I Believe in Change

 Time for Some OPINIONS: Let's Chat About the Supreme Court

Things Cannot Stay The Same.

That’s sort of an inevitability of the world we live in. There are some things that are universal, of course. The vast majority of humanity believes that murder is wrong, for example. But even the definition of what counts as murder has been changed over the centuries.

I believe in change regarding language. Computer is a word now that didn’t used to exist. iPad is a word now that didn’t used to exist. The internet is a word now that didn’t used to exist.

Things change. Language changes. And it’s necessary to do so, or we’d still be using sticks to stab mammoths for our dinner. Or trying to, anyway. 

We’d still have our life expectancies dependent on our dental longevity. Because of change, we are living in a world where we can literally have our third molars removed, instead of depending on them for a few extra years of life.

We’d still be erasing women and non-white people from our history, instead of slowly (too slowly, sometimes) working to recognize all of the forgotten people who did amazing things for our species.

Change is necessary because we didn’t even used to know what germs were, let alone how to prevent their spread. We could still prescribe cocaine for ghosts in the blood as a diagnosis, or we could look through microscopes and work to understand the micro world that affects us every day.

Things cannot stay the same.

Politics Is No Different.

It is important to not only accept, but welcome political change constantly, because we as a species are constantly learning and growing. We’re all trying to do better. Times change. Science changes. Knowledge changes. Politics must, by its very nature, change along with it all.

It has to.

I’m sure everyone who has ever scrolled through the internet has come across one of those humor articles about outdated laws that make no sense anymore. (If they even made sense when they were created.) Here are a few:

• In North Carolina, a bingo game cannot last more than 5 hours.

• In Texas, it's illegal to change the weather.

• In Maine, it's against the law to have Christmas decorations up after January 14th.

• It's illegal to drive with an uncaged bear in Missouri.

• In Connecticut, a pickle can only be called a pickle if it bounces.

• It is illegal in Georgia to eat fried chicken with utensils.

• It is illegal to throw snowballs in Topeka, Kansas.

• It is prohibited to dance to the “Star Spangled Banner” in Massachusetts.

• In Nevada, it is illegal to use an x-ray device to determine someone’s shoe size.

• In Oklahoma it is illegal to wrestle a bear.

• Vermont passed a law just to say there would never be a law prohibiting the use of clotheslines.

• It is illegal to poach a Sasquatch in at least two Washington counties.

Most of these are goofy and more funny than anything else. But without laws and government and politics changing with the times, you get stuff like this sitting on the books well past the time when they’d ever have been useful.

Sometimes that’s all it is. Funny. Sometimes there is still segregation between white and black students clear into the 21st century.

• If political change never happened, we’d still have chattel slavery.

• If political change never happened, 80% of the people I know wouldn’t be allowed to vote, because they fulfilled some, but not all, of the requirements to be white, wealthy, cis, straight, male, landowners.

• If political change never happened, the American Revolution would never have even existed.

Amy Coney Barret’s Stances are Trash

Yeah. I just said that bluntly. In the wake of a manchild crying at me about feeling this way, I’m not very inclined to sugarcoat that opinion. People who agree with her are gonna feel * “dehumanized” by my disagreement anyway, so I might as well just say what I mean.

**Note: No, I don’t actually think that disagreeing with someone dehumanizes them, but the guy who yelled at me the other day about this literally said it did, as he screamed into the void against comments I wasn’t making. So these are his words.

I feel this way because Barret does not believe in change. She describes her stance toward the Constitution, and toward officiating laws in a court, in this way:

In the very first question put to her in Day 2 of her Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Judge Amy Coney Barrett was asked to define, "in English," the meaning of the legal concept of originalism.

"In English that means that I interpret the Constitution as a law," she said, "and that I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn't change over time and it's not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it."

Both in the way I interpret this statement, and in the way she herself describes it in other places, this essentially means that she believes her job as a judge is not to have opinions about laws, but to just blindly enforce them, no matter what. And that the meanings to be enforced must strictly be only the meanings instilled in them upon creation.

Which is suspect to me. I don’t really understand how a person of any conscience can bold-facedly say that the only way you’ll accept new ideas in government is to be micromanaged about it through laws and amendments.

Not just in social matters, either, which is clearly where this is the most problematic. But even in things that are opinions, like taxes, traffic, trade, etc. The world changes too much to be rigid in how you apply rules. A world that only had trains, and hadn’t invented the minie ball yet is not going to react to travel and weapons laws the same way as a place with robots on Mars, clear pictures of Pluto, and extremely powerful drone strikes.

Not only does Barret seem unable to believe in change, but she seems uninterested in the equal application of justice. Odd, considering the way she talks about trying to set aside her personal faith in order to exercise the laws.

“I see no conflict between having a sincerely held faith and duties as a judge. In fact, we have many judges, both state and federal, across the country who have sincerely held religious views and still impartially and honestly discharge their obligations as a judge…. I would decide cases according to rule of law … I would never impose my own personal convictions upon the law.” (U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, 9/06/2017)

“It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions, whether they derive from faith or anywhere else on the law.” (U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing, 9/06/2017)

“I don’t think that faith should influence the way a judge decides cases at all. As I said, I don’t think that a judge should twist the law to bring it into line or to help it match in any way the judge’s own convictions. And that’s true, whether they derive from faith or, everyone has convictions, everyone has beliefs. That’s not unique to people who have faith. And so somehow people seem to think that I said the opposite of what I said, but I think that one of the most important responsibilities of a judge is to put their personal preferences and their personal beliefs aside because our responsibility is to adhere to the rule of law.” (The Heritage Foundation’s SCOTUS 101 Podcast, 2/27/2020)

Actually, I partially agree with her, here. But only partially. You see, I do agree that it is not a judge’s responsibility to make laws, and that it is a judge’s responsibility to uphold justice in the face of laws that the legislature has passed. Yes, even if you don’t agree with the person whom you are protecting under that law.

