LGBTQ+

Yeah, I'm in my 30s and I remember how wildly different it was when I was young. There's still a lot to be done but seeing the general shift toward acceptance is nice (where I am at least).

Yeah I'm in my 40's and nonbinary, but I didn't really understand it until relatively recently. I've always known I didn't fit into my assigned gender, but nobody knew what the fuck "nonbinary" was in the 80's (let alone here in Finland, which is still really conservative compared to the saner Nordics) so naturally I just got beat up for being different. I even dressed in gender-conforming ways but I didn't act the part well enough so people naturally needed to correct that with more violence.

The conservative pieces of shit who insist that all these "new genders" and sexual orientations are just a recent invention and in the good old days men were men and women were women are the same ones who were beating us up and even killing us just a few decades ago (not that they've stopped doing that…)

I didn't just suddenly decide to become an enby; I've always been one, but I didn't even have the words for any of this until this stuff became more mainstream. And then they have the gall to act like this is all a choice, like I'd fucking choose to be something that means bigots will literally want to murder me for it. First they insist that I'm not doing my assigned gender right and I'm not a real {GENDER}, and then when I finally say "you know what, you're completely right, I'm not". Can't fucking win with them, can we?

I came out when I was 14 - 26 years ago (albeit as bisexual, because I didn't know the right words yet) and I felt safe enough to do it because I knew my parents would be supportive, but in the broader world, what I mostly got was, "you're saying that for attention," and a lot of gross comments from teenage boys, and that was far less awful than what queer boys got, if they were even able to be out. And then Matthew Shepard was killed the next year a couple of hours from where I lived and it was like oh fuck, maybe I'll just stick to boys because it's not as safe as I thought.

I know kids aren't always safe now, either, and no one in the LGBTQ+ community is safe in many parts of the world, but it really is so different already. We just have to make sure they know how much better it is, and how much better it still could be, and don't get complacent, because we could be back to hiding the love(s) of our lives very quickly.

It’s odd how much things change and how much they stay the same. An interesting, difficult to notice language shift amongst kids is the complete absence of context for some pejorative uses of “gay.” For instance, the catchall rejection “no way, that’s gay” would elicit confusion first and possibly indignation after. However, other pejorative uses of “gay” still exist, for instance conflating homosexuality with femininity, with femininity having a negative connotation. It’s a partial extinction of meaning and I kinda love it.

All of that to say, the future is looking up in select ways and I’m all about those minuscule victories.

I'm noticing quite the same with vegetarianism. I became vegetarian around 15 years ago, when it was still a marginalized group of people. Somehow also particularly as a man, my eating habits felt like a personal affront to other men, at least based on their reaction.

I generally don't tell people these days, if I can avoid it, despite having had multiple colleagues that were openly vegetarian/vegan. Like, at one point, I felt like the outsider, because I had three veggie colleagues discussing veggie food and I felt like I couldn't participate without blowing my cover, so to speak.
Fucking ridiculous, the amount of emotional abuse one goes through, for not wanting to eat meat or liking humans.