Lucky

Of course, I’m for gay marriage and accepting queer relationships. I support gay rights in an obvious and distant way, the way straight people get to be supportive. Straight allies who’ll never be at risk over their sexuality, who can be quietly supportive while living an easier life. The scale is entirely different, but I can’t help but see parallels to men in tech and gaming jobs. Not boys’ club dickwolves of course, but really good guys who agree that our industry’s a bit skewed on gender and they’d absolutely hire a girl, or take a girl journo seriously. We feel like progressive proponents of change because one’s personal choices are open-minded.

I have so many privilege as a straight girl. Each time I turn my head at a goodlooking guy, every ill-advised makeout ever, even walking hand-in-hand with my date, putting my head on my boyfriend’s shoulder,is  my privilege. When I talk about seeing someone, my friends and family react to him as an individual, not the fact that I’m seeing a man. I am lucky to be a girl who dates guys.

I hesitate to use the word heteronormative here, I hesitate to call myself a female-identified female, these terms belong to the sort of hyperviligant language sensitivity that seems to separate instead of including. I understand that there are transexuals, pre-op, post-op, intersexed, and a wide variety of gender identities, and a whole host of vocabulary options to describe them. I’m happy to be in a city (and, often, in subcultures) where that’s accepted. But in my daily life, I’m good with defaulting to he as a genderless pronoun for the player. Better writers than I have done so.

But whatever we call it, I am lucky.