If you are anti-gay, but there is a law that protects the rights of everyone to get married, your job as a judge would be to rule in favor of justice. And justice would be that people get rights, even if you religiously don’t like that type of person.

If you are racist, but a black person comes before your court having been falsely accused of a crime, your job as a judge is to administer justice to that person, even if your personal convictions are that they are a lesser race. To not do this is to fail in your judicial duties.

But based on every quote I have read of hers, Barret believes a court’s duty is to the law, not to justice under the law. And that is something I can’t get behind.

I Believe That a Judge’s Highest Purpose Is To Administer Justice.

Not to administer the law, mind you, but to administer justice under the law. Through the law. By means of the law.

As a judge—especially a member of the highest court in the land—I believe that your sworn duty is to take the laws created by the legislature, and ensure that they are applied in such a way that justice has been done, to the very best of your ability. 

That’s the entire point of checks and balances: to ensure that the things done by one group of officials protects the country’s people as they’re supposed to.

And yes, that means that your morals and convictions DO come into the picture. To believe otherwise is to destroy the entire purpose of the judiciary.

You must make rulings that you may not personally like, because a just law says you have to. Justice must be served, despite your religious, cultural, or familial ideals. 

But you must also make rulings to repair, rescind, or reapply unjust laws because your moral convictions say you have to. Justice must be served, despite the legal precedents that have come before you.

Change is vital. Things cannot stay the same. But they will, if no one ever pushes for new and better things. Women’s suffrage would never have happened if suffragettes hadn’t gotten out and made noise about it. Civil rights advancement would never have happened if activists hadn’t gotten out and made noise about it.

Part of your responsibility as a judge, on any level in the land, is to enforce things when they should be enforced, and to MAKE NOISE when they shouldn’t. You have power that a lot of people do not have to make that noise.

If your job is to check and balance the legislative and the executive branches of government, you must, by very definition, check those laws and decrees to make sure they are fair, balanced, and just. You must take the laws placed before you and make rulings on how they are applied that ensure they stay fair, balanced, and just.

It is a failing in your duty as a member of the judicial portion of the government if you enforce unjust laws.

Barret Seems To Only Believe In Half Of That Sworn Duty As A Judge. 

Her quotes are full of soundbytes about how the law must be upheld, and it’s not her place to make laws. And she isn’t wrong. But they’re also full of statements on interpreting the law that convince me she cares about the legality of a ruling more than the justice of it. (And that if she could change the legality of things she doesn’t like—without making too many waves—she’d do it.)

For me, her words about trans rights are the perfect example:

"When Title IX was enacted, it’s pretty clear that no one, including the Congress that enacted that statute, would have dreamed of that result, at that time. Maybe things have changed so that we should change Title IX, maybe those arguing in favor of this kind of transgender bathroom access are right. That’s a public policy debate to have. But it does seem to strain the text of the statute to say that Title IX demands it.”

It’s nicely worded. I’ll give her that. She certainly makes it sound like she cares about trans rights, and is just trying to be reasonable about the law, with phrasing like “maybe things have changed, so that we should change title IX”.

But we’re talking about a human’s ability to live unharassed in this country, not some offhand statement on finances or election districts. Human rights are not political opinions.

This quote makes it crystal clear that she’s extremely chill about denying rights to trans people as long as the wording of protection laws is teeeeechnically non-inclusive. She needs everything spelled out for her in explicit legalese before she’s willing to be cool with protecting a group of people that apparently don’t qualify under the ‘everyone should be equal’ part of what America claims to be about.

Saying “it’s really a stretch to read those rights into this document” is exactly the same as old timey politicians saying “I mean, yes, it says that all men are created equal, but it doesn’t say that this includes black men. It does seem to strain the text of the statute to say that the Declaration of Independence demands it.”

See where I’m going with this?

We should be able to say that “all men are created equal” does, in fact, actually demand that we listen to the “ALL” part. It should be inherent in our empathy and humanity that we include rather than exclude. That we not need to be micromanaged, in order to believe in the equality of all humans.

We should not need a law written out to say that “yeah, bro. Stop discriminating” includes trans people along with everyone else. Because they, too, are humans trying to get along in society.

But, ya know, Amy thinks we do. To her, trans folks are a policy, not a people. An opinion, not a human rights issue. And anyone who can believe that about one group of people, whoever they are, loses all credibility in my eyes. If you can dehumanize trans folks, you can dehumanize anyone else. All you need is the right propaganda.

I Don’t Think Barret Is Fit For the Highest Court in the Country

To me, someone who’s good at their job of adjudicating and administering justice under the law would care more about a person to be protected than the minutiae of the phrasing. We aren’t toddlers trying to get away with stuff by finding loopholes. (Or at least, we shouldn’t be.)

**Fun Note: I actually love the idea of de-bloating our government. Smaller sounds great. So much is legislated that sometimes I feel like I need to find a little island that can be my own country, where no one can tell me what to do with my rainwater. 

But the truth is that people are stupid. We shouldn’t have to be instructed on every small and simple thing in order to just not be dicks to other people, but here we are with a potential supreme court judge that will literally discriminate against a whole group of people different than her, until she is legally made to stop.

The fact that we even need laws to tell us not to discriminate against women, people who aren’t white, and people who aren’t cis or straight is just depressing, tbh.

And because I’m not safe in the presence of other humans unless stupid people are explicitly told that murdering me is bad, I’ll go ahead and live with the lots of laws bit.

Now, back to Barret, and her bad takes.

Most of what I’m talking about here has nothing to do with whether other people like her or not. It isn’t about believing false memes or hating her based on her party affiliation. All of it is entirely centered on actual phrases that she, herself has uttered, and which I have read and thought about more than once.

