lgbtq+

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Beyond Labels

Label the foundation of modern society. Why is labeling yourself or someone so important? Why does it matter so much to someone what my gender or sexuality is? I never really thought about this until recently and the more I think about it the more I question everything. When I was young, I always assumed I was a girl and straight but as I got older and learned more about myself, I learned that no I am not. I learned more about myself. I would describe myself as gender fluid, pansexual and asexual. At the same time labels are not that important to me when come to gender personally but as for sexuality it matter more because I have been with a man for a few years and because of this many people assume I am straight when I tell them I’m pan they seemed confused why I be with a man this irritates me internally because it make me feel like I am not a part of the LGBTQ+ community this way of thinking I have faced more by those in the community then thoughts outside of the community.

Until I started back at college in fall of 2023 when I met the amazing group of people I love dearly I always felt like an outsider I did not feel wanted in the LGBTQ+ community nor the straight people community I felt like I was just drifting in space in a way, this not feeling like I belong the more I go to therapy and work on myself the ,ore I realized this sense of not belonging truly affected me. In the book nonbinary I relate with many of the stories although myself am not nonbinary the questioning of faith and the not feeling like I belong and the questioning of why labeling matters so much. No matter if you feel labels are important to you personally or not, I think things like this should be spoken about more in society, so people like me and many others know they are not alone and feel like they belong somewhere in this strange world we live in.

Pansexual and Genderfluid flag.

Be your authentic self always

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“You’re not a girl!”

After reading “Throwing like girl’ and listening to everyone’s stories about how they grew up being treated as less than a girl or too much like a girl by their male peers had me thinking about my experiences when I was a kid and how I was treated just because I had different interests from other girls and had the same interests as some boys.

I remember in elementary school all the girls would play and talk about boys under the playground, but me I was that one girl on the basketball court or the football field trying to show out and out play the boys. Now this came with a lot of difficulties for me because at some points the boys would go easy on me and be like “well you’re a girl and I don’t want to hurt you”. But on the other hand they would undermine my skills in the sport after I beat them by saying “I went easy on you so I don’t hurt your feelings” now both of these sayings would hurt my feelings pretty bad and would make me feel like I truly couldn’t be apart of their little sports groups so it would push me away a little bit to try and hang out with the girls thinking that it would be different but come to find out I was very wrong about that.

As I gravitated under the playground so I could talk with the girls, it very quickly showed me just how uninterested I was in what they were talking about. All of the conversations consisted of them talking about how good the boys looked playing basketball or what new dress their mom bought them that week . And little old me would just sit there and listen and soon after all the girls started realizing that I wasn’t speaking in any of their conversations so they started to catch on and tried to single me out just as much as the boys. It got worse for me when we played this “girls vs boys” which was any game but with girls on one side and boys on the other, I would try and join the girls team when we would do this and the first thing I would hear was “you’re not a girl” and they would force me to be on the boys team completely altering the way I thought and I would try to change myself and act like I liked boys to please them.

Honestly as time went on the playing with boys part left after middle school and I was able to play sports freely in high school but the way that girls felt about me never fully changed because once I entered 10th grade I started becoming more masculine as I found myself so if anything it got worse. Girls wouldn’t let me say the word bitch, some girls didn’t want to change in front of me, I couldn’t be feminine, I couldn’t talk about periods because they “forgot” I got them and definitely couldn’t wear anything remotely feminine or I would get weird looks. They basically looked at me as a man and put me into a box but let me try and switch it up and be feminine it was always a problem so in the end I could never win. But as I got older I stopped caring what people had to say and it let me be as expressive as I want to be and happy in my body, masculinity and femininity.

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Being Bisexual

I don’t feel like I am a part of the LGBTQ+ community, even though the “B” stands for bisexual. I am a bisexual female in a very happy and healthy relationship with a cis male. I see posts everywhere that make me question whether I am bisexual or not just because I happen to be in a relationship with a man. It’s a complex feeling, because I am attracted to both men and women; but have only been in two relationships, both with men. I struggled for a while fully coming to terms with my sexuality and didn’t understand at first that the feelings I got towards some women had the ability to be more than platonic. I think some part of me felt shame. Not in the sense it was wrong to have romantic feelings towards women, but shame in the sense of having the fear of being fetishized. So while some people make me feel like an invalid part of the community, I contribute to making myself feel that way. I do understand that me being with a man means that I do not experience the struggles that those who have partners of the same sex sometimes do (homophobia, general hate, nasty looks). I’m not sure how I can go about feeling more included and accepted within a group I support with my whole heart, when I feel so fake. I hope that this post makes some bit of sense.

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Trans Doubt and Acceptance (9/25)


TW: dysphoria

I am trans… or am I??? Part of me knows that I undeniably am. I have had dysphoria for years, although I did not know what dysphoria was or even what being transgender meant. But even still, that tiny voice in the back of my mind likes to sow seeds of doubt in my thoughts. Maybe it’s denial, internalized transphobia, fear, or some other mix of emotions.

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