Real stories from the World - LGBTQ+

Maya from the U.S.

I'm probably one of the youngest contributors to this. But that doesn't mean my story is any less real or important. My story deals with being LGBT in a biracial family, and hearing their internalized homophobia and transphobia. It includes being yelled at by assholes who think they're cool. This is the story of a young teen who had adulthood thrust upon them.

I've been told that I'm too young to know what my sexuality really is. But the truth is, I'm not. You're never too young or too old for that. I am pansexual, and I identify as nonbinary or genderqueer. I have identified so since the 7th grade.

In fact now that I think about it, many things happened around then. My parents got divorced and I had to look after my brother while court stuff happened. I started at a new school. I cut myself bangs. It was a pretty pivotal time.

I was outed to my entire bus. It was an accident, and caused by a friend. She was just trying to tell me about a possible girlfriend, and a kid went "Wait, you're gay?" First of all, it wasn't even his business, and secondly I was going through a phase where I lectured every person I met on pansexual erasure if they failed to mention it. I turned around and went, "I'm pansexual, actually," and HE scoffed and said that labels didn't really matter because I was still a f*g. I went home crying that day. I had never been said things like this directly to my face. I knew that people dealt with this and worse everyday, but this hurt me so much. I later found out that he thought LGBT people were mentally ill, and that African Americans liked to be called the n word, so he's pretty much the most irrelevant and uneducated person I've met in my life.

Since then, there have been more times. Walking through NYC with a rainbow sticker on my backpack got me shoved into a wall. On a school trip to Washington D.C., I was walking with a friend and someone yelled at us from across the street that we were going to burn in hell. I was just smiling, and she was smiling back. But I guess that offended that person so much that they felt the need to yell at a couple of 14 year old kids.

My dad's side of the family is Indian, and they are all from rural India. There is little to no representation for LGBT people in India, and what little there is is extremely offensive and stereotyping. I've heard my family shit on politicians who propose LGBT rights countless times. Eventually, you get numb to it. It's sad but it's what needs to be done.

I've never had a serious girlfriend, and people use this to claim that I'm actually straight. Straight people do this all the time, and not only to me. The reason I've never had a serious girlfriend is because 1) there are almost no openly LGBT girls around me and 2) the few that exist are in my friend group and dating them would be weird for the whole group. But I don't think that I need to have a girlfriend to say that I'm pansexual. I am pansexual because that's the way I was born.

I constantly struggle with my gender. My family expects me to fit into one box, but the truth it, I don't belong in a box. Gender is fluid, and not related at all to sex, and as highly educated people, my parents should be able to understand this. I have done numerous projects on gender and sexuality and LGBT rights over the years. If anybody has any more questions about the life of a LGBT high school student, you can message me at @blushing-beauty