Given all that, Barret, based on her own words, reads to me as someone who:

• Thinks that human rights are an opinion, just like taxes or traffic laws.

• Claims that faith shouldn’t affect her administration of justice, but would overturn just laws if given the chance, in favor of policy that fits her personal ideas.

• Would enforce unjust laws with nary a qualm, because they’re the law.

• Believes in enforcing laws, but doesn’t care much about the justice of that enforcement.

• Would use her platform of power and influence to encourage anti-LGBTQ+ policy, even if she didn’t technically create or sign those laws herself.

• Would, despite her assertions to the contrary, rule more in favor of her personal party lines than in the neutral and unbiased way she espouses to believe in.

• Follows the Trump line of thinking: Loopholes are where the smart people live. If something isn't airtight, it should be exploited to personal benefit.

• Which, in turn, makes her seem like someone who doesn't like being micromanaged because she can't make her own life choices, but likes being micromanaged because it's an excuse to get away with things through those loopholes.

Now, you’d be right to say that we don’t necessarily know that these things would happen. We’ve only seen her be an actual judge for 3 years, and that’s not a lot to go on, when considering the Supreme Court. It might turn out that she’s just terrible at expressing herself, and she really is devoted to justice.

Buuuuuut she sounds pretty well-spoken to me. And well-spoken people, I find, rarely just misstep in their words to that degree. I believe that she said what she meant to say. And what she meant to say is not something I can get behind.

Ready For My Entire Life Story?

 Y’all, I need some catharsis. Let me tell you why.

So last night I got aggressively told that my opinions about the potential Supreme Court justice makes me a bad person.

Okay. No big deal. This sort of internet trolling happens all the time, right? 

Yes. It does. And normally, this wouldn’t hurt me as fast and as deep as it did last night, for that exact reason. People are stupid, and I’m usually ready for that. But a) it was a friend who lashed out, and b) it was SO out of the blue.

• One friend: Civilly mentions something about Amy Coney Barret.

• Me: Civilly mentions that she appears to be very anti-LGBTQ+, based on some things I read.

• Original friend: Civilly says basically, “I don’t think you’re right about that assessment.”

• Me: Goes to civilly reply back to that comment, only to find

• Original Friend’s Husband: “Sara, that is baseless slander, and you know it. There is not a hairbreadth of difference to her favoured jurisprudence concerning anyone's civil rights and any other judge in America. You should be ashamed of yourself for broadly accusing a perfect stranger of such a vile thing.”

This is a direct quote, lest you think I’m blowing things out of proportion when I say that my hands were shaking as I read it.

No forewarning. No working up to it. No previous discussion or disagreement. No talking about the actual topic. I was just having a civil discussion with someone else, and right out of the gate, here he comes talking about how I am a vile monster (Jeez, bro.) who could not possibly have done any research (I did).

Because I was literally told that I should be ashamed of what I said, and because what I said was expressing concern about LGBTQ+ rights, that goes on to imply that I should be ashamed of who I am. Hence the shaking hands.

So that went well.

But if using large, lawyerly words to try to sound like he’s making a point instead of just directly accusing me of being a bad person wasn’t enough, I woke up this morning to more comments by him still being a truly astounding level of enraged at me, even though no one has been replying to his comments. He’s just shouting into the void, and has not calmed down at all.

Got a great non-apology about how he’s sorry I got mad, but not sorry that he’s upset for being dehumanized. (<— also the actual word he used.)

Which…? I do not in any conceivable way understand how being worried for LGBTQ+ rights has dehumanized this white, straight, married, educated male who has never felt the sting of bigotry in his life. But cool cool cool. This is fun.

At this juncture, I’m still frustrated, but not angry in the same way. It’s a combination of “Are you a toddler? Why are you in hysterics over me saying I don’t trust her political statement about a thing? Calm tf down.”

and

“Um. Friend, are you okay? You don’t seem okay.”

I honestly and sincerely am not sure if he’s alright. I don’t know how to ask, though. If I talk to his wife about it, that a) makes him even more of a toddler, because he needs a grown up to intercede about his tantrum, and b) isn’t fair to her. She doesn’t need to take on the emotional responsibility for his actions, even if it was her original post.

But if I talk to him about it, we have to clear up all the accusations first, before we can discuss if he’s actually okay, or else it’ll just come across as me attacking him about his (false and accusatory ad hominem attacks) opinions.

So I’m doing the only other thing I can think to do about it: making a blog post.

I’m not actually going to talk about how I feel on these political topics, though. That’s not going to be lighthearted enough, and anyway, I think you can already tell where I sit. I was not being subtle, up there.

To counteract the gloom and doom of our leaders’ terrible decisions, I thought instead that I’d tell some stories from my life.

I have a lot of them, mostly about my siblings, and our antics as children. But since the entire fiasco centers around someone I previously trusted getting to sobbing levels of upset about me disliking someone he doesn’t even know because he agrees with her on LGBTQ+ rights, it seemed slightly petty—but also highly appropriate—to choose the gayest stories I have.

Yeah, But I’m Straight, Though...

Ever look back on something and think about how obvious it is now, and how oblivious you were then?

I do that with mystery novels an awful lot.

Everyone who knows anything about any gay people has heard at least one story about “when I thought I was straight, but oh honey.” And they are always a good mix of haha and “oh, my sweet summer child”. Here are some of mine. (There… are embarrassingly a lot.)

Most of these are not funny-haha. Definitely most are funny-painfully-relatable. But here they are all the same.

1. The 6th Grade One-Day Boyfriend

This is a story of how I lived out the perfect middle school sitcom script, like a tween’s absolute dream, buuuuut didn’t actually know it.

