Viktor Frankl and meaning after suffering

Viktor Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. He was imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz and camps connected to Dachau, where his wife, parents and brother were killed.

That history has to be approached carefully.

The Holocaust was a genocide, not a metaphor for every form of human suffering. Queer and trans pain should not be directly compared to Frankl’s experience or to the systematic murder of six million Jewish people. Learning from Frankl requires historical humility. His story is not ours to borrow carelessly.

What we can do is listen to the question he carried out of that horror:

When almost everything has been taken from a person, what remains?

Frankl believed that human beings are driven by a need for meaning. We need to feel that our lives are connected to something: love, responsibility, work, creativity, service, beauty, faith, community or a future that still needs us.

He did not argue that suffering is good. He did not say trauma automatically makes us stronger. He did not say everything happens for a reason. His deeper argument was that even when suffering cannot be undone, the person is not necessarily reduced to what happened to them.

That distinction matters deeply to me as a trans person and as a coming out coach.

So many queer and trans people have been taught to understand ourselves primarily through injury.

We become the child who was rejected. The teenager who was bullied. The person who left the church. The trans person forced to wait. The queer person who lost family. The survivor who learned to disappear.

Those experiences shape us. We should never minimize that. Trauma is not something we can simply think our way out of. It can live in the body, the nervous system, relationships and the way we anticipate danger.

But Frankl offers us a quiet refusal: You are not only what happened to you.

Your suffering may be part of your story, but it does not have to become the complete meaning of your life. That does not require us to forgive everyone. It does not require gratitude for what harmed us. It does not require turning pain into an inspirational performance.

It simply asks whether life may still contain something beyond the wound.

Maybe that meaning is found in building the family you needed when you were younger.

Maybe it is speaking openly so someone else feels less alone.

Maybe it is making art, changing policy, raising children differently, caring for your community or learning to receive love without believing you must earn it through suffering.

Frankl’s lesson is not that the pain was meaningful. It is that your life remains meaningful, even after pain. That is a much kinder and more honest idea.

Jean-Paul Sartre and the freedom to become

Frankl’s work left me asking what meaning I could make from my life.

Sartre forced me to ask what I was going to do with it.

Jean-Paul Sartre was a French philosopher, novelist and playwright who became one of the best-known voices of existentialism. His most famous idea is expressed in the phrase:

“Existence precedes essence.”

In plain language, Sartre means that human beings are not born with a complete, predetermined purpose that tells us exactly who we must become.

A tool is designed for a purpose before it is made. Its essence comes first.

Human beings are different.

We arrive first. Then, through our choices, actions, relationships, commitments and refusals, we participate in becoming who we are.

For queer and trans people, this idea can feel like someone opening a window in a room that has been locked for years. Because we are constantly told that essence comes first.

You were born with this body, so this is who you must be.

You were given this name, so this is who you are.

Your family expected this future, so this is the life you should want.

Your religion has defined your love, so this is what your love must mean.

Sartre interrupts that entire structure.

He says you are not an object with a purpose assigned by someone else.

You are a person still becoming. Now and always.

That does not mean we choose every part of ourselves or every condition of our lives. We do not choose where we are born, what kind of family raises us, whether we experience disability, how much money we have, what prejudices surround us or what forms of violence threaten us.

Sartre understood that we are born into circumstances we did not create. But he also believed we are never entirely reducible to those circumstances.

Something in us can still respond.

Something can question.

Something can refuse.

Something can imagine a different future.

This is why Sartre described freedom as both a gift and a burden. He wrote that human beings are “condemned to be free.”

We did not choose to exist, but once we are here, we have to make choices. Even refusing to decide is still a kind of decision. For queer and trans people, this can be both liberating and terrifying.

Coming out is a choice, but it happens within conditions.

Transitioning involves choices, but those choices are shaped by access to care, finances, family support, location and safety.

Living openly can be freeing, but openness can also carry real consequences.

This is where Sartre’s idea of “bad faith” becomes useful—and where it must be handled gently.

Bad faith is the act of hiding from our own freedom by pretending we are only the role we have been assigned. Queer people may recognize that feeling. It can be the moment when we realize we are still performing a version of ourselves that was built to protect us.

We laugh at the joke so nobody becomes suspicious.

We accept the wrong name because correcting someone feels exhausting.

We build a life around what our family can tolerate rather than what allows us to breathe.

We convince ourselves that we do not want love, community or truth because wanting them feels too dangerous.

But I would never use Sartre to condemn someone for staying in the closet.

Sometimes hiding is not cowardice. It is survival.

Sometimes a role protects us until we have the resources to leave it.

Sometimes freedom must begin privately, as the knowledge that another life is possible, long before it can be lived publicly.

As a coming out coach, I do not believe authenticity means recklessly telling everyone everything. I believe coming out should happen on your terms, in your time and with honest attention to safety.

Sartre’s question is not necessarily, “Why haven’t you come out?”

A more compassionate question is:

Is the life you built for survival still protecting you, or has it begun to imprison you?

That is a question only you can answer.

Simone de Beauvoir and freedom under real conditions

Sartre gives us a powerful idea: we are free, and we participate in creating ourselves.

But that raises an obvious problem.

What happens when the world punishes people for using their freedom?

