Well, it's a fresh year here at The Epic Epileptic and I hope you are having as great a new start as I am!
University classes start up again this week (I had my first at 8AM this morning...it was 0C outside and I found myself unable to justify wearing my usual flip flops)! Excited, yes. Looking forward to gobs of homework and loads of quizzes and exams, not so much.
I thought I'd write about an interesting subject in this post- it's one I'm hearing a lot about lately.
I'm a heterosexual girl (I'm very much a "tom-boy") but I have a number of friends who are homosexual, transgender, or bisexual; because of the current climate in the world surrounding homosexuality, etc., it surprises me when people get very judgy with them. I wanted to write because of something that was said yesterday in a religious setting.
As a student at a private university run by the Mormon church, I do expect to be surrounded by a slightly different point of view than I'd be around in almost any other place. A girl stood up last night in a group meeting I sat in on, just for kicks, and was saying something about missionary experiences she'd had that week and in the middle of her little relation she said something like,
"...this fad or thinking it'd be cool to be homosexual..."
I furrowed my brow like, "Uh, what?" but she'd moved on.
Is that really what people think about LGBTQIA people nowadays? That they're choosing to be gay because it's a cool fad? This girl was clearly a bit off her game (maybe it was the frigid temperature?) but it made me wonder how many people that I sit next to in class, that I talk to on Facebook, that I sit next to at the stoplight, etc., how many of them think that being gay is a choice that people are making because it's "in" right now?
Science is proving that people who are gay or transgender tend to know from very early on. A friend of mine says she "knew it since she was 4 or 5" that she was supposed to be a girl; likewise, another friend of mine came out when he was 12. People might think, "They're confused!" or "They just need to play with more trucks (or dolls) and they'll sort it all out." (I don't think that's so) Case studies show that the more a parent tries to put their gender-bending (I seriously love that phrase haha it makes me imagine someone bending backward whilst levitating above a pile of blue and pink clothing) child into their birth gender, the more unhappy the child gets. Sometimes the child will be shy about it or will "pretend to be a boy in public" but then come home and transition into that gender they would like to be.
How difficult it must be to be transgender- I have my days where I wear baggy clothes (usually after I eat loads of food haha) and heavy shoes and then I have days where I wear my quite feminine clothing, but I don't ever have to feel awkward about wearing what I wear. It's perfectly acceptable for a girl to wear pants nowadays and it's fine that I don't own a scrap of pink clothing. I don't have to entertain the notion of "hiding" who I am or who I want to be to satisfy the public/society's rules on gender identity.
What do you think about religious opinions on homosexuality? Do you ever feel like a population (Mormon, Catholic, Protestant, etc.) takes it too far to be against LGBTQIA rights?
If you have thoughts on the matter, I'd like to know what they are.
Happy New Semester, New Year, and New Day,
EpicEpileptic