Sixth grade was a weird time. Somewhere partway through the school year, I started to notice people around me suddenly caring about clothes in a way they never had before. They started walking through the hallways holding hands with boys. They started being strangely interested in the love story parts of the books we read for school.

I have some oddly specific, but very vivid memories of some of these times, especially regarding the four other girls that were my main friend group in 6th and half of 7th grade. 

Just a very brief and innocuous example: One of those girls (Becky) had her locker next to mine, because we were alphabetically next to each other that year. I remember so distinctly this day when she came to school wearing fancy, super thick flip flops, and asked if I liked her new shoes.

I didn’t yet know that shoes were a thing anyone cared about, so I was kinda confused about how to answer that. Not because they were bad shoes. I just… I was lost on things like that kind of a lot. I really didn’t understand any of it. And if I didn’t understand shoes, I definitely, on a much higher level, did not get the boys thing, which I also started to notice, when it came to these four friends.

Was this partly because I was just socially awkward, and didn’t always pick up on cues that other people saw? Yeah.

Was this partly because I am a little bit demi, and don’t always, even today, pick up on attraction-related things? Yeah.

All I knew then was that I had no idea why anyone should want to hold hands with a boy, or dance with a boy, or kiss a boy. You have NO IDEA how baffled I was at our fifth grade dance when there was this guy that literally had a line of girls waiting to dance with him.

Actually, that STILL confuses me. But we were ten. Logic was never part of it. ;) 

Fast forward to our middle school halloween dance. (This may have been 7th grade? But I seem to recall it being 6th. Whichever.)

I was in what was perhaps the worst costume ever created. I don’t even remember what I was trying to be. I just know I had a king sized tan sheet haphazardly draped all over me, and badly secured with what may have been rubber bands and tape?

It was a disaster. But nevertheless, I went to the after school dance anyway. The dance itself was also a disaster. I mean, it was a room full of either 6th or 7th graders in the school cafeteria with costumes that rode the line between “I’m still a cute kid” and “I want to be a sexy teenager”. I don’t know what the school was really expecting from that.

At some point, I had one of those moments you see in every 80s/early 90s tv sitcom ever written: the “you go ask him if he likes me, but don’t tell him that it’s me who’s asking” scene. Or, at least I was in that scene. The memory of how I got there is kinda fuzzy.

Everything went according to the script you see on tv. Your friends talking to his friends about whether or not he likes you, and whether or not you like him back, and doing the back and forth dance trying to make something happen between kids that don’t even know how to say the word “boy” without being weird about it. It went like clockwork.

The only problem: I didn’t know that’s what was happening, until I was dancing with this guy. His name was Josh. We danced for a bit. He was a solid 8 inches taller than me, at least, which I guess I was supposed to swoon about.

The next morning my friends were all, “Josh wants to go out with you!!”

Me: Okay?

Them: Thinking I said “okay!”

We sat through science class, where he was on the opposite side of the room from me. I knew we were dating, I guess, but I didn’t know how I’d gotten myself into that. I spent the whole class thinking, “Wait, what is happening?” Not, “I don’t want to date anyone.” Literally just “what is happening?”

Guys. I didn’t even know what dating WAS. I was that slow on the uptake.

I eventually figured out that we were supposed to sit next to each other and maybe hold hands. A small part of my brain went, “Oh. Ok, that’s… fine.” The rest of my brain went, “Wait… what? Why?”

By the end of the day, I decided to ask one of my friends what exactly we were supposed to do as people who were dating each other. Which seems reasonable. But remember that part where I was also socially incompetent? Yeah. So, that conversation ended up with them getting the idea that I didn't want to date him, even though that’s not what I said, and then my friends told his friends to tell him that we were breaking up.

Y’all. I was so awkward in 6th grade that I accidentally got into a relationship, and then accidentally got myself back out of it on the same day. It worked out well for me, but if I HAD wanted to date him, this would have gone down in history as one of the world’s greatest middle school tragedies.

Any of you who were around at the time might remember this story a lot differently, but let me tell you: I spent that entire few days being more confused than I had ever been in my tiny life to date.

2. The 1999 Mummy Movie

I was too oblivious to notice that there were certain movies I liked more than others because the main female character was just “really cool”. I “wanted to be like her”. Same thing with some of the super cool girls I wanted to be around all the time. I wanted to be like them. They were cool. “I just think they’re neat.”

Mmhmm. Yes. That’s all that is.

The very first memory I have of noticing a girl in a way that is indelibly etched into my psyche was the 1999 movie, The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. This movie series has terrible CGI, but actually also has timeless jokes and great acting that is still a blast to watch 21 years later. They are good movies, and you can’t blame me for loving them anyway.

But I loved them a little more for a reason that I didn’t figure out till a lot later.

Not far into the first movie, there’s a scene where the boat is attacked, set on fire, and starts to go down. Everyone jumps overboard into the Nile, including Evy, who is in her night clothes and loses most of her stuff. The next scene, after getting out of the river, is Evy buying new clothes while Rick and Jonathan are trying to buy some camels.

She walks up to them in her new duds. Rick turns around. His jaw almost literally drops, and there’s this massive moment of chemistry that happens as she does her little smile at him.

Y’all. That was the moment my stomach did its very first flippedy flop, butterflies, whatever you want to call it. The thing where it feels like your whole stomach has decided, for no clear reason, to do a couple of somersaults. Just for half a second.

Actually, there’s a perfect gif of that scene. Let me add it here, if I can.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/bb/ff/ef/bbffeffe553b3fdbbc2647335bc19516.gif

Most of you have experienced this. The majority of you probably in a way that made sense to you at the time. Half the people my age experienced it with Orlando Bloom in the first Lord of the Rings movie. I know my sister’s memorable moment of this sort was Christopher Plummer, in Sound of Music. I know someone else for whom Tom Holland is the giver of every chest butterfly.

