The school play is so fun.. I’m going to be sad when it’s over, omg. :(
I get to wear a cool headset, and it’s like I’m in my own little world. All I can hear are a few techies. They’re so funny. XD We kept making Mean Girls references, it was pretty great. :3
So as everyone knows today was National Day of silence. A friend of mine put a little sticker on me that said I wasn’t talking and I was told not to speak so I could represent the silence of lgbtq people around the world. I wore something else instead. And I did a LOT of talking.
I hadn’t publicly come out as pansexual before today. It was nerve wracking but I just felt like now was the time to do it. I wrote this sign in class with the definition my psychologist once gave me and I had the kid I sat next to in class tape it to my back. For the rest of the day I was bombarded by people who ran up to me and asked if I could explain my sign. I told them that Pansexuality is defined as “Not limited or inhibited in sexual choice with regards to sex, gender, or activity,” and that basically it means that neither sex nor gender is involved in being attracted to someone. Completely gender blind. Most people asked me if that just meant bisexual, and I told them it was different (I quote a site I found, QueersUnited: Pansexuality is not to be confused with Bisexuality in which “Bi” denotes two genders (male & female) and “Pan” being “all” is open to people who fall at all points or even outside of the gender continuum.) I explained that I have never identified as bisexual. I’ve talked to bi friends about it and read up on it but I felt like I was still different. All I knew was gender didn’t matter to me at all, it didn’t matter if someone was a girl or a boy or identified as a girl or a boy or was trans.
Many people then asked me how that was possible. I asked them to explain the feeling of being happy. Around 6 people gathered to try and explain it, saying things like “You feel high spirited, you’re smiling, you know, Wheeee!” I told them to explain what being high spirited felt like, told them that someone could smile even if they were upset and then politely asked them if you could ONLY feel happiness if you were literally saying “Whheeeee!” They thought about that for a few seconds till one girl said Happy is HAPPY I can’t explain it!” to which everyone laughed and agreed. I agreed and said that you can’t explain emotion to people, it’s something that exists inside. I said that if they never fully understood what pansexuality meant that was okay, it’s kind of hard to understand if you don’t experience it, but just to KNOW that it exists and it’s real.
That’s a major problem I have. Out of the thousands of kids at my school there was only one person who commented on my sign and knew what pansexual meant. While talking to some confused kids about the difference between pansexual and other sexualities, I even had to explain transexual and asexual. There were people I was talking to who I have HEARD calling their friends “Trannies” as a joke, and they never even knew that the word wasn’t simply an insult, they never knew what it actually meant! In sex education, teachers are required to go over gay straight and bi, and they barely spend 5 minutes on the subject matter. One day I would like for sex ed teachers to inform their students of pansexuality, asexuality, and transsexualism. I would like to see teachers inform kids that they may not identify with the body they were born in and that’s okay!
Until that happens, I am proud to say that I was not silent today.
Go Rachel!
