Do you feel comfortable answering questions about your gender to friends? Acquaintances? Strangers?
I feel like this is going to turn into a drinking game every time I mention I’m from a “conservative small town”, but that has a lot of impact on how open I am about these things. Seriously, people in my community talk about homosexuality in hushed whispers and euphemisms like it’s still something to be ashamed of. The concept of genderqueer doesn’t even cross peoples minds. We just don’t talk about these things. Until I feel like I can have an open conversation without dancing around the subject and sidestepping LGBT+ jargon, I’m not going to be comfortable at all about explaining my gender without at least a PowerPoint and some charts. I’ve talked about my gender to two people and it was worse than having teeth pulled and I have had four teeth pulled in one sitting and the lidocaine was wearing off on the last one. To say sitting through that torture session was easier should say something about how opened minded the people around me are. So the short answer to the prompt is, No, I don’t feel comfortable at all unless it’s an online setting because the charts and graphs are only a click away.
A³ 