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nonbinarypoststhings · 4 years

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Hi, irrelevant, I know, but do you remember anything about the highschool period of your life? I swear this part is the most stressful part of all my life, first I figure out my sexuality, then I move away from all my friends, then my gender, and as if it's not enough, add to that school and standardised tests and all the typical drama of being a teen. Oh and also don't forget that you're somehow supposed to make choices that will affect the rest of your life.How does anyone even survive it?

I do remember my high school life, and as I have reconnected with one of my old classmates recently, I've even talked a bit about it with her.

(Warning for Homophobia, transphobia, Sexism, Racism. Only the homophobia is like explicit, but the others are mentioned. Feel free to tell me if there is more warnings I should have. Also, long post)

High school is a tough period of time for everyone. Everyone is struggling with who they are, and what they want in life.

And add in the layer of being Lgbtq+ it becomes more frustrating.

I have a hard time translating the school things from my country to others, but I believe I graduated what would be translated into high school only this year, but I will still talk about my old school which I graduated from three years ago.

My class back then was not the best place for anyone who is lgbtq+. Me and the classmate I mentioned earlier connected well back then, and still do now, but the rest of them..? Not so much (I will also exclude two more people from that rest, who also is my friends now).

We were a class of 22 or 23, and yes I believe that most of us probably were at least somewhat accepting of the lgbtq+ community, we still only had, from what I know, 2 people who actually is in the community. Neither of us accepted it at the time, even though we both were proudly supportive of the community.

The thing is, she struggled with internalized shit about her identity and that delayed the realization.

I was genderfluid, and same thing there. I denied my own gender because, my friend was nonbinary, I couldn't also be, right? So internlized shit that delayed the realization.

Neither of us came to term with it until after we had left that school.

But I have a clear memory of us both Hating our class, we were a class of mainly guys, and every single guy was white (tbf, we had 1 person who wasn't white in our class all together).

We all know what white cis straight men are famous for...

Being bigots.

I don't know if anything has changed these past years, I haven't talked to them. But back then,

At least half of them were openly sexist, homophobic, transphobic etc.

I have a clear memory, that still Disgusts me so much to this day, of a sex ed class where the teacher, bless her, tried to be inclusive and ask us what we thought about gay couples. (Not how it should be done, but it was atleast a try in the right direction) The guys, who always ran the show (the ones I hated more than I think I can explain), said (TW for Homophobia):

"Gay guys are disgusting. Lesbians are hot".

I was so mad, my skin was crawling with disgust, still is when I think about it. To everyone who only accept lesbians because they think it's hot, you are disgusting. Lesbians are real people and they are not there to please some man. It's not for you, it's between the lesbian and her girlfriend and you should Stay Out Of It!

It wasn't a great place to be out in, so maybe it wasn't weird for us to ignore our own identity, to not want to be lgbtq+ in that space, because if we had been out back then even just to ourselves we would've had to face these people every day and therefore face these kind of things knowing that they are talking about us like this. Even though they didn't know it, they were and it was disgusting and terrible.

(I am not saying repress your gender or sexuality until you are older, you don't have to do that at all. Just be safe, and know that if people are mean or ignorant, they are wrong. You are valid and loved and we all support you so much. Find support, and don't let bigots tear you down. You are Valid and you are who You are no matter what others tell you)

I wanted out of that class, from those people, ever since I was like 6-7 years old. I hoped when we switched school when we were 12-13 that I would end up without a bunch of them. I did still have that same class, which really I had expected even if I hoped differently.

At 16 I got a change to move across the country, I took it. Actually, I kinda fought for it, and I was lucky enough to get it.

Moving away from all my friends were scary even if I had made an active choice to do so. I was terrified that I would be lonely, and that everyone at this new school would be terrible and I had to move back home and face that shame of failure (obvs, it wouldn't be actual failure to get out of a toxic place if it has been that, but I saw it as such)

When I came to this new school, everything was super different from back home.

My class was, to my standards, filled with so many different people with different cultures. All of them different from mine because I was from across the country, from a small town. And suddenly here I was in a gigantic city.

Anyway, this school taught me a lot, about everything. My class had openly Lgbtq+ people. My new friends were suddenly all queer or questioning, and I was in awe, because... It could be like this?

Also, everyone was super nice to me. Asking for my instagram on day 1 so we could be friends on there, showing me how to get back home in this new city when everything was so new to be, starting conversations and being just geniune good people. Like, huge shout out to those people.

I learned so much about oppression, and how to stand against it in this school, not because I myself was oppressed, I'm white and at the time I thought I was cishet.