For me, though, this moment didn’t make sense. I didn’t even know, yet, that being gay was a thing that existed. I was 14, and by that point all I had figured out was that boyfriends were a thing I was supposed to want. I had figured out that dating was desirable, because it was nice to be noticed, and to be in love. I had even figured out some of the things that people my age looked for in a guy to date.

And I wanted a boyfriend, because a) being alone doesn’t feel good, and b) I was taught that being noticed made me worth more. Honestly, it had nothing to do with me actually feeling desire for any of the people I had crushes on. (In fact, I was kind of proud of the whole “I’m not boy crazy like everyone else” thing. Turns out, I was just real gay. And probably a lot more demi than I am currently.)

I had not yet figured out that the sort of weird sinking feeling in the back of your mind about a crush IS NOT NORMAL. (If you get that, listen to it. Double Check for red flags.)

I had also not yet figured out that no one else around me chose their crushes based on deciding who it made sense to like, and convincing themselves to be interested.

I know. I know. This is one of those “oh, you sweet summer child” moments for sure. But I didn’t have a basis for comparison yet. I just figured that’s how it went for everyone. I didn’t know you were supposed to want to be close with these guys. That you were supposed to be drawn to them. I didn’t know what actual attraction to an actual person felt like.

Until 1999.

It didn’t make sense that my stomach did that thing, when I first saw the movie. And it didn’t make sense that it had never happened with any of the boy crushes people my age were into. I didn’t get the JTT phase. Or the Nick Carter phase. I almost understood the Orlando Bloom phase, but not to the degree that others did. I didn’t even really get that scene in George of the Jungle where Brendan Fraser is running with the horses, and all the girls were swooning.

So why now? And why Rachel Weisz? (Answer: because she’s RACHEL WEISZ. But that’s another topic.)

The point is, I didn’t know what was up with that, and because it happened pretty rarely, it was easy to ignore. Obviously boys were still a thing that I liked. And someday I would marry one, and everything would be great.

Easy to ignore, but not easy to forget. I’ve thought about that moment literally thousands of times since then. 

In the early thousands, when talk of marriage rights started to float around in the ether. In the later thousands, when prop 8 was a major controversy. Later, when the supreme court was doing its thing. Sometimes just at complete random, in the middle of the night. It’s always been there in the back of my head, absolutely demanding that I recognize and process it.

Another one of my “sweet summer child” moments was in the early days of the marriage laws stuff. (Or at least of the wider-spread publicity of it, because I know this is a thing that’s been lobbied about for decades.) I think it was 2003 or 2004ish. Someone in my dorm mentioned, just in passing, about how there were people that said you didn’t choose to be gay, but you were born with it. And how they didn’t know how to feel about that.

I, also in passing, thought instantly of the Mummy movie, and just said casually, “I don’t know how it works, but I definitely think people are at least born with an inclination.” 

Then I walked off and never followed up on that. But y’all… I wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t felt it. That’s exactly the thing that gets you looks from everyone in the room who are all thinking, “Um. We may have something to tell you.”

Either way, I kept watching The Mummy, and the Mummy Returns over and over. Because the awesome ladies sword fighting in the second one was just cool. Nothing to do with me being into that. Of course not. I just wanted to be like them. That’s all. They were awesome. (They ARE awesome, but y’all. The mental gymnastics here was award-winning.)

And so I carried on. Occasionally actually thinking a dude was attractive, which confused the entire process. But never being really into them.

3. The Band Kid Boyfriend

The fiasco with Josh was my first clue that maybe boyfriends weren’t a thing I was gonna be into. Or… it would have been, if I wasn’t so oblivious.

I’ll tell you what. Our culture of “straight till absolutely proven gay” does a NUMBER on you.

Anyway, the next clue—or at least the next really major one, outside of me still not understanding everyone’s desire to have boyfriends—came a few years later in high school. There was a band kid who I think played either the clarinet or the flute. All I really remember is that he loaded tetris onto my graphing calculator for me and brought a massive bottle of fake blood to school for halloween.

One day we were just sitting next to each other playing graphic calculator games in homeroom, when he boldfaced asked me, “Hey, do you want to be my girlfriend?”

Part of me did, because boyfriends were a thing I wanted. Or was supposed to want. Part of me didn’t, because I was extremely not into him. All of me didn’t know how to answer that question. So I ended up accidentally getting out of it in the same way I did with Josh: being so confusing with my questions and answers that it was clear to anyone with an ounce of sense that I wasn’t into it.

I basically said, “Okay, but I’m not really into the whole sitting together and holding hands and all that stuff.”

Y’all. I told a dude “I’m not really into holding hands and sitting together”.

But, ya know, I still didn’t have the faintest clue that guys weren’t much of a thing, for me. The fact that I didn’t want to even sit next to a boyfriend in the hallway before school did not work its way far enough into my teenage brain to make me realize that maybe something else was going on here.

I mean, yeah, it’s fair that I don’t have to be attracted to every guy ever in order to be straight. It doesn’t work that way, obviously. But come on now, teen me. The clues are adding up.

4. The Girl I Wanted To Be Bestest Best Friends With

In early college, I spent a lot of time deciding which boy in my dorms I should have a crush on. Not a single one ever noticed me. I’m sure most of them didn’t even know I existed.

Turns out, guys are more likely to be interested in you and ask you out if a) they know you exist, and b) you show interest in them also. This was a complicated thing for me to grasp, though. Because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I had no metric for understanding that the other girls who were into these guys had a different thing going for them. (That thing being their desire to seek out and interact with the boys.)

Know what I did know?

That one day this girl showed up, and I knew without question or doubt that I needed to be best friends with her for forever. Not only that, but I wasn’t even afraid to do anything about it. I still remember, so very vividly, walking up to her in the lobby of our building and just starting to chat with her.

