#old posts

Do you sometimes go through your own posts, and you're like,

"no way I posted that two days ago that's way older"

I'm thinking about Cody Winter and want to give some cultural context for what things were like in the mid-2000s

I was in high school from 2004-2008, so I'm about 4 years younger than the cast of AFTG. I lived in a small, liberal town in New England. If you played a girl's sport in my town growing up, you one of my best friend's lesbian moms as your coach at one point or another. I came out as bisexual in freshman year. We started a Gay Straight Alliance because that's what we called them back then. There were plenty of out gay/bi guys with boyfriends at other high schools. I'm sure it existed, of course, but I never experiences any homophobia during high school.

We did not talk about transness. Senior year, someone in the GSA suggested that we do more to incorporate trans people and I said, "but we don't have any here" because at that point, I was under the impression that trans meant surgery, I don't think I knew what hormones were.

I learned about all that in college (smallish, liberal school) but the trans group meetings were tiny and mostly people who identified as allies. I led it my sophomore year onward because the trans guy running it was going abroad (I was cis at the time) and they were like "yeah you seem chill and we need /someone/ to run it."

I don't remember if I learned about people being nonbinary or using gender neutral pronouns in college--I feel like I must have, since I don't recall it feeling new when I met some nb people in the scene the year after.