The reality that there is privilege everywhere became very apparent to me from an early age. One of my most memorable moments that lead up to this realization had to be when I was a freshman in high school. As a teenager I was never doing what I was supposed to be doing, this included being in class – let alone the school building- when I was meant to be. I remember the first and only time I was caught skipping with a few friends during school hours. While my POC friends were scared of what the truancy officer was going to do with them my non-POC friends were cool calm and collected. I was somewhere between worried about my POC friends and wondering why my nonPOC friends were so calm. I had personally never had a bad experience with the police force but of course, I knew about biases people had and how some officers would racially profile POC. One of my POC friends ended up running before the officer even left his patrol car. Luckily the officer was nice and let us off with a warning.

When we all met up again later that day the non-POC friend asked jokingly “Why was everyone so scared? Why did you run?” and the rest of us replied with something along the lines of “When you look like us who knows how that could’ve gone”. Our non-POC friend couldn’t comprehend why the rest of us reacted the way we did. We told him he had to check his “white privilege card” because if he didn’t need to worry about what might happen when coming face to face with an officer that was a privilege.

Ever since the pandemic started I had a lot of free time on my hands to think about not only my sexuality but also my gender presentation. I had the opportunity to meet a group of friends who helped me understand all the new things I was discovering about myself. In recent months I “came out” to my family. I put “came out” in quotes only because the closet door was glass, I wasn’t hiding that part of myself I was very much openly queer since like the 5th grade. My friends and family knew I wasn’t only into men and that I didn’t fit perfectly into feminine roles but recently I was able to really put a label on everything that I was feeling both in the aspect of who I wanted to be and who I wanted to be with.

The first question that my cousin asked me was “How to use pronouns?” it was an easy explanation. The second question that came from another cousin was “Does this mean you’re transgender?” It wasn’t a difficult question to answer, but I did have to go into a deeper explanation of what being Non-binary and being Transgender meant. The conversation basically went about me telling my cousin that no I don’t want to go on hormones to change my body but that I wouldn’t mind getting a chest reduction and presenting either Masculine or Feminine whenever I wanted. That I didn’t care for pronouns that if someone wanted to refer to me as he or they, it didn’t bother me, but that there were some feminine terms that did bother me and I didn’t want them used to refer to me by. It was a long conversation but at the end of it, I felt like I was closer to my true self.

Name: Ellie, El

Pronouns: They/She/Him I don’t care! 😀