Natalie Barletta – Special to the Southern News
Recently, one of my best friends opened up to me and told me that they were deciding to become gender queer. They’ve been wrestling with this decision for a while, and have had trouble with the gender identity that they were born into. Since declaring gender queer, they have been extremely content with their decision.
What is gender queer? Gender queer is a non-gender binary gender identity, by not being male or female. People who are gender queer go by the pronouns ‘they/them/their,’ other than being a him or a her. The lines are somewhat blurred, therefore they are genderless, and have elements of being masculine and feminine. Some gender queer people can be transgender; however some can just not prefer to have a gender simply because they don’t want to have one. Their sexuality can be gay, straight, bisexual, or pansexual. Gender queer people now have the option of not declaring a gender on Facebook, which is something that is something that happened in the last month or so. In some cases, you can say that gender queer people are considered to be the third gender, or be bigender, which is the combination of two genders.
Many issues come from people who are considered to be gender queer. For example, when my friend first told me, it was a very hard concept to grasp. For most people, when they are referring to them or they I think that you are referring to multiple people, not just one. It’s a hard transition, I will admit, to go from referring to my friend as ‘he’ to ‘they,’ especially when you’ve gotten used to calling someone a ‘he’ for so long. I do mess up a lot when I’m referring to my friend, but I am trying to work on it because it’s extremely important to them that I refer to them that way.
One thing that I decided to do was some research on it, so that way in some senses, I could understand the concept a bit better. I think that was the best thing in some senses because then it taught me to truly understand what it really means.
In some instances, I feel like research can be the key to understanding things that are foreign to us. We live in a forever evolving society, full of change, and new social norms. When my mom was my age, gay couples couldn’t be out in public. They worried that they were shaming their families, and had to hide who they were. In our generation, we’ve become mostly open and accepting to gay couples. Now, gay marriage is something that is legal in several states, and will only get better from there. As gender queer becomes more and more socially normal, I hope that it’s a term that we only get more and more comfortable with as a society. By learning about it, I feel like we become more and more accepting to those who are different than us.
As an ally to the GLSEN network, I can honestly hope that my kids are able to live in a world that’s open and accepting to those who different. I hope that they don’t have to hide who they are, and they accept those who are different. I believe as we educate ourselves to try to understand why they are the people that fall in this category. Gender queer is a relatively new term, but it’s a term that is fast spreading around the GLSEN community. We as a society can become more and more familiar with it, to help those who do in fact fall into this category feel like they are accepted.