No, I learned because our teachers wanted us to learn about all these things that I knew were real problems but I had only heard of in fiction, never in real life.

I got to a safe space, where racist teachers got fired asap. Where teachers were openly queer and my classmates could come out as trans to the class simply by stating their new name and pronouns. No questions asked. I got to a school where every introduction included name and pronouns. Where we were all shown that we can be who we are and that is okay. And where teachers apologized to students in a real and honest way when they did something wrong.

In this environment I got to figure out who I am. Yes it took two years, but I figured it out and felt safe enough to tell my new friends in weeks, because they accept everyone.

So, the question, how do you survive high school?

My answer is simply, you hold onto the belief that you will survive, and that things will get better. And you will get there.

You can try to find other lgbtq+ people in your school, I know some have groups you can join (mine didn't).

And with the tests, I guess I recommend you study, and remember that a bad grade isn't the end of the world. You are worth more than a grade.

I wish I could promise you that you could enter a school like mine, where everything certainly wasn't perfect (you never get rid of high school drama...), but it was still a very friendly space.

But I can promise you that you are not alone and things will be better. If it gets better in high school or if it gets better years later, I can't tell you. But it does get better. And you will survive.

Also, sorry for this extremely long answer, it was probably not what you're looking for. But I hope you find an answer in there eitherway.

Long story short, high school is a shitshow, but the show must go on.

Also, gender neutral bathrooms in schools should be standard (it has been in all schools I've gone to and no one is complaining here, not even the transphobes).

Also, the reason why I barely mention the girls in my old class, is simply because there were almost none and nothing any of them have said when I've been around has been relevant to this answer.

Tell me if you want things tagged or added to the warnings at top.

#genderfluidpoststhings #genderfluidpoststhings ask #Homophobia tw

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idiopathicsmile · 7 years

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Why You May Already Be A Unitarian Universalist! Or, a short guide to the goofy hippie aunt of the theological world (but the kind of aunt who has been to protests and Seen Some Shit)

Do any of these sound like you:

“I’d like a safe setting to explore my spiritual beliefs, but I’ve got baggage about organized religion!”

“I wish there was a church for atheists!”

“I wish there was a church for people who aren’t sure if they believe in god or not!”

“Over the years I’ve slowly assembled a highly personal grab-bag of spiritual beliefs and practices, but I miss service projects and singing hymns and drinking coffee on Sundays!”

“I need a religious community that supports rights for people of all genders, races, religious beliefs, sexual or affectional orientations, ability statuses, and national origins!”

“I want to raise my kids in a church that offers an extremely comprehensive, LGBTQA-friendly, shame-free sex ed program to all teenagers!”

Or conversely,

“I’ve already found a different personal belief system that feels right for me, but I am intellectually curious about where you’re going with this!” (Perfectly valid!)

If any of the above is true, or if you just feel like killing some time on the internet (also valid), read on!

“So, what do you guys believe?”

Modern Unitarian Universalism is a religion without a creed. That means you can be UU while believing in as many or as few deities as you want (including none or “I don’t know” or even “the very question doesn’t feel that important to me”). There is no consensus within the church on an afterlife (if any), or a holy book (if any), or even which holidays to celebrate, other than presumably, like, the birthdays of your friends and loved ones.

Plenty of UUs identify as agnostic or atheist, but we also have members whose beliefs are informed by Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, earth-centered/Pagan traditions, and/or Humanism, among others.

Asking an individual UU about their beliefs is sort of like asking someone about their taste in music. It’s meaningful to them, it’s shaped by their own history and experiences, and no two people will have exactly the same answer.

“Wait, you guys don’t agree on anything? What even brings you together?”

A DEEP AND EVERLASTING LOVE OF COMMITTEES.

No, sorry, that was a hilarious joke playing off an old Unitarian Universalist stereotype, which is that we are super into discussing things and then voting on them as a group.

Hilarious.

It’s hard to speak for all Unitarian Universalists, and some of them might quibble with the exact wording I’m about to use, but I feel like part of what makes us a bonafide religion is a deep shared conviction that trying your hardest to be kind, fair, and moral is itself sacred.

“If you can’t agree on a religious text, how in the world are you guys on the same page about what it means to be moral?”

I mean, sometimes we’re not? We like a good debate.

But although we don’t have a creed, we do have a common set of principles we try to use as a guide. Here they are, straight from the Unitarian Universalist Association website:

The inherent worth and dignity of every person;

Justice, equity and compassion in human relations;

Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations;

A free and responsible search for truth and meaning;

The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large;

The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all;

Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

“Uh, that’s compatible with every world religion and also, like, Captain Planet.”

