Why is Straight the Default?
How many “straights” do you know?
There are over 7 billion people on this earth, and for some reason people like to assume that all of them should be “straight”.
Anyone different is ostracized, bullied, and even brutally assaulted. They’re asked unfair and extremely private questions. They’re put on a stage and publicly ridiculed. Their bodies are put under a microscope and picked at. People slap a label on them that might not even match.
There are people that cry themselves to sleep at night because they’re terrified and full of vile self–hatred.
They have been brainwashed and bullied into the idea that something is wrong with them. There are kids in Elementary school that have innocent little crushes on one of their classmates and are petrified. They won’t let it escape past their lips because they know that other kids are abused and shipped off to so called conversion camps.
Adults are going through life in complete hiding. They plaster a mask on their face and pull on a costume because they’re scared of being their true selves. They push themselves so far down a well inside their bodies until they don’t even know who they are anymore.
They fall into a bottomless pit of depression. They are exposed to extreme anxiety. Some adopt self–harm coping strategies. Some find their hands wrapped around a bottle of pills or the cold metal of a gun. They lose the will to live. People wonder what the point of waking up is. Happiness becomes a distant memory.
Kids are picked on at school for being anything other than cis-gender and straight.
They’re publicly labeled and thrown into the spotlight. They’re outed and forced into unsafe spaces. Kids are contemplating on taking their own life because they’ve been told that they’re going to burn in hell for eternity or spend life alone like a monster shunned to the edge of the world.
Those same kids end up actually taking their own life. Some of these kids are kicked out of their homes and can’t survive on their own. They sleep in shelters, in parks, in alleys, on the cold sidewalk, and anywhere else they can lay their heads. They eat whatever they can find. Some of them still try to finish school, and some give up on education in order to provide for themselves with whatever job they can grab. Others go down darker paths filled with prostitution and drugs.
Strong online communities save many lives.
Finding people like me online saved my life. I grew up wondering what the hell was wrong with me. I spent many nights staring at the wall with tears staining my cheeks because I felt like I must’ve done something really terrible to deserve being so different.
People spit the word gay out like it was bitter cough medicine. They spit it out like it burned their mouth. They stayed far away from anybody labeled gay as if it were as contagious as the plague. I spent years eating lunch alone and being the absolute last to be picked for anything. I was hit, shoved, and almost had my arm broken one time just because I wasn’t like everyone else. I was pressed up against the cold bathroom wall and choked until I almost lost consciousness. I was backed into corner after corner until I finally fought back.
During my senior year of high school, I started lurking in the transgender tag on Tumblr.
I discovered that there were people that felt like I did. People were going through the same things I was going through. Then I got to see other transgender people happy and living life. They had partners and pets and children. They had jobs they loved and homes that actually felt like home. I wore a tie to senior awards day, and I had never felt more like myself. I was terrified of what people would say, but I made myself wear it anyway. I was tired of hiding myself. I was tired of pretending. I admitted I was transgender to myself during senior year, but I waited until after graduation to tell anyone. Then I only told the people closest to me.
I got to community college and wore bow ties and men’s button-ups whenever I felt like it. I bought my first cologne and wore it every day.
I went through over half of my life hating myself and being terrified about someone discovering the real me, and it’s society’s fault.
It’s this suffocating small town’s fault. It’s my fault for letting it last as long as I let it, but society planted the negative seed in my mind. They planted the seed and watered it consistently. They watched it grow and fill with pride. It was as if I had been thrown into a lake with cement bricks tied to my ankles. I couldn’t breathe. Darkness engulfed me. My lungs burned as if they were drowning in acid. I almost drowned under all of the negativity.
I used to refuse to look myself in the eye in the mirror. I hated what looked back at me. I wore the baggiest clothes I could get my hands on. They were self–inflicted wounds on my arms that only long sleeves could cover up. Anytime someone was nice to me, I couldn’t bring myself to trust it. I thought it was a trap or a cruel joke. All my trust in people shattered, and I had to pick up the jagged pieces. I’ve been slowly piecing it back together over the years, but the cracks will always be there.
It took years to unravel the self–hatred tangled in my heart.
Some of it is still there. Every day I unravel more and more of it. Every day I can look at myself a bit longer in the mirror. I step a bit more out of my comfort zone every day. I had to plant my own seeds of self confidence, and it’s slowly blossoming inside me. Soon it’ll be a beautiful garden.
Why is straight the default?
Why is it that a man and a woman getting married and having kids the only thing that’s acceptable? How can someone look at two women or two men loving each other unconditionally and see it as something disgusting? How can you see a transgender person finally loving their bodies and being genuinely happy and not be happy for them? How can someone else’s happiness conjure hatred?
There’s over 7 billion of us. Some of us love women. Some of us love men. Some of us love living as the gender we were born as. Others have to take extra steps to become the man or woman they’re meant to be. We’re all human. We all deserve to live, be happy, and be loved.
