Why Pride still matters in 2026 - and what therapy has to do with it....

June arrives again, and every year someone asks whether we still need Pride. In 2026, in a political climate where trans rights are being rolled back across multiple jurisdictions, where the language of "protection" is being mobilised against the very people it claims to serve, and where LGBTQ+ young people continue to present in therapy with disproportionately high levels of distress - the answer is yes. Unambiguously.

But I want to come at this from a slightly different angle. Not the political one, although I often talk about that - and it matters. I want to come at this from the psychological angle.

The self we learn to hide

Transactional Analysis (TA) gives us a useful framework here. Eric Berne's concept of the life script - the largely unconscious story we construct about ourselves, others, and the world, often formed in response to early relational experiences - helps us understand something important about what it means to grow up LGBTQ+ in a world that was not designed with you in mind.

Scripts are written in response to injunctions: the spoken and unspoken messages we receive from the people and systems around us about who we are allowed to be. Don't be you. Don't feel. Don't belong. For many LGBTQ+ people, these injunctions arrive early and often. They come from families, from schools, from religious institutions, from casual cruelty in corridors. And they get internalised - not as someone else's opinion, but as felt truth.

What follows is a life organised around concealment. Not dishonesty, but survival. In TA terms, the person develops a false self, or what Donald Winnicott might call an adapted self, that presents as acceptable to the world while the authentic self waits, often in considerable pain, for conditions that feel safe enough to emerge.

Code switching as daily labour

This is where code switching becomes clinically significant. The term originates in sociolinguistics. It describes how people shift language, tone, vocabulary, and register depending on their social context. But for LGBTQ+ people, code switching is rarely just a linguistic phenomenon. It is an embodied, effortful, daily performance of a self that is legible, palatable, and safe to whoever is in the room.

The gay man who straightens his posture, deepens his voice, and erases the pronoun when someone asks about his weekend. The non-binary person who picks the gendered bathroom least likely to cause a scene. The lesbian who has, without consciously deciding to, rehearsed a heterosexual version of her life story so thoroughly she could deliver it without a pause.

This is not trivial. Code switching of this kind is cognitively and emotionally costly. It requires sustained vigilance, a constant reading of the environment for safety cues, and it carries a significant cumulative toll. Research on minority stress, developed by Meyer and others, is clear that this chronic, low-level hypervigilance is one of the primary mechanisms through which structural marginalisation gets under the skin and into the body.

In TA terms, this is life in the Adapted Child ego state: perpetually monitoring, perpetually adjusting, perpetually deferring the authentic self to the demands of the relational environment. The Free Child, spontaneous, present, genuinely self-expressed, learns that this is not a safe place to live.

What Pride does

This is why Pride, as a collective and public phenomenon, carries real psychological weight. It is not simply a party or a political march, though it is both of those things. It is a temporary but genuine rupture in the conditions that produce code switching. For a few hours, in a particular space, the adapted performance is not required. The script can be set down.

For people who have spent years organising their lives around concealment, that experience of collective belonging, of I exist, visibly, and no-one here is asking me to be otherwise, can be quietly profound. It does not resolve the internal work. But it does something important: it offers an external experience that contradicts the injunction. It says, in relational and embodied terms, you are allowed to be here. And sometimes, that matters enormously.

In the therapy room

What this means for clinical practice is that LGBTQ+ clients often arrive in therapy not simply with presenting difficulties, but with a long history of script-driven concealment and the particular exhaustion that produces. The therapeutic relationship, at its best a space of genuine contact, may be among the first relationships in which the person has not been required to code switch.

That is a significant clinical responsibility. It asks therapists to examine honestly whether the room they are offering is genuinely safe, or only apparently so. Whether their assumptions, language, and framing are truly affirming, or neutrally heteronormative in ways they have not noticed.

This Pride Month, if you are somewhere in the gap between the self you show the world and the self you actually inhabit, I want you to know that the work of closing that gap is possible. It takes time. It takes a relationship that can hold it. But it is real work, and it matters.

Talking Works offers confidential, affirming psychotherapy in Cottingham and online. Enquiries welcome...

www.talkingworks.uk

chris@talkingworks.uk

Book a FREE online consultation via the website