Do high school kids these days just have trans classmates now. Like I keep seeing zoomer posts casually referring to it. Fucking wild if true.
Here's what prompted this post btw
yeah my younger sibling's friend group made bets about if any more of them would end up as trans lol
[ID: tags reading “I mean yeah” and “were we. not supposed to have trans classmates (keysmash)” end ID]
I’m going to take these tags a little more seriously than they were probably intended.
We are elated y’all have trans classmates. We didn’t. We didn’t because it wasn’t an option to be trans, you probably didn’t even know the word. And if you did, your parents would have abused it out of you. And if they didn’t, the school staff would have. And if they didn’t, the other kids definitively would have.
I’m not even that old and let me tell you, my first year of high school, gay rights got discussed and that was it. Most were favorable about it and thought gays should just be allowed to do their own thing! So it wasn’t horrible on that front! But I had teachers tell me in the same breath bisexuality didn’t exist. And transness? Wasn’t even discussed. Even in my friend group of multiple bisexuals, I could count the number of times I even heard the word before I graduated high school, and it was said with apprehension. Like we were gonna get in trouble for knowing the word. Because in some families, you would have been in trouble for knowing the word “transgender”.
Trans acceptance has a long way to go, but please please please be aware that 10 years ago it was unthinkable, not because everyone hated trans people, but because a lot of people didn’t know they existed to think it.
This. I went to school before section 28 was repealed. I didn’t know trans people existed and, assuming my teachers even did, it would have been illegal for them to inform me. Queer people were officially not supposed to exist. Was I the only trans kid in my school? Probably not. Were there kids who, unlike me, knew they were trans? Maybe! I know people my age who transitioned younger. It was possible, just less common than now. I don’t know what my single-sex boarding school would have done if someone had come out as trans, but I do know when a boy at my then-boyfriend’s single-sex boarding school was outed as gay his parents were called to pick him up for his own safety. And yeah, boarding schools were probably worse than normal schools but section 28 applied everywhere.
So it is strange to think of openly-trans kids just living their lives and being a normal part of school life. (Kind of like how my grandad probably found it strange that there weren’t a load of kids with post-polio syndrome at my dad’s school.) It is, in fact, fucking amazing. Because we didn’t have that. It’s wonderful that it’s normal to gen Z, but maybe some people in the notes could stop expecting the rest of us to not marvel at how far the world has come in the span of less than a generation. Progress is good and should be celebrated.
