as small as a world and as large as alone

4:30pm June 1, 2015

clatterbane:

As an indication of what a garbage nightmare in general the school system I spent 10 years in was, in side by side middle and high schools with about 600-700 students total? There was one kid who was out as gay the whole time I was there.

ONE. Who couldn’t have hidden worth a damn, if they had tried. Things were about as bad for that person as you might expect.

I mean, a lot of the rest of us who were indeed not cishet and getting a lot of harassment did group together. But, it was bad enough without being openly out in that environment.

(And I think I heard that C. who was out then, is actually trans. Not totally sure, thus the generic they. Not to degender, but I don’t want to misgender people even if they don’t know about it and probably don’t even remember who I am after all this time.)

Yeah there was only one out gay kid in my high school too.  I was gay and so was the guy everyone thought I should be dating (and yes I did eventually date a guy, but he wasn’t gay, I was just heavily closeted and confused about my attraction to women and nonbinary people at that point in my life) and he said he’d been bullied a lot for being fat and for being gay (possibly without the gay part being explicit), but he’d never seen anyone bullied the amount I was.

I don’t know how much the out gay guy was bullied, but he ended up transferring to a famous elite east coast prep school (yes I went to a high school where everyone but me and my friend seemed to be rich people who could do things like that, they were always talking about flying to Paris and shit like it was just something you do, and it was awkward and weird class-wise), and then he had to leave because of “stress”, which I wonder if it was a code word for being mercilessly bullied.  The only thing I remember of how he was treated when he was still at my school, was someone saying something like “He only reads that gay magazine in public because he wants to flaunt how out he is so everyone can see he’s gay every minute of the day.”  When there was an openly gay guy in Junior Statesmen of America (don’t even ask why I joined) I heard everyone saying similar things, like “He only gets the attention he gets because he’s gay, not because he’s a good debater.  He just uses it to get attention and fame and stuff.”  Like I wonder if these people knew what it was like to even be a deeply closeted gay or trans person.

Oh and the JSA guy?  Amazing speaker, amazing charisma, totally not because he was gay.  Yes he was in the gay marriage debate.  Yes he talked about how he wanted to meet a beautiful man and then marry him.  And his speech was amazing with or without a personal connection, not that the personal connection didn’t help, but… not the way these people meant.  It just made it more compelling because he wasn’t talking about abstract theories, he was talking about real people’s lives.

The guy in my high school was also an amazing public speaker and had been student body president of my junior high, but I don’t remember if he was in JSA or not.  My only involvement in JSA was a totally embarrassing moment where I got accused yet again of being on drugs (everyone’s go-to answer for my more flagrantly autistic moments) for showing up at a marijuana legalization debate with my entire speech planned out in my head… but I had neglected to translate it into words and found myself going nonverbal during a marijuana debate in front of hundreds of people.  I had those weird social-awkwardness-flashback things for over a decade after that, in which I’d find myself repetitively blurting out things I’d meant to say but couldn’t at the time, or things other people did say at the time.

Wow, high school memories.  For only being in mainstream high school for all of three months (but being allowed back for JSA and JCL – Junior Classical League, basically Latin club, just like JSA was a glorified debate club with a pretentious name, but JCL was less pretentious too and more fun) I got a lot of bullying in, and a lot of it was for being autistic (even if they didn’t know to call it that – someone who knew me back then, when I told him I’d been diagnosed, had a three-word answer – “that explains everything”), but a lot of it was also a gender thing that manifested as both transphobic and homophobic remarks 

(And sometimes transmisogynistic remarks, because some people were constantly implying I was something like a “boy in disguise as a girl”, possibly because of a “sex change”, and those phrases I just used should tell you how little they know about what being trans means.  For the record I’m FAAB and genderless, but just like I was mistaken for other kinds of disabled than I am sometimes, I’ve also been mistaken for other kinds of trans than I am.   Especially by people almost totally ignorant of what trans means beyond this idea of “sex change operations”…) 

(Since even trans people who aren’t genderless sometimes don’t get genderlessness, I can’t imagine these people would, or would even care to.  I didn’t even get it at the time, though I worried that inside I might be male, because I had strong feelings of female not fitting ever since I fully discovered that gender existed at the age of seven or so, and it got worse at puberty.  It wasn’t until my twenties that, probably reinventing the wheel, I came up with the idea of genderlessness to describe what I was, and that was after a lot of soul-searching after noticing differences between me and other people who identified as FTM at the time – some of whom still do and some of whom, like me, discovered that there were other categories that fit us better.  And at the time I remember trying to come up with a word to describe my lack of gender identity, and settling on nongendered, which at the time I contrasted with both transgendered (which I thought always meant “identifying with some kind of gender, just not the one you were assigned at birth”, but which can also mean “not identifying with the gender you were assigned at birth”, it just depends on who you ask) and cisgendered (which by definition always means identifying with a gender – the one you were assigned at birth).  I now strongly prefer genderless, a word which I had read in an article by Jane Meyerding but forgotten about until later.  As a word, it rolls off the tongue, or fingers, easier than any of the alternatives (nongendered feels slightly awkward, agender feels very awkward, and neutrois feels French).)     

4 notes