Listen, nobody in the Unitarian Universalist church is gonna stop you from using a nineties environmentalism cartoon as a holy text. Embrace your truths. As a group of young sages once said, “Saving our planet is the thing to do.”

“I already believe all of those principles. Am I a Unitarian Universalist?”

I mean, if you want to be!

…although the definition of a UU is broad enough these days that we’ve got a quirky (and in retrospect maybe kind of problematic?) habit of retroactively claiming dead historical figures* who demonstrated a belief in the seven principles during their lives. Like, “That person PROBABLY WOULD’VE BEEN Unitarian Universalist, given the chance! One of us! One of us!”

That said, if you’re reading this, you’re probably alive, so at least for the time being it is your call!

*I am now bound by ancient UU law to list to you some dead historical figures who actually self-identified as Unitarian Universalists (or Unitarians or Universalists, since the two didn’t meld together until a series of meetings in the 1960’s):

Olympia Brown (the first fully ordained female minister in the U.S., also an abolitionist and feminist)

President John Quincy Adams

Joseph Priestley (18th century theologian credited with discovering oxygen)

Ralph Waldo Emerson and a number of the early American Transcendentalists

Louisa May Alcott

Elizabeth Gaskell (author of North and South, among others)

Rod Serling (Twilight Zone creator)

Beatrix Potter

Pete flippin’ Seeger, hell yeahhhhhh

“Who runs this show?”

Rife as it would be for comic possibility, there is no Unitarian Pope. There are no cardinals. Authority is for the most part pretty decentralized. Individual congregations govern themselves, through committees and elections. A minister has to be approved by their congregation before it’s official.

Those Seven Principles above came, like I said, from the Unitarian Universalist Association, which is made up of delegates from churches all over the country, and every year they get together and vote on major stuff. But yeah, congregation to congregation, things can vary pretty widely in terms of how they do stuff, or even whether to use the word “church.” (Some instead call themselves a “society,” or a “fellowship.”)

“What the heck does a UU hymn even sound like?”

Oh man, this reminds me of that classic Unitarian Universalist joke, “Why are Unitarians so bad at hymns?”

Answer: “Because they’re too busy reading ahead to make sure they agree with all the lyrics!”

Priceless.

But in reality, some of our songs are, like, transcendentalist poems that have been awkwardly squeezed onto the melody of some older hymn or classical piece. Sometimes you sing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” seemingly without a trace of irony. Sometimes you’ve got old spirituals about justice (like I said, things can tip towards well-intentioned appropriation) or Christian hymns that have been revised to be nondenominational and gender-inclusive. Sometimes you break out the classics, like “This Little Light of Mine.”

Here’s one of my all-time faves, which is based on a translation of a poem by 13th century Persian philosopher and mystic Rumi. You’ve got to wait until the rounds kick in. So good.

“What’s the official stance on rights for the LGBTQ+ community?”

It’s formally recognized by the UUA that our seven principles are totally incompatible with homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, or any other type of bigotry.

Because the power is so decentralized, I can’t say that every congregation has always been enlightened, but as religions go, I think it’s pretty widely accepted that the UU church has long been on the forefront of LGBTQ+ rights. There have been UU ministers performing same-sex marriage ceremonies since at least the seventies, and there’s a long history of activism within the church.

The UUA website has a section detailing our ongoing efforts to be inclusive of all genders and orientations. If you’re a member of the LGBTQ+ community and nervous about visiting a UU church for the first time, you might also want to aim for one of the churches that’s specifically opted into our Welcoming Congregation Program, which requires the congregation to go through special training and to offer gender-neutral bathrooms, among other things. (Most UU churches at this point have opted in. If you’re trying to find the closest location that’s also a Welcoming Congregation, there’s a checkbox you can click on this handy look-up tool.)

“So for decades when American politicians were arguing that same-sex couples couldn’t marry because it ‘went against religion’, it literally went against this particular religion to discriminate against those same couples?”

Yes. Yes, it was. The Bush years were a weird time.

“What’s the official stance on racial justice?”

We’re in favor of it. (Again: if you take those seven principles seriously, there’s no pussyfooting around opposing racism.)

I’m not gonna lie: at least in the suburban midwest UU churches I’ve attended, we are by and large, uh, pretty white. So I can’t really speak to whether or not a person of color would feel comfortable there. I’d imagine it would widely vary by individual and by congregation.

