No one can tell you who you are but yourself

With the flags of the LGBT, queer and bisexual communities, they recently got married in front of the registrars in Cetinje Vanja Gagović i Saša Lazić.

"There was no way it would go without flags, the whole idea of ​​the wedding was to do something for ourselves, in our own way, the way it suits us," Vanja said recently during a guest appearance on the "Klofer" podcast.

During her life, Vanja declared herself as straight, a person who is attracted to people of the opposite sex, as a lesbian, a woman who is attracted to other women, and as a queer, a person who has no restrictions in terms of gender and sex in choosing a partner. Her husband Saša is a trans man.

"Our marriage is absolutely a queer marriage, there is nothing that is not queer about the two of us," she says.

When asked what queer is, he simply says - queer means freedom.

"People like to say that you have gay and normal, trans and normal, like this and normal... What is normal? Everyone is different in their own way, and queer is what actually falls outside of that CIS/straight box, people who are CIS, which is the opposite of trans, people who identify with the gender assigned to them at birth, and people who are attracted to them. the opposite sex, what would they say - normal. Queer is all that's left now. There are backdoors and that's all that's different - gender expression is different, partner choice is different, relationship to your body is different, world view is basically different. For me, being queer means freedom, it means that I can now look the way I want, act the way I want... Who will tell me who I am, will society tell me who I am? No. I will tell society who I am. I'm queer, I don't fit into your boxes, not at all," says Vanja and adds that it's like when you put a cat in a box, the cat rejects the box, but when given a choice - the cat finds its own box.

The essence, she says, is that man has freedom and finds himself.

"Once I identified myself as queer, once as a lesbian, for a while I thought I was straight, because I didn't know that other option existed. I thought for a long time that a woman would understand a woman best, why can't I have a girlfriend, you trade goods with a girl, listen to the same music... then at one point I had an outburst - you talk about boys together... Then gradually you realize that that's normal, that it's human, and that's when I completely stopped paying attention to a person's gender and sex."

When asked what in life determines us to simply accept other people, she says that it is the desire and willingness to approach them with good intentions, to make their existence easier.

"No one asked for it to exist, we all suffer together, but let's suffer as little as possible and support each other as much as possible and make it easier for each other to go through life," says Vanja. He also adds that parents and teachers are important for growing up in kindergarten.

"All of them should explain the differences to children in a 'gentle' way, not only on the basis of gender, who is male, who is female, but also about love, skin color... because, especially in the Balkans, we tend to instill hate first (hate). First we have that 'us and them', two teams play against each other, we always have the idea that we are against someone, instead of being all for each other."

She says of her upbringing that her supportive environment was "insensitive, until it became essential."

"There wasn't much talk about it, I know that my mother had two friends who have been living together for years, that my aunt had a friend who had a girlfriend... my aunt's friend was gay... I knew all that, but it didn't occur to me to the head for a very long time, because it is not presented as something bad. I went through life with that in a relaxed way, I didn't even talk about it, my choice of partner is my business", says Vanja.

Her mother Svetlana Jovanovic is one of the few who publicly supported her children's choices.

"I am the mother of an LGBT person. My child introduced me to a person who means something to her. I'm almost not interested in gender. I fully respect my child's choice or the lifestyle she wants to lead, provided she is not a criminal," she said at the Pride Parade organized in Podgorica in 2016.

Vanja still says today that her mother's support is very important to her.

"I don't have to hide," she says and adds that for her it is just a burden to invent in front of her family and friends about the status of the person she is in a relationship with.

"Imagine that I now have to introduce the girl to them as a friend, so that people ask me if she has someone, that I explain that she does... It's a relief. And it starts from my family and my freedom, to be okay with my family, to not be afraid of how they will react if they see me at Pride. They are expecting me at Pride."

She also adds that her family's attitude towards her choices is such that the right to choose is hers and that the only important thing is that her choices do not hurt other people.

"In the sense of not ending up in prison. I can't relate that there are parents who say 'your choice of partner doesn't make me happy, come on out of the house'. Or, a girl who told me that her brother threatened to kill her if he saw her with a girl. Creepy... and others who say 'kill, slaughter, so that fags don't exist'. Could it be your friend, someone in the family", says Vanja.

He says that the problem is not only in the environment, but sometimes also with LGBTIQ people themselves, who are instilled with the feeling that what they are is wrong. He adds that being part of such a narrative is a "shame".

"Like when they tell boys it's a shame to cry, you shouldn't cry, to be like a girl... I have a cousin who told me that the children laughed at him because he had pink sneakers... he answered them with 'I can't hear you' . But they didn't remember that, but it was presented to them like that, pink is female, blue is male... Colors have no gender, neither toys, nor goods," she says.

Vanja and Saša started their relationship five years ago, at Pride in Thessaloniki, Greece. She went through the transition process with Saša, which is why she moved from Montenegro to Serbia.

Saša had to accept sterilization before starting the process of transition and gender adjustment. This is the case, both in Serbia and in Montenegro. In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights determined that the prerequisite of sterilization in the legal recognition of gender identity is a violation of human rights.

"It's a terrible thing, which makes you realize how unimportant different people are to others. This is the same reason why they operate on intersex children as soon as they are born, to make it 'normal'. It is a huge violation of human rights," says Vanja.

"Intersex" is a term used for a variety of conditions in which a person is born with reproductive or genital anatomy that does not conform to typical definitions of male or female.

"Imagine that you say 'I want to live my life freely', so that someone who legitimizes me does not put me in danger, and you tell me 'let's get sterilized before that'. You also have situations where they legitimize a trans person, and there is an immediate problem with how the person looks and what is written on their identity card, because not all police officers are sensitized... I have heard stories that a trans person comes to report violence, and that the police officers speak in men's work and ask her what she has under her skirt. Terrible. These are some things that people don't know and say 'who is stopping you from being who you are'."

On the day of the wedding, Vanja added Sashino to her surname, Saša hers. He jokingly recounts the amazement of the registrar, who asked "is that possible". After the wedding, Vanja is now Gagović-Lazić, and Saša Lazić-Gagović...