Queer, Diasporic, and Denied: Reclaiming Identity Beyond Citizenship

There’s a particular kind of heartbreak that comes from being told (on paper) that you don’t belong.

For me, it came in the form of a letter from the Czech government.

After nearly two years of research, documentation, translations, and emotional labour, I was officially denied the right to reclaim Czech citizenship by descent. Not because I wasn’t Czech “enough,” but because I was one generation too far removed and caught in a bureaucratic technicality that rendered my family’s story irrelevant.

The denial cut deep, especially after being told I qualified. But the pain went deeper than the law. It stirred something older, something more familiar.

I come from a lineage shaped by movement. My Italian, Polish, and Czech ancestors crossed borders long before I was born. Yet each of these identities lives in me differently, and none of them comes with a single form of recognition.

As a queer, nonbinary person raised in America, I’ve long known what it feels like to be unrecognised, misnamed, made invisible by systems that won’t make room for people like me.

This rejection of heritage, of identity, of belonging, felt like déjà vu. Because the truth is, this isn’t just about one country. Or one document. Or even one identity. This is a story about how states define who counts—and what it means to claim yourself anyway.

How Citizenship Law Reduces Identity to Paperwork and Proximity

When I began the process of reclaiming Czech citizenship, I thought I was entering a system meant to reunite people with their roots. Instead, I found a structure built to measure belonging by proximity to paper.

Birth certificates. Apostilles. Official translations. Generational thresholds codified into law.

I met every requirement except one. I am a third-generation Czech. That detail alone made me ineligible. It didn’t matter that I grew up knowing the names of my family’s villages, speaking fragments of the language, or carrying on the stories and customs of my ancestors. It didn’t matter that the Czech Embassy in Washington told me I qualified.

The law draws the line at two generations. Everyone beyond that is excluded.

This is how many countries gatekeep identity: through rigid bloodline requirements, legal precision, and an obsession with timelines that favour bureaucratic tidiness over lived reality. They reduce multigenerational stories to checkboxes.

And this isn't the only country that demands a tidy bloodline. My Italian and Polish ancestry is also filtered through bureaucratic definitions of worthiness, whether through missing documents, outdated treaties, or legal loopholes that don't account for families like mine.

And I’ve seen this kind of gatekeeping before. In the U.S., queerness is also filtered through documentation, gender markers, insurance categories, and medical codes. Your identity is only recognised if it fits into a predetermined format.

The message is the same: we’ll believe in your belonging only if it’s convenient.

Queer Diaspora and the Pain of Being Unseen by Both Nation and Norm

Being queer in a world that wasn’t built for us already means learning to navigate erasure. Being part of a diaspora adds another kind of distance, another system that struggles to see you.

I’ve spent much of my life trying to make sense of what it means to belong when the places that shaped me don’t always claim me back.

In one context, I’m “too far removed” to be Czech. In another, I’m “too complex” to be easily gendered. Neither system—nationality nor gender—quite knows what to do with someone like me.

This is what it means to be marginalised: to exist in the in-between, to feel the weight of systems that can't account for your whole self.

What I inherited wasn’t a neat lineage, but a rupture; a legacy of more than one culture. Italian Catholicism, Polish resilience, and Czech migration all echo through my body in different ways. The kind of memory carried in smells from a kitchen, a phrase half-remembered, the knowledge that some stories were never written down for safety’s sake.

And queerness carries its rupture, away from heteronormative family structures and predetermined scripts. But in those ruptures, we create new shapes. We find home in chosen family, in queer community, in language reclaimed or newly learned. We make homes in the spaces between systems.

For people like us, belonging isn’t something that’s handed down. It’s something we build deliberately and defiantly, together.

Reclaiming Cultural Identity Without State Recognition

I didn’t stop being Czech just because the state said I wasn’t.

I still cook koláče, žemlovka, and halušky from memory and inheritance. I also make pierogi from my babcia's recipe and remember the scent of garlic and basil in my Nonna's kitchen. I still trace my ancestors' migration on maps and wonder what it meant to leave everything behind for a future that wouldn’t include us. These acts are how I keep those histories alive, even when paperwork tells me I can’t.

Citizenship is a legal category. Identity lives deeper than that in the language we choose to learn, the traditions we prefer to keep, and the people we choose to remember. No government can grant you the sense of familiarity that lives in your palate. No law can dictate how it feels to be moved by a proverb your dziadek used to say.

I don’t need a passport to be Czech, just like I don’t need state-sanctioned gender recognition to be nonbinary.

States can determine legal recognition, but they don’t get to define the meaning of identity. I carry my culture in how I honour my family. I carry queerness in how I make space for other people like me. These aren’t performances; they’re practices.

This is what reclamation looks like: not waiting for approval, but living into what already belongs to you.

Who Gets to Belong? Queer and Diasporic People Beyond the Margins

My story isn’t rare. And it isn’t singular. So many of us carry hybrid identities; queer, mixed, diasporic, blended across nations and languages, and yet we’re often forced to simplify ourselves just to be seen.

All over the world, people are navigating systems that were never designed to hold them.

We’re asked to prove ourselves through documents, DNA, pronouns, and papers just to be acknowledged as real. And when we don’t fit, we’re erased.

But being erased on paper doesn’t mean we vanish. It means we adapt. We build outside the margins. We write ourselves back in.

I’ve met others in the Czech diaspora, people whose ancestors left for survival, whose cultural memories live in kitchens, lullabies, and Sunday dinners. I’ve met trans people who’ve been denied legal gender recognition but still live in full, joyful expression.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re the quiet norm for many of us.

What ties them together is a pattern: states treating identity like a checklist, and belonging like a limited resource. You’re only recognised if you arrived soon enough, stayed close enough, and looked simple enough to process.

But real identity, real belonging, is messier than that. It’s built on relationships, care, and resistance. It’s something we claim, not something we request.

Choosing Belonging on Our Terms: “Reclaiming, Regardless”

I may not hold a Czech passport. I may not have legal proof of my identity.

But I have something just as real:
A name spoken in many languages.
Recipes passed down from Polish, Italian, and Czech kitchens.
A voice shaped by queer resilience and intergenerational survival.
A life lived in joyful defiance of reduction.

I belong to no single country, and yet I belong to many.

I come from migrants and memory-keepers, people who crossed oceans and borders, who adapted and rebuilt.

My ancestry isn’t singular. It’s layered.

I’m not just Czech. I’m not just queer. I’m not just one thing.

And none of us are.

I’m reclaiming my heritage, not because I was granted permission, but because it’s mine.
I’m reclaiming my queerness, not because a system validates it, but because I exist.

And I’ll keep reclaiming, regardless.

If you’ve ever been told you’re too mixed, too queer, too distant, too much, know this:
You are not alone.
You do not need a government’s affirmation to be whole.
You do not need a document to belong.

Your story matters.
Your identity is real.
And your belonging is yours to define.

🌍 Further Reading + Reflection

Original Article on Expats.cz

• Diaspora – A scattered community connected by memory, not borders

• Legal Recognition – What happens when the law sees you—and when it doesn’t

• Chosen Family – The people we claim as kin when bloodlines or states fall short