Our track record with Civil Rights is probably on par with any ultra-liberal, service-based American religion. We had a lot of early white abolitionists (given how low the bar was back then, I’m sure many would be considered racist by today’s standards), we had members active in the Civil Rights movement (if you saw Selma, that minister who gets killed by an angry mob was one of ours), and I think there was even a while pre-McCarthyism where we were closely allied with socialism and our members included some people of color who were key activists in confronting racism and supporting unions.

And then the Red Scare happened and our religion barely survived and we leaned away from socialism, and since then we’ve always kinda been predominantly an upper to middle class white liberal thing, with all the blinders that implies.

But a lot of UU churches have expressed solidarity with Black Lives Matter and with the protests at Standing Rock, and there is a growing movement within the church to confront and examine any latent white supremacy in ourselves and in our congregations.

One of the things that endeared me to my current church was when the minister announced that we were all invited to a racial justice protest, which had been organized by a black Christian church in the Chicagoland area. And the minister said, essentially,

“Listen, they are going to use religious wording that may not align with your personal beliefs. And what I need you to do is imagine you’ve got a Universal Translator like in Star Trek. And if they say “the glory of God” and it makes you uncomfortable, think “the glory of human kindness.” If they say “the spirit of the Lord”, you can think “the spirit of Life.” Because these Christians are out there doing the work that fits with our deepest values, and in the end, we have more in common than not. Sometimes we need to get over ourselves, and follow where they lead.”

At our worst, I’d characterize us as well-meaning but clueless (i.e. using the stories or imagery of world religions as a metaphor, in a way that flirts with appropriation). At our best, we’ve got some activists of color on the front lines, doing cool shit.

“This all sounds...so incredibly Politically Correct…”

Yeah, we strive to be accepting of everyone but I should warn you upfront that if P.C. culture upsets you, Unitarian Universalism is probably not gonna be a good fit.

“Did you say something about comprehensive sex ed for teens? In church?”

I certainly did! Through the OWL (Our Whole Lives) program, specially trained adults teach the youths a multi-year curriculum about bodily autonomy, consent, respect, healthy communication, gender identity, sexual orientation, safe sex (including passing around condoms and dental dams), destigmatizing sexuality, and relationships, among other things. Also, you can anonymously submit questions at any point, and your teachers will do some research and provide an answer next week.

When I was young, this was seventh and eighth grade Sunday school. I think since then, they developed the program to include age-appropriate components for younger kids, and to focus more on high schoolers.

“Seriously?”

When my older brother went through an earlier iteration of the program, the curriculum included a slideshow with photos of actual naked people, who were just random UU volunteers from the seventies. By the time it was my turn, these had been replaced by tasteful charcoal drawings.

“So on a scale from one to ten, how warped is your brother?”

He’s doing great! Actually, he’s a member of his local UU church and a volunteer OWL teacher. Though if I had to guess, he’s probably pretty relieved he doesn’t have to contend with those slides.

“Where can I find out more about Unitarian Universalism?”

Here’s the UUA website. Here’s that nearest-church-finding tool I mentioned before. If you don’t know if you’re ready to jump from 0 to physically stepping into a sanctuary, especially if you’ve got a bit of that ol’ social anxiety, here’s the ask that reminded me to post this whole mess in the first place, about how to maybe ease yourself into things a little first.

“Hang on…if you break these words down into their roots, ‘Unitarian’ implies existence of a single god, as opposed to the widely accepted Christian trinity, while ‘Universalism’ surely refers to the notion of universal salvation, meaning that both terms seem to point to a specific concrete (if perhaps somewhat heretical) doctrine based around Christian concepts like God, Jesus, and Heaven—meaning, in short, that the very name of your religion seems to belie the nigh-endless spiritual possibility you’ve been describing in this blog post…what gives?”

Well, you’re not wrong. The name at this point is largely vestigial. But to understand how we ended up where we are today, and how we arrived there with this awkward polysyllabic soup of a name, I’m gonna need to take you through a couple of centuries of heated theological debate.

“Do you NEED to?”

I mean, ‘need’ is relative, but that’s definitely my plan!

Stay tuned for part II, “A (Very Very Very) Informal History of Unitarians, Universalists, and their Unholy (or Possibly Very Holy) Melding”

#not tryin to push my faith but i do think plenty of folks are already secret UUs #and just need a word for it #and in times like these it can be really good to stand in a room of people with your values #who are sad and angry as you are and for the same reasons #and searching out hope and community despite it all

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