These few weeks, we have been focusing on LGBTQ+, the community, their situation, and how they are treated. During middle school, I have learned about this topic several times, but now that we are in high school, we went a bit deeper. One interesting thing I learned is the difference between gender identity and expression. Previously, we didn’t go in depth about how people express their gender, but through this PSE unit, I learned that gender identity is the personal sense of one’s own gender, while expression is how they act, different from sexual orientation and gender assigned at birth.

Since I was little, I would be intrigued by documentaries about ‘different’ people, but now thinking about it, they weren’t ever ‘different’, not normal, in any way. Usually, I would watch about syndromes or diseases, but one day I stumbled upon a girl who was born a boy. This made me stop at first, confused and shocked, but as I spent the next hour watching and searching about this ‘phenomenon’, I came to realize that they weren’t born in the right body and that sometimes their gender in their head doesn’t align with how they were born.

From then on, I became very curious about different genders, and new gender types that aren’t as common, for example, intersex: when a person has both female and male reproductive organs/systems. It is similar to a hermaphrodite that is seen in some types of animals/bugs.

To conclude, this unit was very interesting for me as I got to expand my knowledge and add on to what I have learned from the previous years.