progress I’ve made on my HRT has been very helpful for the future.

So, what brings me joy is just being able to dress up as my new gender, being more feminine and perceived as more feminine, being able to present us who I truly am. I have hope for the future in doing that, as well as living a happy life in Brisbane, spending time with my new friends in Brisbane is super awesome as well, and so much fun. For me personally, the HRT has been very euphoric in the bodily changes that has occurred in my body. As it helps push my body to being more of the desired gender I want to be. I really like its effects and the physical changes that have happened to me, like softer skin as an example. In the future, I’m highly looking forward towards just being able to be more of myself. As I think in the future, I’ll look very happy and joyful and pretty and cute, and because whenever I do get to present as my preferred gender, I do get extremely happy and joyful, and I get all these euphoric emotions that make me just glad to be who I am, and I just get to feel pretty and cute. Yeah, but it’s an amazing experience that being able to actually be able to be yourself is such an amazing emotion and gift.

Mae:
My biggest challenge right now is learning to love myself and developing self-acceptance. It requires a lot of looking inwards, a lot of introspection and because there’s a lot that I’m not happy with in myself right now. But I want to learn what to change, what I want to keep and to add to myself so I can get to a better, happier point in my life. Yeah, that’s the big challenge for me right now. My name is Mae. I am currently 21. I use they/them pronouns, and I’m currently from Caboolture. Joy to me, very recently has come from feeling loved by my friends and feeling understood by my friends. There’s been a lot of times where we don’t always see eye to eye about things but knowing that we’re all approaching it with love and understanding and trying to work things out so that we all get to a point where we are better with each other. It’s just quality time. Quality time is nice with people that I love. Like, sometimes it’s just as simple as, like dinner with family, but it can also just be like laying in bed with my boyfriend or watching a movie with friends. It’s just nice to be around people who want me there. Hope is a very elusive thing to me right now. I have, like a lot of people, probably a bit of an issue with doom scrolling, and I’m trying to work on that, but so much of media is designed to just make you feel awful, and it’s difficult to find hope in all of that. But it’s also nice to see people who want to do better, because it makes me feel like it’s possible to achieve. A lot of that comes from my boyfriends, but just people in general that I can see, striving to do better makes me want to strive to do better. At the end of the day, I just want to be happy. I think everyone just wants to be happy and safe. And for me, that’s just changing a bit of how I look, and that’s how I will end up happy, not being afraid of what I’m seeing in the mirror.

Min:
My name is Min and I am 22. I am a non-binary young person with multiple disabilities. May last year, I got really sick. I couldn’t walk, couldn’t feel my limbs, and was having unexplained seizures. My nervous system had been overloaded by stress, pain and trauma, and it was starting to form physically. I was given the preferential diagnosis of functional neurological disorder, which basically means my nervous system is constantly overloaded. This causes me to get tics, chronic pain, gut troubles and seizures, which affect my daily life. Through these challenges, the only person I really had to rely on was my friend, this person I consider my big brother, and refer to him as such. He was my anchor when I thought I had no one, the person I could go to with my mental health, when it went downhill. He supported me through both my transitional journey and my health journey when no one else would. I want to help others, like how my big brother helped me. I want to be the voice for those in the community who feel like they don’t have a leg to stand on. Like I did. I hope that in the future, when I’m mentally ready, I can be someone that our up-and-coming generation can look up to, no matter their race, gender or sexuality, like how my big brother took me in. I want people to know that they’re not alone in this world, that there are people out there, and we’re here to help.

Anonymous:
I’m 20 years old. I live in an apartment with my best friend. I work in the arts. I study at university, and I’m a transgender man. I started hormone replacement therapy just before turning 17, and I got chest masculinization surgery shortly after turning 18. I now live fairly stealth, meaning that I pass as male 100% of the time, and only those that are close to me know that I’m trans. People like my co-workers, acquaintances, people that I meet on the street, etc, have no idea that I grew up as a girl. I’m not ashamed of who I am. Being queer is such a source of joy in my life, and I have no idea where I’d be without my queer friends and community. But being a teenager was hard. High school, especially difficult. I couldn’t yet figure out why I felt so different to all my peers, but everyone else could tell that there was something different about me too, which quickly became a target. No matter what I did, how hard I tried, which clothes I wore or who I tried to be friends with, I didn’t fit in with the other girls my age. There was something different about me that I could not figure out. My life felt like I was wearing a costume and playing the part of a teenage girl, but everyone else had memorized their lines but forgotten to give me a script at all. I was performing, but not well enough to disguise the deep sense of wrongness within me and nagging in the back of my mind that something just wasn’t right. At 13, I cut my hair short in an act of rebellion. I was sick of the balancing act. Suddenly, the teasing turned to how I looked like a boy, offhand remarks that they mistook me for my brother at first. This opened a door to a pathway that I didn’t even know existed, and I couldn’t stop chasing that feeling. It took me a long time to figure out what I wanted. Lots of awkward trial and error, bad haircuts, whispered confessions to my closest friends in the middle of the night, late night google rabbit holes, and it all led me to the same answer. I realized that I wanted, more than anything I’d ever wanted in my entire life to wake up as a boy. Years of hard conversations, wait lists, binding my chest, hormones and surgery later, and it’s finally my reality. I get to live with my best friend in our perfect apartment filled with plants, sunlight, laughter and a life surrounded by people who love me and see me for who I truly am. I’m finally exactly who I always wanted to be, and now I get to live the rest of my life exactly like this.

Rowan:
So to overcome obstacles from the past, we need to learn from these obstacles in the past and from each other. There’s no point tackling something alone when someone else knows the solution. A lot of issues could be solved if we just listened to each other and actually heard what we’re saying. Listen to the people being impacted, listen to the experts in the field, use critical thinking to understand what you’re reading, who wrote it and listen to other perspectives. If everyone listened to the people being directly impacted or who are directly involved with these obstacles, we could deal with them efficiently, ethically and morally.

A happy memory that makes me smile was when I first started to notice the effects of testosterone on my body. Such as a deeper voice, more muscle mass, even things like increased body hair. It really helped me connect with my body more than I ever had previously. But another memory which is similar to this is also when I got top surgery, and the first time I looked into the mirror post-op. My body had finally matched what I’d always envisioned it to be and I smile every time I look in the mirror now and when I see my surgery scars, because I can look and see myself and be happy with how my body looks. Because I see me for who I am, and that joy makes me smile. Jellyfish. So, jellyfish are an invertebrate with no brain, and they just kind of float around in the ocean and let the current take them where they need to go. If the current is fast, rough or stormy, the jellyfish takes the current on and flows with it, and eventually it comes out the other side. Sometimes unscathed and sometimes a little hurt, but it heals and keeps going. Jellyfish remind me of my take on life, where I just go with the flow and I deal with the problems as they come, and I’m able to come out the other side as a stronger, more resilient person. And if I’m hurt, I just take a moment to breathe, chill out, go with the flow and heal, and then I just keep moving with life.