My Sexual Preferences Aren’t Restricted by Gender
Does that make me pansexual?
I didn’t grow up in a very interesting place. It’s a small town on the East Coast of Canada where there wasn’t much to do other than drink the weekend away.
And like a lot of places that aren’t terribly interesting, it didn’t expose me to a whole lot of interesting ideas.
I learned about gender through some mixture of sitcoms, teen movies, playground chatter, and overhearing some (usually judgmental) comments from the adults around me.
I was vaguely aware of the existence of trans men or trans women, but I did what everyone else around me (and on television) did — I found a way to fit them into the gender binary. I thought of trans men as simply men and trans women as simply women. (That made me the outlier. Everyone around me insisted that the gender a person was assigned at birth was the one they’d carry to their grave, no matter what.)
I had never even encountered a non-binary conception of gender until I packed up as much of my stuff as I could in my little light blue car and moved out of town to attend university.
But it wasn’t the university that did it. Despite what panicked conservative commentators seem to think happens at liberal arts universities, none of my classes ever…
