How I got all 180d, son

Confession: I've been a bastard. I mean, in the past. Still, it's relevant. Call it a post-quarter-life crisis.

In the last ten years, I've discounted the gender and sexual identity of more people than I can count. Newfound queer identity? Whatever, you're probably going to sleep with a dude sometime soon. Newfound trans identity? Um, trend whore much?

I've been a bastard. My friends have been bastards. They still are bastards. Nobody is good enough, nobody has struggled enough or lived through enough. Your parents haven't kicked you out, or stopped talking to you. You haven't lost your best friends, your siblings, been booted from school, been homeless, haven't lost enough jobs. Competition, competition. You weren't expelled from high school for starting a GSA. The cops didn't harass you outside of a gay bar at 17. You didn't lose someone (queer) to HIV or suicide or alcoholism. You didn't protest loud enough or long enough or hard enough.

You didn't. End of story. End of relevance.

So, if you were into adding things into the Are You Queer Enough? competition, you'd probably also toss in all of the rad cultural bullshit, too. Lesbian Until Graduation, Girls Gone Wild, every pop culture reference that has made people think that queer chick identity is transitional, experimental, and Not Real. When we see girls kissing, it's very much pushed into the realm of fantasy. It's titillation, and it's silly and it's "look at her nails, they're not short enough.".

After 10 years of this, you sort of form an opinion. All of your friends support it, and that opinion goes like this: Queer Identity Is Formed At Birth And That Is It. And you agree with it, and you discount & discount & mock & discount ...

And then you meet someone who fucks your whole idea of everything you've learned so far. HLE, you've 180d me.

I don't know what it is. I think it's the you don't know x until you know y thing. In this case: you don't know what an fucking asshole you've been your whole life about queer identity until you hear how hurtful it is for your friend to run into those same ideas about queer identity. And then: fuck those ideas about queer identity.

And really: fuck them.

I can't abide by that shit anymore. I can't have my old ideas about gender and sexual ID fucking with the heads of my friends. I can't have someone hurting because I can't let go. I can't be the THAT GUY that I was. I just can't.

I've got your back, HLE. I swear.