Simone de Beauvoir was a French philosopher, feminist, novelist and Sartre’s lifelong intellectual partner. For years, she was wrongly treated as if she merely repeated Sartre’s philosophy. In reality, she challenged and expanded it.

Sartre told us we are free. De Beauvoir asked what freedom actually looks like for people whose bodies and identities have already been assigned social meanings.

Her landmark book, The Second Sex, contains one of the most important sentences in modern feminist philosophy: 

“One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”

De Beauvoir was not saying bodies do not matter. She was saying a body does not arrive with one simple social meaning attached to it.

Society teaches people what their bodies are supposed to mean.

It teaches children how they should dress, speak, move, love and imagine their futures. It rewards some expressions and punishes others. It tells us which parts of ourselves are natural and which are unacceptable.

In other words, gender is not only something inside a person. It is also a social process.

Everyone undergoes that process.

Cisgender people become gendered too. 

They are taught how to perform masculinity or femininity, which emotions are acceptable, which clothes belong to them, which relationships are expected and which future they should pursue.

Cisgender becoming is usually treated as “natural” because it follows the “approved path”.

Trans becoming is treated as “artificial” because it makes the process visible.

De Beauvoir was not writing modern trans theory, and we should not pretend she was. Her work came from a particular feminist and historical context. But her idea of becoming gives us language for something trans people understand very clearly:

The gender assigned to us was never only a biological observation. It arrived with an entire social script.

Transition can therefore be understood not as escaping reality, but as participating more honestly in our own becoming.

De Beauvoir also wrote about how women were made into the “Other.” Men were treated as the default human being. Women were treated as a variation, a “secondary category” defined in relation to men.

Queer and trans people experience a similar structure.

Straight people are simply people. Queer people must explain themselves.

Cis people are simply people. Trans people must provide proof.

A heterosexual relationship is treated as ordinary. A queer relationship becomes political.

A cis person’s understanding of their gender is accepted as obvious. A trans person’s understanding of theirs is treated as a claim requiring debate.

This is what Othering does.

It places one group at the centre and forces everyone else to live as a variation from the norm.

De Beauvoir helps us understand that liberation cannot depend only on personal courage. 

Freedom requires conditions.

A teenager cannot simply choose freedom if honesty will make them homeless.

A trans person cannot access bodily autonomy through willpower when health care is unavailable.

A disabled queer person cannot “overcome” inaccessible services by becoming more authentic.

A racialized queer person does not experience identity outside racism.

An Indigenous Two-Spirit person does not experience gender and sexuality outside the ongoing realities of colonialism.

A person living in poverty does not have the same menu of choices as someone with financial security.

This is where de Beauvoir corrects any shallow version of existentialism.

Yes, our choices matter. But so do the conditions in which those choices are made.

What these philosophers offer queer and trans people in Canada

When I place these three thinkers together, I hear three different questions.

Frankl asks:

What meaning can I make from what I have survived?

Sartre asks:

Where am I still allowing someone else to define my life?

De Beauvoir asks:

What conditions shaped my choices, and what must change for freedom to become real?

I think queer and trans people in Canada need all three questions.

We need Frankl because legal progress does not erase grief. Many of us are still carrying family rejection, shame, medical trauma, bullying and years spent hiding. We need a way of saying that our lives remain meaningful without pretending the harm was necessary.

We need Sartre because rights alone cannot tell us how to live. At some point, each of us faces the question of what we will do with the life that is ours. Not the life our parents imagined. Not the life our church permitted. Not the life strangers find easiest to understand.

Our life.

And we need de Beauvoir because queer liberation cannot be reduced to individual bravery. Pride cannot become a demand that every person expose themselves to danger. Coming out cannot become a moral test. Authenticity cannot become another standard people fail when they lack safety or support.

Freedom is personal, but liberation is collective.

That means creating families where children do not have to earn belonging.

It means making gender-affirming care genuinely accessible.

It means building schools where queer and trans students are not treated as political problems.

It means defending human rights before they are weakened, not only after they are lost.

It means making housing, employment, public life and health care safer.

It means understanding that a right on paper is only the beginning.

Coming out is not the end of becoming

People often talk about coming out as if it is one moment.

You say the words. You tell the truth. The door opens. The music rises. Your real life begins.

Sometimes it feels like that. Often, it does not.

Coming out can be slow. It can happen repeatedly. It can involve joy, grief, relief, fear and loss at the same time. It can reveal who is willing to grow with us and who was only comfortable with the version of us they had already imagined.

And even after coming out, the work of becoming continues.

We still have to ask what we believe.

We still have to decide what kind of relationships we want.

We still have to examine which survival patterns remain necessary and which are preventing us from living.

We still have to build meaning.

That is why these philosophers matter to me.

Frankl reminds me that I am more than what I have survived.

Sartre reminds me that I am more than the role I was assigned.

De Beauvoir reminds me that becoming myself was never only an act of personal will. It depended on people, systems and conditions—and my freedom now carries a responsibility to help create better conditions for others.

That, to me, is queer spirituality.

It is not pretending our suffering was sacred.

It is recognizing that our lives still are.

It is the work of making meaning without glorifying pain.

Claiming freedom without denying oppression.

Becoming ourselves without abandoning one another.

Queer and trans people are not only surviving what tried to erase us.

We are creating families, language, art, community, political movements, rituals, care networks and new ways of understanding what a human life can be.

We are still becoming. And we are helping make it possible for others to become too.