I never do that with anyone. My social anxiety is crippling even now, but back then it was horrific. I was the most awkward person in that 7 floor building. But I walked up to this girl, talked to her like it was no problem, and did become very close friends with her.

In fact, we’re still friends. We don’t talk often, largely because she’s not on any social media. But when we do, it’s like we never stopped. For 17 years, we’ve been solid, that way.

It was always platonic. Partly because she does identify as straight, and has been married to a dude for 15 of those years. But mostly because I don’t think either of us knew there was an alternative. Two 18 year old kids in their first year of college have a lot of things they don’t know.

I have never once even slightly regretted taking that risk of talking to her. Nothing in my life is the same because of that one choice. But sometimes I think about that day when we were sitting on a bus stop bench, and she put her head on my shoulder. And about how confident I was in needing to know her better. And about how instantly we clicked.

If our society was different, or if I was less oblivious to what was going on with me, who knows? Did I really just only want to be BFFs or was there something else at play there?

We’ll never know. But the way I treated guy “crushes” vs how I now treat girl crushes really does make me wonder.

5. The Girl With the Coat

My sophomore year of college, there was a dude that I was actually into enough that I understand how I convinced myself I was straight, still. (For clarity, it does happen, just extremely rarely. And at the time of those earlier stories, it had not happened yet.)

His name was Jason, and he was a twin. I still remember mostly what he looked like. But even on looking back at the severity of that crush phase, I don’t now think I liked him in the way I then thought I did. Largely because I never wanted to kiss him or cuddle with him or any of that stuff. I just liked to look at his face and generally be weirdly obsessed.

That’s another thing we’ll really never be able to know for sure. Maybe I did, but maybe I’d picked him for the same reason I’ve picked out a lot of guys over the years. Good shoes, or a nice haircut, or it just made sense, or I felt I had to choose someone, and he was the least terrible. I don’t know.

But what I do know?

That same year there was a girl who always wore this really sharp coat to church every week in the winter. And I noticed EVERY WEEK. She and I fought a lot, actually, because we were both awkward and both 19. Sometimes you’re stupid when you’re 19, and you haven’t figured out how to be a good adult yet.

Every single week for that entire winter, I really badly wanted to tell her how nice she looked. Kind of in the same way I wanted to tell the girl in the lobby that I wanted to be friends with her. I was almost compelled to it in a way that my social anxiety could not understand.

This time I didn’t, though. I was too afraid to do it, because of how rocky our general relationship was. I know it would have been really nice for her to know, and I know it might have even smoothed some of the bumps we had, but I was just too afraid.

The way I noticed how nice she looked every week was NOT the same way I liked Jason’s face. I don’t know how to describe what the difference was, but it’s just really, really not. To a degree that I don’t at all understand how I didn’t see it at the time. I did even more mental gymnastics about this.

Now, I didn’t sit around thinking about kissing her or anything like that. I don’t think even I could have done enough logic twisting to explain that away. I was still too unaware that gayness was a thing to have even gone down that mental road, tbh. But I do think I was responding to a kind of interest that I consciously didn’t know was there, but subconsciously did.

She’s now married to a very cute lady with whom she takes lots of instagram food and cat pics. So I also do think that this was partly a gaydar-in-training exercise. She didn’t know at the time. I didn’t know at the time. But like… I picked up on it anyway, I think. ;) 

I don’t tell this story to say that we should have been romantic, because I don’t think that would have worked out anyway. And I don’t tell this to make anyone feel awkward. I don’t mean to imply that I was very creepy about longing for this person who I couldn’t have, because I didn’t. I didn’t even know that there might have been a reason that I found her very normal dress coat very, very sharp-looking.

But it’s part of me piecing together the clues of this larger—and so long—story I’m telling.  

And hey. If you’re reading this, and you actually recognize who you are, you looked really nice that winter. I’m sorry I never said it to you. I should have.

6. The Time I Didn’t Know What Wedding Colors Were

This isn’t really a gay story. Just an “I cannot believe how oblivious I sometimes was” story. But maybe it’s a liiiiitle gay, too.

About a year after the winter of the girl with the coat, I had a roommate who was engaged. She was getting married as soon as the semester ended, which also meant lots of wedding planning. This was very exciting for some of my other roommates, so they talked about it a lot.

I didn’t have a problem with this, but it’s when I first began to realize how very much weddings to men were a thing that I did not ever think about. I thought I thought about them. But turns out, there’s a distinct difference between thinking about the vague concept of getting married someday and assuming that it will be to a man, and actually thinking about weddings. Cakes. Clothes. Flowers. All the stuff.

One day I came home from school and walked into the kitchen area, where the couch and the tv also were. (It was a dorm. What can ya do?) All of my roommates were gathered in a circle doing that thing that they sometimes do in movies, where they’re giggling and talking about weddings, and just generally being excited about men.

As I entered, all five of them turned to look at me, kind of in eerie unison, at which I froze. Possibly with one foot still raised comically high in the air. (Freezing is my natural fight or flight reaction.) Then someone asked, “Hey Sara. What do you want your wedding colors to be?”

And I stared blankly.

Blinked a few times.

Stared for a few more seconds.

Then said, “Weddings have colors?”

Remember that part back in the middle school boyfriend section where I talk about how sometimes people pick up on stuff in a way that I never have? Yeah, this is another one of those things.

I’m not going to say that every straight girl plans her wedding in great detail from a young age, and if you don’t you’re gay. That would be inaccurate. But I am going to say that quite a few people do plan their dream weddings in great detail from a young age.

They have colors picked out. They know the names of dress styles. They know what sorts of flowers they like. And honestly, I would venture to say that most people who do this also know exactly the kind of person they are interested in marrying.

