02/11/2026
“Your partner isn’t invited.” “We forgot to book you a ticket for the family vacation.” “You’re only dating a trans guy to spite me.”
These are sentences I’ve heard, or that people I work with have heard. Maybe you’ve heard one yourself. Maybe, at some point, you’ve said one.
Sentences like these launch enormous pain. Whoever receives them hears the shock arrive, and feels it. A kind of floating in space, senses gone. Disconnection. Like a blast wave of silence, travelling at the speed of sound and slamming into the eardrum. Shock.
The mind shields you from the pain. Holds it. Waits.
The meaning echoes: you’re outside the flock. A black sheep.
According to a 2025 study, nearly 4 in 10 American adults are estranged from a close family member. Being rejected by your family is not a minor or marginal experience. Still, we are social animals. We need others to survive and to grow. And when you step outside a social convention, the people closest to you may push you out of the system. Point at you as the black sheep. Not belonging.
The pain launched at the black sheep is a distillation of the fear and dread of whoever casts it out. Someone who couldn’t hold their own fear of being cast out, and decided, not necessarily consciously, to pack all that dread up and load it onto the scapegoat. To part ways. The black sheep, the scapegoat, carry the flock’s pain and are sent out with it. A sacrifice in the hope that the camp stays pure.
The fear of being left outside. Of not belonging.
Who among us hasn’t felt that at some point? What did we do with that fear?
Language does it too. In some places people prefer to replace “black sheep” with “renegade,” a word that makes the sheep responsible for its own exclusion.
Of course, non of this works.
Time to pause for a very short story. In 1863, Darwin’s cousin wrote to him about a strange flock in which every ewe gave birth to black lambs, though the ewes and the ram were white. However hard the owners tried to breed white to white, the next generation was born with dark, black wool. Not good for business. A black sheep gets pulled from the flock because people can’t dye it the colours that suit them. That, they say, is where the term comes from. Not because the flock rejects it, but because it isn’t profitable to people.
So it isn’t the flock that sends out the scapegoat. It’s a group of frightened people. And it isn’t the flock that removes the black sheep. Again, it’s people who want things to run efficiently.
And who is the shepherd? The shepherd is the norm. The fear of failure, of loss, and of the ultimate threat since the dawn of humanity: being cast out, alone, helpless.
Even today, after years of effort and research, at least 3% of Australia’s Merino flock will always carry the gene for black wool.
The black sheep won’t take the dye. Just like parts of us that simply won’t bend to society’s needs.
The black sheep won’t take the dye. Just like parts of us that simply won’t bend to society’s needs. That stay conspicuous, out of place in the landscape, however hard society tries to erase them. This unsettles every attempt at control and order, and leaves one possibility we can’t escape: it’s this strong simply because it’s part of society itself. And maybe that’s what threatens most: the black sheep is evidence. Undeniable evidence of the parts society tries to smooth over and hide.
I know that using “black sheep,” let alone Darwin and genetics, can be problematic when talking about q***rness. I’m not explaining q***rness through biology. I’m looking at a phenomenon, as an example of the system we live in: a system that isn’t uniform or homogeneous, and has no way of becoming so.
Queerness exists in all of us as a quality. This isn’t a statement about particular people, but about society itself. To be part of human society is to carry its q***r parts in us. In some of us they’re distinct and conspicuous; in others, comfortable and soft. Where do you feel yours? For me, I feel it in my throat when I remember school: the boys sent to woodshop, the girls to home economics.
Back to the flock for a moment. Say a few thousand sheep. Try counting them all. In the past, every flock had a few sheep that weren’t white, and those were the ones the shepherd counted. That’s how he knew: if one of them went missing, a few white ones had surely wandered off with it. When the fences went up and farming became more industrial, the non-white sheep were killed as lambs.
As long as there were sheep of other colours in the flock, you could tell who was missing and who was there. They were evidence of the flock’s edges, and of what lies past them.
An open system needs them. When the system closes and fences itself in, they’re killed, and the evidence is lost.
All of us carry unique qualities that society struggles to understand and accept. That experience holds pain, and meeting it is an opening toward personal and social expansion.
Black wool, spotted wool, wool covered in glitter if you like: that is exactly what places the sheep in the flock, in the system. It belongs to the system because it’s different. In systemic constellation work, everyone belongs to the system. Including those who were cast out. With no need to make them fit.
Through q***r constellation work, the black sheep’s place in the system comes into view: it stays as it is, and invites the system to widen and grow. That’s why I choose to work with this term, “black sheep.” The black sheep holds immense possibilities.
What sentence did you hear? Or maybe say?
On November 9 and 15, 2026 I’m hosting online introductory workshops in q***r constellation work. Perhaps a few black sheep will meet there and find their place. All are welcome.
In the photo: A member of my own chosen family of black sheep.
Photo: Shat Ben Efraim, Queerhana 2003
