“IT”

In my blog on August 8th I wrote about how you couldn’t judge a book by it’s cover. This blog was about a gaming app that I play. I have been playing this game for over 8 months. There are people from all walks of life. Different religions, political view, ethnic backgrounds, languages spoken, and countries and maybe sexual orientations and gender identities. The reason I say maybe is because people don’t talk about the last two. It’s like living in a closet in a game. Kinda strange, but I feel its because people don’t wanna have to deal with others that have different views as them.

The other day people in the group I mainly play with were debating about whether someone was female or male. This person has a feminine name JOAN. However a lot of our male members felt this person is a male, because of the way the talk in chat.

One of them even went as far as saying, “Is it a boy.” This real upset me. I couldn’t believe they said “it” in the sentence instead of “they”. I remember when I told this group of people I was non-binary, someone said,”so you are an it.” I let it go, because I used that moment as a teaching tool. However, that wasn’t the case this day. When it happened this time I realized with all the different religious, political, ethnic, etc. it would be best to step back and take a few days to calm down.

This person that used “it” is a Muslim, male, from Denmark, who does speak English. This could be the reason why he said what he did. I now know that, I am the only non-binary person he has ever encountered and is struggling with the language. He did point out in regards to me he does his best not to uses gender pronouns. This made me feel better.

The United States has a long way to go when it comes to different types of gender identities, but I’m sure that other countries might have even farther to go.

What I can say is by me telling them about my gender identity they are aware that people have different gender identities other than male and female.