Oh boy this is long aren’t you excited?
I’m 15 and me and most of my friends at school are queer. A lot of my friends are bi/pan, nonbinary and/or asexual and I have one friend who is a trans boy. I’m sort of at a questioning phase with my gender and sexuality. For now, I identify as genderfluid and gyneromantic asexual, but things could change because its still hard for me to understand my feelings for girls, whether they are platonic, romantic or sexual. My gender is always a pain too. For a while I considered I could be a boy, for a while I felt I was agender, etc and it changes a lot so thats why I just identify as genderfluid.
I’ve come out as far as sexuality goes to my mom. It was hard because even though she is and always has been accepting of gays, she still just wrote it off as a phase, or said “Ok but wait until you are older you might change your mind.” And as for asexuality she thought that was totally impossible. She even at first said “I know you like boys,” which made me incredibly angry. What would she know of who I like? I have never liked boys, I only forced myself to because I thought I had to, and because my mom would never stop asking who I liked.
My mom had trouble at first and is still not always entirely convinced, but she is much better at accepting that this is (or might be) who I am. I feel like, she just had to get over that mourning phase, the mourning over my future son in-law that will never exist, the prom dates, wedding and children I’ll never have and mourning of the daughter she thought I’d be. She had to get over that and realize, its ok, because she still has me, and that with just me or with me and some other kind of signifigant other it will be ok. I haven’t told her my gender because I’m afraid she’ll think its silly like she did with asexuality.
As for my dad, I still haven’t come out to him, but he could be suspecting. He’s homophobic. He doesn’t think so. He thinks because he isn’t “hurting them” and he lets them live their life, but if it were up to him they wouldn’t be able to get married. He thinks its wrong because of his religion, he had said he thinks it is a mental illness, and he has said “I can only be tollerant of them to a certain degeee.” He is even more transphobic. But I know that he loves me more than he hates LGBT people, and I hope that even though it will be hard, it will open his eyes to who queers really are. People.
When I heard about Leelah, it was when it just happened and I saw things on tumblr. There weren’t very many notes on the couple posts about her. It seemed like, just another LGBT suicide… Sad isn’t it? I was devastated, but it seemed like nothing new, because frankly it happens all the damn time on tumblr. It shouldn’t be this way… I should be shocked by Leelah’s story, it should be something rare and unexpected but it just wasn’t. There is always some crisis where people are trying to find out if someone is ok, because they posted something suicidal and haven’t been heard of. Tumblr is just full of LGBT youth… So many… And we see it all the time, the depression, the struggles, and the deaths. But the first thing Leelah made me think of was my trans friend, as well as other trans people I follow. People are depressed and facing homophobia and transphobia so often on my tumblr dashboard, Leelah could have been any of them. I looked through Leelah’s blog, beyond the suicidal things to her art, interests, opinions and her life and it was just mind blowing how much her blog was like mine and other people I know, how she was just another one of us. It reminded me how at every moment my friends and all of us in this LGBT comunity we are vunerable and attacked, at at any given moment another one of us could fall. And fall they have, and falling they still are. Its hard enough being young, there already are enough teens committing suicide, but being queer makes it so so much harder and death so much more common. A trans boy on my dash who posted a note and took pills who was fortunatly found, but who still is angry they lived. An agender person on a game I was on who was being misgendered, called she even after being asked to be called they, and harrassed, being asked repeatedly to talk into the mic so they could tell if they had a “boy” or “girl” voice, who then left and said they were going to kill themself. I have spent too long urgently searching for people who can contact the LGBT youths who have bid farewell, too long praying that someone makes it to them and they don’t die. Not to mention the news stories posted every day. Another trans woman killed. Another trans women killed. Another and another. We need to end conversion therapy, but we need what Leelah asked for even more. Education. I want kids to know that they are ok how they are, and that their peers who are different are ok too. I don’t want kids confused their whole life because they’ve never heard of people like them, and I don’t want kids being hated and misunderstood by their own friends and families. I want change for me and my friends. I’m lucky I even have the support I have, so many kids like Leelah don’t. I don’t want to pray and cry for anymore kids who have left nothing for us but a note, because everyone said their lives weren’t worth as much as everyone elses, that they were wrong. I want to end the hatred through the education of the youth to be accepting, I want everyone to understand and support LGBT people, especially the youth.