It is incredibly easy for me to pass as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Other than being white, I’m none of those other things, but the only way to get anyone to see me as anything other than that is to actively force them to acknowledge my self-described identity. One of the reasons I’m not out at work, beyond the things that some of my coworkers have done or said that make me believe they might not be the most accepting people, is that I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to constantly correct people. When I came out to my friends, the ones I’m still friends with didn’t take much work to correct. Most of them were in the practice of using pronouns other than he/she in their daily lives and while some of them slipped up (and some still do), they catch and correct themselves most of the time. As far as I can tell, none of my coworkers practice using a wider-range of pronouns and none of them self-correct themselves. One of my ex-coworkers (for whatever reason, probably my years of isolation within the company, default to thinking of the people on my team as my coworkers and everyone else as fellow employees) who transferred off my team back in early 2021 uses they/them pronouns like I do and I constantly have to correct my coworkers when they come up in conversation. I do not expect that my coworkers would be any better when it comes to me and my pronouns, especially because I look exactly like your average Midwestern Cis-Hetero White Guy.
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Exploring Identity As I Search For Community
For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.
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