College Chronicles

College is like the Twilight Zone in the sense that I’m in a place where I can actually ask people to use my correct pronouns and gently correct them when they don’t use them. Today I was in a group of three doing interviews for a project and a dude referred to me as “she” so I just kind of paused and smiled like “uh, bruh, I’m not a girl” and he paused, nodded, then repeated his sentence with “he” instead of “she”, and the conversation continued. When my teacher slipped up my pronouns, I mentioned it in private, she apologized, and next time she called on me in class she made a point to use my correct pronouns so the whole class heard her use “he” and not “she”. 

Like… I can actually walk around and expect a good amount of people to treat me like a human being? Even if people don’t understand or find it weird, so far pretty much everyone has at least just tried to go with it and has been chill with me correcting them. 

One of the interview topics was gender and sexuality, and I ended up going on a rant to the group of three I was with. A girl was asking me and a stereotypical white cis dude ((he believed gender roles were good and anatomy determines gender yet he was quiet and respectful of what I had to say and did pipe down as I kind of spoke up)) about gender and sexuality, and she asked if our gender affected our ability to have certain opportunities. The guy was actually chill like “honestly no- as a guy I’ve never been held back because of it” which was cool that he recognized it. I ended up going on this contained ((I wasn’t angry I was just serious rambling)) rant about how I lacked the opportunity to be treated like a human much of the time- how being different seemed to make people think they had the right to treat me however they’d like. That simply because they don’t understand or approve, that they can purposefully misgender me, belittle me, and refer to me in ways that they would never treat a cisgender person.

College is very freeing.