At any rate, a lot of people have ideas about weddings long before they’ll ever be married. And I didn’t even know they had color themes. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that I might have been more interested, as a child, in learning about wedding stuff if the thought of marrying a man was more than just a very vague, abstract notion in my brain.

“Yes, weddings have colors. Come on. What colors would you like your future wedding to have?”

I finally answered with, “Tie-dye. That way I don’t have to pick.”

To be fair, I actually have always liked full-rainbow tie dye. (FORESHADOWING) So that’s an actually good answer. But I also largely said it because I really didn’t feel comfortable picking a set of colors for an imaginary party.

Good grief. What would have happened if I did find a man that was actually interested in me? If I couldn’t even pick out a color for a fake version, I’m not sure a full on wedding would be a good idea. So there’s the next clue. Thinking about marrying men had to stay absolutely abstract, or I got really weird about it.

7. General Media Experiences

Over the years, I got interested in a lot of fictional characters to a degree that started to very, very slowly clue me in. So, so slowly. 

I did the same thing as with the Mummy. Enjoyed the media as a whole. Ignored that some of my characters were favorites because they were attractive as well as great characters. Pretended to like some of the guys in the series. Legit liked one or two of them, but mostly, as with all the rest, the crushes on guy characters were sorta just picked out. They didn’t happen via the normal means.

Here are some things I said, while still thinking I was totally straight:

Some coworkers and I were talking about Avatar The Last Airbender. Apparently a lot of people think Katara is super boring because of how Mom-friend she is. Which, first of all, is a hard job. And second of all, did they not see her water bending by the end?

Anyway, they were all discussing whether or not she was cool, and whether Aang should be with someone else.

• Me: I get it, though.

• Them: You get which part?

• Me: I mean, she’s not just a great waterbender. She’s also smoking hot.

• Them: Absolutely, utterly dead silence.

• Me: What?

Another day I was discussing Fullmetal Alchemist with a different coworker. I started a conversation about Riza Hawkeye and Winry, who are my favorites.

• Coworker: Yeah! They’re so cool. AND they get to be with Mustang and Ed.

• Me: <gives a look that says “That is a thing that I care about with these characters…” while convincing myself it’s because I just don’t care about seeing them based on their love interest.> Um, yeah! They do!

• Coworker: Speaking of which, which one would you pick, if you had to choose?

• Me: <without thinking for even a second> Hawkeye.

• Her: <slightly thrown off, but then looks like she understands> Ah, yeah. Same. I’d want to be hawkeye, too. I mean, Winry has a better job, but I’m definitely in love with Mustang more than Ed.

• Me: <giving a look that says “Yes. That is exactly what my original meaning was…”> Uh huh. Yeah. Mustang is cool.

  

Me talking about Asami Sato to literally everyone who has seen Legend of Korra for the entire first few years since its release: “Asami is absolutely on my list. If I was a dude, I’d be madly in love with her. She’s literally perfect.”

Y’all, I said that last one probably hundreds of times.

I know. I know. Here’s my sign.

8. Crying in the Front Seat of a Dark SUV

It’s all fun and games till someone loses an eye. Or has a panic attack.

Yeah. I started getting panic attacks every time I had a date with a guy. Which, to be fair, was not often. I’ve been on fewer dates in my entire life than there are Fast and the Furious movies.

The last date I had where I was pleased to have gone on it was with a guy in my DnD group. Actually, it was a good time. It just didn’t go anywhere. Lack of sparks and all that. We still game every week, and are good with being just friends about it.

Since then… well, it got ugly toward the end, before I really, truly gave up on it. ‘It’ being the dating scene.

There is honestly no reason for “playing Settlers of Catan with two friends and a guy date” to make me sob uncontrollably on my bed when I got home. It logically made no sense. Even if I wasn’t into him, he wasn’t mean or bad or hurtful.

I couldn’t control it, though. Clearly this wasn’t about logic. It was about something else that I just didn’t grasp. And if there’s anything in the world I truly hate, it’s having facts and not being able to understand them. If you give me a scenario that is supposed to make sense, but I can’t work it out, it will drive me to distraction like nothing you’ve ever seen.

(I actually recently had a similar issue with the encounter-building math in the DnD Dungeon Master’s Guide. It does not actually work, but so many modules, gamers, and developers pretend like it does. All the while people are running their own math systems to build a good game, and kinda no one talks about this secret math. This is ridiculous, and for a while it made me absolutely crazy that I was doing the calculations perfectly, but getting results that didn’t match up with what they said I was supposed to.

Different topic for a different day, though.)

The point is, I was missing some secret information. (That info being that being gay was a possibility. Just straight up never occured to me.)

• I knew that I had found some guys good-looking in the past. (Which, let us note, is different than being actually attracted to them.)

• I knew that I’d always planned on eventually getting married.

• I knew that I did NOT want to be single forever. I’m too much of a people person to handle that well.

• I knew that there were women in my past with whom I had instantly connected, in ways that had literally never happened with any men. (There are some guys that I am very, very close with, but those relationships took years to build, in every single case.)

• There are women that I have wanted to be around in much more intense ways than I’ve ever wanted to be in a room with any dude. (Not sexual ways. Just “I want this friendship to happen so bad”.)

• That has never happened with a man. Not a single one time.

• I knew that I’d been on several kinds of dates with different kinds of guys, and every single one of them felt disappointing in a way that I do not know how to describe. Even when the dates were really good and fun. Something was always missing, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it was.

• I knew that dates were starting to give me panic attacks, seemingly for no reason.

• I knew that guys, for reasons I didn’t know how to grasp, were just wholly and completely uninterested in me.

And all of that brought me to a place where it came crashing down together. Why could I find dudes good-looking, but be totally unable to connect with them? And also be able to instantly connect with women, but not want to physically be with them or kiss them or anything like that?

