Throughout my childhood, I consistently felt threatened by the masculine figures around me. I remember one day, after being shoved around on the playground, I ran to my dad crying, asking that he teach me to stand up for myself. Seeing this fear as childlike and unwarranted, my father chuckled and told me that “that’s just how boys are.” That’s when I learned what being a boy meant.
I remember the first time I was ever told by someone that a space was “girls only.” My best friend Courtney had constructed a pillow fort during a play-date and had barred me from entry. “Didn’t you read the sign?” she jested “Girls rule, boys drool! You can’t come in, you’re a boy!” I can clearly recall the frustration of knowing she was wrong, but not yet having the language to express why. It was harrowing to come to the realization that I wasn’t like any of the boys around me, yet I’d never fit in with girls.
This realization quickly exposed itself as a falsehood when, in third grade, I was teased relentlessly about my all-girl friend group. I remember one day, to escape from the onslaught of kids’ jeers, one of my friends, Izzy, pulled me into the bathroom with her. At the time, neither of us thought anything of this decision until another of my friends walked in and exclaimed “he can’t be in here!” While this experience was another of exclusion from women’s spaces, it brought me comfort that, at least for a moment, neither I nor Izzy had remembered that people typically saw me as a boy.
I could carry on for pages discussing the several ways in which I concluded that I was transgender. However, in a surprising twist, my sexuality was far harder for me to figure out. Gender is all encompassing and in your face. However, when you are like me, sexuality is mere background noise. My most pertinent memory in regards to discovering my sexuality was when watching TV with a friend. She had pointed towards the screen and proclaimed “wow, she’s so pretty, right?” in reference to an actress on-screen. I gulped and meekly replied “I don’t find anybody pretty.” After two years had passed, she came out as a lesbian and I came out as a demisexual.
My journey in discovering my sexuality didn’t end there. Far later was when I had my first crush. It was on a friend of mine who had recently come out as a trans guy. I remember thinking “if I perceive this crush as straight, then it implies I see him as a girl, which I know I don’t… but I don’t think I’m gay.” This moral dilemma troubled 13 year old me greatly. I had hardly begun to accept that I might not be male. Now I had to figure out how I perceived the genders of those around me? I knew internally that he was a guy, but did I see him as such? If so, why did I feel so uneasy with the term gay? Was I just a gay guy with internalized homophobia? Was I a transphobe who was neglecting the legitimacy of my friend’s identity? Would I stop asking rhetorical questions and just get to the point already because you are tired of reading this 4 page paper? I didn’t have answers to any of those questions until after extensive conversations with the person who I had a crush on. I finally realized I was straight, but not because I saw him as a girl. Rather, because I saw myself as one.
A large part of my confusion around gender and sexuality was a direct result of the absence of education surrounding it. Throughout my K-12 schooling, the furthest we learned in-class was the STD rates of various sexualities during our sex-ed unit in health class. The statistics with which we were presented mysteriously excluded lesbians. It contained “straight men,” “straight women,” “bisexual men,” “bisexual women,” and “gay men.” Upon asking my teacher why lesbians were not included, she exhibited a lot of confusion as to what the word “lesbian” meant. I told my (extremely queer) counsellor about this and she promptly sent a strongly worded email to the health teacher. The next class, either out of ignorance or spite, the health teacher taught us about Patient Zero, the singular gay man who supposedly brought AIDS to America.
Fortunately, the lack of proper LGBTQ+ education in our school began to change as, in my senior year of high school, I was made the leader of our school’s GSA. Determined to help my LGBTQ+ classmates get informed about our community, I turned the club into a sort of class on varying aspects of LGBTQ+ identities. I eventually ended up making a website where anyone, whether members of the club or not, can access all the material discussed during our GSA’s meetings.
As a result of the experiences shared in the safe space of that GSA, a lot of my opinions on LGBTQ+ civil rights began to shift. I was formerly a sturdy advocate of the phrase “Love is Love,” as, at the time, I wanted cisgender heterosexual people to know that us queer and trans folks were just like them. However, after meeting extremely outspoken and non-passing queer and trans people, I began to realize that there was beauty in being queer (which here refers to its meaning as “odd or unusual”).
Nowadays, I see the most important goals of the LGBTQ+ to be public normalization and acceptance. Not assimilation. I don’t want to be “tolerated.” I don’t want cisgender heterosexual people to look at me and say “oh I understand, you and I have a lot in common. You’re transgender, and you’re transitioning to look like us.” No, I want to be accepted because of my differences, not in spite of them. To me, the day that those differences are finally normalized is the day that I will no longer neglect to talk in public for fear that my voice will reveal my transgender status. All I want is for LGBTQ+ people and our culture to simply be accepted as is. Trust me, I know that this is unrealistic. In our current America, there are people who will hate anybody different from themselves. However, our inability to reach this ideal should not be used as justification to never strive for it. The closer we get to being seen as normal- not being seen as “the same as everyone else,” but normal- the closer we get to allowing LGBTQ+ people to be ourselves.
