When someone says they’re not straight, most people automatically assume that they like the same gender. And when that person tries to explain more of their sexuality, they’re told that they are just confused, it’s just a phase, or that they haven’t met the right person yet. This causes the person to think that they’re broken, or that they really are confused. Especially when an adult figure that they trust tells them this.

For most people, they think that you either like the same gender or the opposite gender. You can’t like both, or more, or none. When you tell them that there are more options, they try to deny it. I’ve met people who say that they aren’t homophobic, but when they say they don’t think bisexuality, pansexuality, and asexuality are real, they are being biphobic, and are hating against the other two. There isn’t really an official term for the hatred against pansexuality and asexuality, but it’s still there.

In my friend group, two of us are asexual, and three of us are bisexual. The five of us go to GSA(Gay straight alliance), where we see more people in the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve heard a lot of the members saying that they would like to be recognized better in the community and the world. Like I said earlier, people only think that there is gay and straight, nothing more.

And for all the transgender, agender, nonbinary, and gender fluid people, they still get hated on. One of my friends who is transgender only used the nurse’s bathroom because he couldn’t go into the one for girls, and he didn’t want to get beat up in the boy’s bathroom. And another one of my friends never used the correct pronouns for the first friend. Even when I talked to the second friend about it, he never fixed his mistake.

At Tahoma, they added gender-neutral bathrooms. This is helpful for the people who don’t want to go into the regular bathrooms due to gender. However, there are people who don’t understand these bathrooms. I’ve heard a story about two guys talking about the bathrooms. They tried to go into one of them, and someone yelled at them, being kind of rude about it. In turn, the two guys were being rude to the girl who yelled at them. They didn’t understand the purpose of the bathrooms, and they said some pretty bad things about the girl. The two guys were not aware of why the bathrooms were put in, making me hope other students aren’t like that.

There are more sexualities and gender identities I didn’t list, but I listed the ones I hear about the most and have more knowledge on. These are the ones that I hear about most, whether it’s in the community, or online. But there’s hate against everyone in the LGBTQ+ community, whether it’s in the real world or online. Sexualities and gender identities do not define us, they are part of us. All we ask for is to be treated as equal and valued humans.