Coming Out
As a queer youth myself, I feel like adding my own story onto all the others. In the interest of keeping my story short, I won’t go into too much detail of how I came out as Trans and polysexual. I believe I came out as Trans first. Before I even knew the concept of social expectations, I was forced into them. My mother constantly told me “boys have to do this!” or that I was acting too much like a girl. From early on, that always annoyed me. Once I had immigrated to Canada, I started to learn of the expectations that society puts on people of all genders. The least expectations are given to the males. This is followed by those who do not identify as a man or a woman. Then there are the females and finally, those who choose to identify outside of the gender binary and the Trans people who do identify within the binary. All of these things, I never knew, however. I didn’t become more aware of these until later. I started out as a homophobe and transphobe myself. I never really understood what those really meant. I simply made fun of gay people because others did. Eventually, I started to question why it was bad. I decided myself that it wasn’t. Everyone else around me thought otherwise, so I decided not to question it, to remain normal. When coming out as gay opens you up to so much ridicule, I don’t think people are too open to admit it. Around the 10th grade, I went to a social website called tumblr. It was a fun past-time and I enjoyed exploring the website. This is when I learned about transgender people. I was ignorant to that before. I thought Trans people getting surgery was gross and thought they were men just trying to experience female bodies. Tr*nny is a slur I am ashamed to have used. However, after discovering that being Trans isn’t just a sick fetish people have, I was more open to the idea. Eventually, I started to question myself. I felt more attached to the identity of femininity rather than masculinity. I questioned myself for a long time and eventually, I found out that I was in-fact not cisgender. I was transgender. It took a while to come out to people and tell them that I was trans. It took a lot of courage too. In the end, I did it. I told them all. I came out as polysexual after coming out as pansexual. I came out as pansexual because after realizing I was Trans, I immediately realized that my interests did not lie solely to females. I decided on polysexual later because I was never really attracted to any boys sexually. I found out these things about myself after finding out that they existed. I feel like people shelter their children too much from these things and don’t let them explore. Finding yourself is hard. Realizing your identity isn’t easy by any means. I think that if more people were aware of trans people, all the sexualities and genders that exist, more people would identify with those terms.