\n
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n(No. I’m not straight. It’s a big social epiphany, but it’s not that.)<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\nFor a while, I’ve been questioning gender and the whole craic with gender and all that jazz…I have never really felt exclusively female…like HURRRR LOOK AT ME, I AM WOMAN; and felt like this combination of female and male but kind of thought of gender as more on a continuum. I think my brain must enjoy these, since my sexuality is appaz on one too…<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\nAnyhoo, having known very little about it the glory that is my SCIENCE BRAIN went on a Google hunt. Aaaand the more I explored, the more I was like “This is like me\/my life\/this makes sense.” <\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
Thus far in my life (imagine me 6 or so months ago, pottering around minding my own business), the experiences that I have had of society (both LGB and ‘straight’) with gender variant\/non-binary\/trans* peeps have not really been massively positive…There is a lot of judgement on the type of person that goes by a neutral pronoun\/is genderqueer\/is non-binary – and I found especially that even before anyone got to know the person they were seen as weird and to be avoided. <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\nAnother common experience was meeting people who, having met one non-binary person that was annoying\/weird, assumed it was a trait of their gender identity, not a personality issue. This made my battle with how I was feeling a lot more difficult to come to terms with. I couldn’t work out if I was ‘one of them’, and if I was, I hoped I wasn’t as annoying\/weird but feared that I was, and that if I ‘came out’ my friends would view me as the same.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n So, chatting this through with one of my closest pals who was also going through something similar, I managed to figure out bit of the headfluff – that most probably I didn’t have the exact same characteristics as the people that my friends perceived in a certain light, and that non-binary was me. Buuut out of fear of the consequences to my friendships\/relationships\/life I didn’t tell anyone (except for pal numero uno, as previously mentioned). <\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\nTHEN I had the amazing experience that was NUS LGBT Conference. Of all of the places I have ever been in the world EVER, that is the most comfortable I have felt being myself and not feeling like I should conceal any feelings I had. I wanted to go to trans* caucus, but was terrified – I had confided in a trans* friend about my intense feels and been knocked back and told I wasn’t trans (which I don’t define myself as specifically anyway, I’m just not cis…) so was scared that I would be judged by other people. However, I met some truly AWESOME and inspirational people that made me realise: I am okay. It is okay. It gave me so much confidence and all of the feels…<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\n So then I had a bit of a Buddha-style “BE THE CHANGE” epiphany and decided that if I wanted to change how the people around me generally viewed non-binary, then sitting hiding in a corner pretending I’m a female unicorn was going to do fluff all. They all seemed to like me for being me as ‘female’ so what’s in a pronoun? I’d be open with myself, and maybe some people would get to learn some stuff along the way.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
And, knowing that a lot of the reason I was scared is because I had NO CLUE ABOUT ANYTHING, I’ve come up with a bit of general info\/FAQs on my perception of life and all that jazz in terms of GENDER.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
Knowledge is power and so forth.<\/p>\n<\/span><\/div>\n
I also asked you beautiful people for your questions, and with the help of my top pally Freya (who is also just as cool as me, and in the same proverbial boat) we shall give you 2 LOTS OF ANSWERS, either tonight or tomorrow. It’s like buy one get one free. And you don’t even have to buy one.<\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span><\/div>\nStay tuned kiddos!
Much loves xx<\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":1211,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bimedia.org\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}