After reading the excerpts from Alok’s book, I felt bad. I never realized the privilege I have as a cis-gendered female. The fact that Alok has to explain themselves to people is outrageous. It’s crazy that we’ve come so far, but people still aren’t tolerant towards others that don’t look or act like them. I think it’s time that we accepted people for who they are. In the dismissal chapter, where Alok had a quote for each paragraph, it reminded me of Jules from Euphoria. In the first episode, she was at Nate’s party and wasn’t doing anything. Then he started bothering her for no reason whatsoever. He claimed she wanted attention for how she looked. He was referring to her being transgender. I’ve seen situations like this happen so frequently. I think something I really have to do after reading these excerpts is stand up to those ignorant people who take pride in shaming others for being themselves. If we all started standing up for one another, the world would be a better place. The scariest part of it all, in my opinion, is that you can never act a certain way in these situations because you never know how the person will react. Many people are so outraged by the way non-binary people live their lives that they resort to violence. I thought it was an older generation thing, but I was surprised to hear a popular guy ask another guy how many genders he thought there were in my first week of junior year. And when the popular guy said 2, he smiled and said, “Good, we can be friends then.” It was completely random. I don’t know why people are so fixated on the lifestyles that other people live.