We Are Human

I have not always been as open minded and accepting of the LGTBQ community as I am now. It wasn't until about ten years ago that I became fully accepting of it. As a child and young teenager, I always listened to my dad and even agreed with him (to a certain extent) and his belief that homosexuality was wrong. I would even make jokes about the gay couple I saw at the movie theater or the gay couple I saw at the mall some eighteen odd years before.

Even though I myself, an assigned female at birth, had fallen in love with my best friend when I was thirteen, I still didn't fully accept or understand the LGBTQ community and therefore, by extension, myself.

I remember when I first realized that my feelings for my best friend went beyond normal friendship. I remember feeling, at first, confused by my feelings. I often found myself wondering "If I have feelings for her, but we're both girls, shouldn't I be a boy?” I’m sure many LGBT teens have felt the fear of what their classmates would think if they found out that they were gay or lesbian or trans. I however, for some reason, never even thought about that. Maybe it was because I didn’t know exactly what it meant to be gay. Or maybe it’s because I had been teased constantly in elementary school for my weight and the things I loved that no one else did at that school, like anime and video games, that by the time I got to middle school, I didn’t much care what people said about me. I had learned by then to ignore the teasing to the extent that I never heard what some of the other students said about me behind my back. I did, however, worry that there was something wrong with me. I wondered if something in my brain was broken. And while I didn’t much care what my classmates thought, I did care what my parents thought. And because of that, I desperately wanted to be “normal”. To be straight. I had no idea that it was even possible for two people of the same gender to love each other and I didn't understand that there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I knew absolutely nothing about transgendered people or non-binary or genderfluid people. Today, I identify not only as bisexual but also genderfluid. And with the help of my boyfriend and my other friends I have come to understand more and accept more. I am proud of who I am and I now fully believe that love has no boundaries. Love is love is love.

I think that a big part of coming to accept the LGBT community happened when I went to college. As a very sheltered child who went to an all-girls Catholic school for five years and then to a co-ed middle school where there were more boys than girls, I didn’t have much opportunity to learn about sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression. I was very shy as a child as a result of bullying so I stuck with the few friends, all female, I made in middle school throughout my four and a half years there. I almost never interacted with anyone outside of my little group. All of my friends were just as naïve as I was when it came to sex and related topics, so when I went to college and met so many different people, gay, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, it was like in all my favorite fantasy stories where suddenly the main character finds themself in a new, beautiful but unfamiliar world. Being able to talk with people who identified as LGBTQ, especially one of my professors, who was kind enough to invite me and a small group of her students to her house a couple of times, really helped me understand that there was nothing wrong about loving someone of your same gender. Seeing and hearing my professor talking about her life and her experiences, like meeting her partner and adopting their daughter, made me wonder why I had ever thought that love between two people could be wrong.

This realization has led me to not only be more accepting and open to others, but it has also led me to be more open and accepting of myself. I have made so many new friends, many of whom are gay, lesbian, trans, bi or even pansexual. I even have a boyfriend. The world is a big place. And by meeting these new people, becoming friends, learning new things and having new experiences, my world has expanded. I have become a better person because of my friends.

We are all human. Do our hearts not beat in our chests if we love someone of the same gender? Do we not all bleed red though our skin color is different? Do we not all have hopes and dreams and fears? Some of us may love people of their same gender. Some of us may have a different skin color. Some of us believe in a different religion. Some of us may not believe in religion at all. But that does not change the fact that we are all human. We may have differences. But we are not different. We are not abnormal for loving whom we love. We are what we are. Different but the same? The same but different? No. We're human. And that's all that matters.