a common ward in today's times. everyone has their reasons, some grounded in safety, some grounded in preference of social interaction. some reasons I'd agree with, some I wouldn't. I'm not here to discuss the details. A person's space is a person's space, and who they share it with is of course up to them.
But I look at this. I abstract it. Finding a way in the world, and then closing off to those who come next.
I came to finally understand I was queer somewhere in the age of 19. I often think about how I could've figured it out sooner, but I didn't. And it happened almost by chance. An offhand joke-comment linking to a website with trans jokes, a bit too much resonance, enough instability in my life to make me open to considering something that felt at the time to be an extreme. I wasn't inspired by anyone.
I didn't have queer elders. I had a chat room full of people just as confused as me, with a regular world-ending drama every week like a bad soap opera. I had, at most, people physically older than me who were also queer, who'd started exploring their queerness around the same time I had. As much as I wanted to look up to them, they had little to offer, save for the bureaucratic facts they'd discovered. And a lot of misinformation.
I had to forge my own path, my own understanding, from scratch. I had very little to build atop. I became an elder, for my social circles, even just a year in, as those around me were inspired by me and came to me asking for help. And what did I have for them? Uncertainty, mostly. Misplaced confidence. Things I wish I could go back and unsay. Though it worked out in the end, I supposed.
Where would I have found them? Not in my life in the physical world, certainly. Where would I find the invitation?
Though granted, I lived online. But the queers who knew more than the turmoil of confusion and intense rejection of the old self, were they hiding from me there? Or was I just looking in the wrong places? I don't know, really.
We began finding our ways into online communities at a young age. We learned quickly to lie about our age unless it was proven we didn't need to. Avoid talking in voice chat, lest we give the obvious tell. When our voice dropped it got easier. People didn't question us then. They assumed we were in our twenties. Often people many years older than us assumed we were their senior. Quite an amusing thing.
We eventually found people who didn't care. 4channers, a lot of them, back when that inspired a vision of a slimy internet asshole more than it did a radical. Still had enough bad ideas for us to mimic some of them, until we learned the broader context that unlike what our history textbooks and authority figures had said, racism was not in fact magically dealt with before my time, and it was not harmless joke fodder about a problem long-solved. But still, they weren't out to get us or anything, they were simply the ones we found who could not give less of a shit about our age. And they were amicable. And they were people to hang out with. So that's where we ended up.
Gods do I wish for a better past. Gods am I glad we eventually recognized we ought to distance ourselves and leave.
I got a lot of life advice from one particular person I met in that group. The closest I ever really did have to a queer elder, though they kept themselves deep in denial that they had gender things going on, so they hardly had good advice on that topic. One of those in the "it's gotta be magical TF or nothing" closets. Lots of long nights with them though, asking general life questions. Things I'd never feel comfortable asking my parents, but needed to know. A lot of their answers were close enough to accurate to be helpful. So still, I owe a lot to them.
Being seen is exhausting. Being seen by people who don't understand yet even moreso. I'm well versed now in the amount of energy needed when a new trans comes asking for help, to learn what path they've found. to reorient them out of memetics and binaries, and towards a deeper understanding. A more satisfying understanding. But I find it worthwhile, when I can.
Where do young queers end up, if they want guidance beyond what they can co-discover within the under-18 age cohort? Who do they talk to? Who is there to have the philosophical conversations? To take them seriously. To not talk down and prescribe a truth, yet also not talk up, looking to them for all the answers. To at the very least, show them where they'll be welcome when they do hit that magic number that rules so much in our world. How many are simply hiding their age, or lying about it, like I did for so long? Afraid to say too much lest someone figure them out.
I don't know. Hard for me to say, with just one physical vessel to peer into the world, with all its social bubble skews. But I wonder sometimes.
