New year, Old times, New generation

Hello everyone and welcome to a new era!

2020!

Sorry my last post was in November but i have been super busy with university as of recent.

Anyway so what is this blog post about? well....

I was laying on my bed today just thinking about old times, especially primary school, when i remember the first time i heard the term 'lesbian'.

I was in year 4 (age 8-9) when someone who was very mean to me said that and my best friend and i were a bunch of lesbians. Now me and my best friend were very close, we were friends for 5 years prior this but we are not friends anymore as while i grew up to be gay, she grew up to be homophobic...ironic.

But that was the first time i heard the word lesbian. As an insult from a very pasty boy. Though because i was 8 and had never heard this world before i was just confused, so i went home and asked my mum. Now i can't remember what my mum told me exactly but i do remember that she was upset saying she didn't want me to hear about it this way and my dad got annoyed and yelled at the school. so from a very young age i thought it was offensive...till i learnt what it actually meant when i was 11.

The second time i heard the term lesbian was when my friend said to me that she could see me as a lesbian when we were 12. She must of been psychic. But she was also saying it as an insult.

So my first encounters with the word lesbian had been insults ...and i wonder why i found it so hard to come out...

But that was the past and so i want to focus on now and specifically the next generation. Not my children. I'm talking about the youths of today.

Be warned this may not be all youths but from what i have observed from my cousins, my cousins friends and apps such as tiktok.

It seems now that among the youths now that there is resilience against homophobic bullying. When i was growing up i was bullied for being gay which i will talk about in another post. I asked my cousin (who had recently come out as bisexual and goes to my old secondary school) if she had any difficulties with people at school because i will go sort it out and to my surprise she didn't even think about people bullying here at school because she had been supported so much. In fact she was surprised that i was bullied.

Another scenario is that although apps like TikTok make me want to throw up and are awful they do shine a light on LGBTQ+ issues and LGBTQ+ communities. For example, i sometimes bind my chest. When i was first binding i couldn't take my binder off properly on my own so i had help. I asked my cousin once to help take it off and was prepared for all the questions of what is a binder? why do you have one? and instead i just got an 'ok'. which i was surprised about. I asked her if she knew what a binder was and she said 'yes' because she had seen it on TikTok.

So while apps such as these are absolutely shit, they do raise help on LGBTQ+ issues, especially trans.

While Boomers will say that technology is the route to all evil, and it can be *cough* piers Morgan *cough* it is also a place for teens to spread experiences through funny videos that may or may not be related to educate others. I hate Tik Tok but if it wasn't for TikTok i would be having a very awkward conversation with my cousin in the bathroom.

The next generation isn't as cursed as we think they are as they are more tolerant than the older generation. There is less homophobia, racism and sexism among the younger generation so lets keep supporting them.