The trans guide to picking a foreign Pride to visit

How to take a vacation, find a Pride to take part in, and feel the love as a trans person.

Pride Month is a massively important month for all kinds of historical and social reasons. It’s also my favourite month of the year - partly because it’s a commemoration of how far my community and I have come in what feels like a short space of time, and partly because it’s a wonderful chance to meet lovely people in an atmosphere which is equal amounts political and party. There are also always events going on everywhere in the city related to Pride, and if you are in a country where trans rights aren’t great, you can spend time somewhere better for you.

That’s exactly what I want to talk about here: going to a foreign country’s Pride celebration so that you can be yourself somewhere totally different. If you’re afraid of going out in your home town presenting the way you want, going somewhere new for a week or two can be so freeing, because if nobody knows who you used to be known as, or what they expect you to look like, you can start from scratch and be totally anonymous. When you add to that the fact that you can pick a country for the way it treats trans people, it’s a win-win going abroad for Pride. If you book it well in advance, you can also save on the flights.

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How I picked my foreign Pride

I had a couple of things I was particularly focused on when picking my Pride. One of them was cost, as I couldn’t afford to go to a typical tourist trap and spend over the odds to eat out every night. Therefore, I needed to find an underrated or under-visited city, possibly not a capital, and to keep costs down I decided to either use Airbnb, or find a budget hotel with a guest kitchen. This way I could watch my eating while also shopping from a supermarket every day. Hostels were out for me, because I didn’t want to deal with gendered dorms (if I stayed in a women’s dorm, guaranteed someone would complain; if I stayed in a men’s dorm, the dysphoria and potential negativity from the other men would make the experience awful). 

Picking a Pride city: the ‘Moneyball’ method, or ‘Being a Humongous Nerd’

If you’re a fan of sports, you’ve probably at least heard of the book and film ‘Moneyball’, about a baseball team manager who used statistics and went against popular wisdom to find bargain players who boosted the fortunes of his team. What that story teaches us in life is to not always go for the shiniest object, but instead to go for the diamond in the rough. 

Bearing that in mind, and being the world’s biggest nerd, I went to various sites to compare the prices of various consumer items. This is a good example. The information wasn’t going to make my final decision, but it was going to help. Ideally if you’re in Europe and on a budget, you want to go to the city in the country with the best LGBTQ+ record where you’ll find the best-value experience. 

This also includes hotels and Airbnbs; rental accommodation is a seller’s market, and Pride week in major cities is when landlords experience a high level of demand for their rooms. Therefore, picking a major European capital for your Pride trip will probably be fun - because there will be so much going on, but you’ll have to compromise on the room. I’m the kind of person who, on an Airbnb page, always scans the lowest-rating reviews to see what kind of reaction the owner has to issues being raised. Instinctive defensiveness might mean that there will be issues for a new guest, and any noise complaints, for example with construction, might end up ruining your summer break. 

I knew that Brighton Pride, although it would be really nice to travel to and experience, would be difficult to find accommodation for, because it is the biggest in the UK and everyone wants to go there. After a few rejections from Airbnb hosts there ("no parties, no solo clubbers," the usual excuses), I decided to focus on places with less of a reputation.

The eventual choice: Antwerp Pride

Belgium has a reputation for being boring, and yet it’s no less exciting than the Netherlands or northern France in terms of what it offers a visitor. Antwerp Pride, taking place in Belgium’s second city, fitted really well into my schedule, and with Antwerp not being a major tourist destination, there were lots of really nice-looking Airbnbs run by superhosts when I looked it up. I settled upon an apartment directly opposite Antwerp Opera House, run by a local man called Pascal, who had fitted the place out with a wide desk, a modern power-shower, a Bluetooth speaker, and screen doors that open right up, allowing beautiful overhead views of the square, and the Opera House, which was adorned with rainbow fabrics on its pillars for the week.

Though I didn’t eat out much - there was a big supermarket 50 metres from the apartment block - when I did go out for moules-frites, waffles, or a Duvel, the prices weren’t astronomical, in fact they felt pretty reasonable. The Antwerp Pride website also had loads of events on each day of the main week, including, when I went, a book launch and reading in English by a queer Chinese author (where a few misconceptions about trans rights in China were corrected - maybe a story for another post), an opening concert in the beautiful Rivierenhof Garden with a quite uncanny George Michael tribute, and an art exhibition in the centre of the old town by local artists, some of whom seemed to have noticed a lot of bodies while travelling. 

The drawbacks of Antwerp Pride can mostly be thrown in the bucket marked “corporate Pride”. Pro-Palestine and anti-war protesters were censored, with the presence of Palestinian flags enough to get local students ejected from floats and, on a number of occasions, seemingly bothered by police. While the Gaza War is a controversial issue, Pride is meant to be political.

The final-day festival next to the regenerated docks had an idiotic system where you had to pay for your entry ticket, then pay for a wristband separately which would allow entry to the toilets. Refusing to hand over any money to pee, I went to a local bar and used the toilet for free, then bought a much better beer than the official event was serving. I’d hoped for far more than the tatty merch stalls I saw at the festival, but at least the music and the drag shows were fun. The truth is, Pride is what you make it, and sometimes the best parties are the ones that take you by surprise.

Which Pride should I visit next? Let me know! You can contact me on Bluesky or by email.