Why couldn’t my stupid, broken self just pick one thing and stick with it? How did it make any kind of ridiculous sense to be attracted to one thing, and able to connect to another? And what was I supposed to do about it? Just be single forever, because I can’t be interested in all aspects of a person?

One day, not too terribly long after the Catan panic attack, I was driving home with my friend, and we kinda got talking about this. I didn’t intend to spill my guts, but a dam broke somewhere, and out the flood came. Eventually we got to the parking lot, and just sat there idling in the car as I dramatically and emotionally listed all of the stuff I just typed out above.

She was very patient with me, and let me just agonize it alllllll out. It didn’t make much more sense afterward than before, but I had some words for it now. I definitely had figured out that I wasn’t connecting with men in any kind of way that worked. I just didn’t understand why I couldn’t connect with them if I (I thought) physically was into them?

(Spoiler: I wasn’t. I just still never had that context for comparison.)

I cried a lot. Not because of shame, though, which is an important note. But because of this desperate need to just make things make sense, when they wouldn’t. But I think that SUV was a turning point. A listening ear and a verbalized version of what had been piling and piling and piling on top of me got me motivated to finally just figure it out.

9. Breakthrough

The end of this story is just as long as the beginning, and I think I’ve more than worn out my welcome. So I’m going to summarize it a lot. If you’re still here reading this, then wow. Thanks. You have some blogger endurance.

The end comes after a lot of agonizing. The agonizing was my motivation for figuring this thing out, but the actual breakthrough didn’t come until I decided to just let my brain have a little freedom to think.

Why can I connect with women but not want to physically be with them? Well… how do I know that I don’t want to be with them?

And the floodgates opened. 

I told myself a lot of times that I didn’t, because if I did, wouldn’t I want to kiss them and hold hands with them and stuff? Well, do you know why I didn’t want to do any of that? Literally because I didn’t think about it.

That actually was it, all this time.

I wish I was kidding or exaggerating. 

Every time I connected with a girl in a really strong way, I didn’t want to kiss her because I didn’t even think about it. The idea of it didn’t enter my head. Every time I thought a girl just looked really especially nice that day, it was only me being nice, because anything else just honestly didn’t occur to me.

10. Yeah, I’m coming back to Asami Sato Again. Deal With It.

There are a few things that opened that gate for me. One of them was my friend just straight up asking, “Are you actually sure you don’t like girls?” And even though I answered at the time that I was sure, the question never left my head. It wormed its way in, the same way that one moment from the Mummy movie did.

Also, around that time, the Legend of Korra series had somewhat recently ended. And as most of you know, it ended super gay. This was the first time a show I’d watched from beginning to end, over years of weekly episodes, had a canon, main-character relationship that was gay, and not subtle about it or only implied. 

(I know other shows have dealt with the topic slightly, but this one was the first I had been keeping up with during its whole run.)

Honestly, it kinda startled me at first, and I really wasn’t ready for it. But I loved the show so much, and loved Asami so much, and if we’re being honest, I loved Korra a lot, too. So when fan art started to hit the internet, I saw actual imagery of these two characters, whom I loved, kissing and being cute and just generally being unhandleably adorable.

I couldn’t explain why I liked the fanart SO MUCH. I had no way to grasp it in my head. I’d never in my whole life cared about a fictional couple enough to put pics of them on my ipad and use them as wallpapers. But Korrasami has owned my phone off and on for 5 years. In fact, they’re my lock screen right now.

Between noticing that I craved stories about them in a way that I never had for M/F rom coms and cheesy romance stories, and mulling over my friend’s overarching question, “but like, are you sure you don’t like girls?” I finally got a brain pattern that worked. Things finally made sense.

Yes. Yes I do like them. Once I asked my brain, “brain, do you like girls” it said, “HAVE YOU NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION ALL THIS TIME?”

It wasn’t necessarily a comfortable answer, because now there are a lot of things I have to deal with that I never thought about when I assumed I’d just marry a dude some day. But the fact that it’s an answer, and that I understand it, and that there is clarity in my brain now is… well, it’s kind of miraculous.

It’s a weight that’s gone. It’s a new start. It’s being able to breathe again.

I haven’t had a panic attack about a boy, ever since.

Guys. It feels so good to just not have all that looming over me anymore. I can’t words it properly enough.

There are still people I’m kind of afraid to talk to about all this, because I don’t know how they’ll take it. I’m still weird and awkward about mentioning crushes and dates in front of people, because I spent 3 entire decades faking all that, and pretending I cared about boy talk, and not being able to say things I’d rather say. I spent 3 decades being so unable to express myself about romance and dating that I literally couldn’t even think those things to myself, for years.

That doesn’t go away in a hurry.

But the other day my friend asked, “how are you doing?”

• Me: Mediocre, but hanging in there.

• Him: What would make it better?

• Me: I’m split between "you could make Trump totally disappear" and "You don't have a cute girlfriend for me, do you?"

• Him: I need a cute girlfriend first

And it was just that easy. If it was like that with everyone, the world would be a kinder, gentler, and more wholesome place.

Not everyone is as chill as that, sadly. And I’m not entirely ready to like, bare my whole romantic soul and hopes and dreams to people. I still feel too awkward talking about those things, even with people I’m close to.

But I’m practicing. Working on it. Getting bold about it. Writing blog posts about it, that probably no one will finish, because it’s SO LONG. And someday maybe I won’t feel a sense of impending doom at the thought of telling my Mom or Dad I’m dating someone.

(No, but seriously, for decades I’ve been scared of mentioning it to them, even when I thought I’d date a boy, because that need to hide was so powerful, and the idea of dating a dude was so… not the right thing. The dread was incredible.)

Maybe I’ll be able to just casually mention in a group setting about a date I went on without my ears turning red and stammering out some weird, quick, poor excuse for an explanation.

Some day.