I am a Gen-X’er. I am among the first of the new models to come out. The Mustang and the Beatles beat me and my peers to the scene by mere months, both being introduced the year prior. Probably due to being the first of my generation, I feel a lot of connection with the later baby boomers. We share a lot of cultural references and values, but we are still unique.

I am of “The Breakfast Club” generation, referring to the film that came out less than two years after we graduated from high school. Indeed, as self-appointed chairman of our (OMG!) 40s Reunion Planning Committee, I have been pulling on classmates’ heartstrings using “The Breakfast Club” as leverage. “We are more alike than different,” I tell my peers, trying to get even the most skeptical, “I don’t do reunions”-types to attend.

In my class, I am a bit of an outlier but I am hardly surprised. To my knowledge, I am the only transgender person in my Northampton High School class of a bit over 300. While I had feelings that I might be transgender then, I dare not come out. There was no one to trust this information with, and as I knew it was relatively rare, I thought perhaps I was mistaking my feelings for something else, maybe something other guys felt but didn’t talk about. That was clearly not the case.

After I came out as transgender to my classmates starting in 2016, I was amazed at the incredible, broad, level of support I received. It was more surprising because I always felt on the fringes of high school life. I felt the same in college, and much of my male working career. Things are decidedly different now.

For kids in school now, transgender and gender non-conforming students are a far more common occurrence. What these kids will choose to do with their bodies and lives after they get out of school remains to be seen, but for now, exploring the ranges of gender and gender expression will hopefully make them more informed, more accepting adults. Just the same, in many areas of the country, these kids face an uphill battle.

As a member of the transgender community, I try to stay well informed, and yet, probably because of my age and lifestyle, I’m not aware of all the many things going on in the “underground” of the gender-diverse community. For example, I just found out recently that there is a transfeminine flag. It uses colors and patterns similar to the more common Trans Pride flag, but it is clearly not the same. There is also a transmasculine version emphasizing different colors. “How could I not know this?” I thought to myself.

The deeper I dug, I found more unique terms and terminology that are used by the transgender and gender-diverse community that made me feel old and rather out of touch. I know the common terms — I even educated others on them, and, let me say, there are a lot. Today, however, finding out new terms like “demigirl” and seeing all the many flags for any classification of transgender or gender-non-conforming people, I felt ignorant and outside of a community that I took pride in being a member of.

Considering the cliques in “The Breakfast Club” made me consider a question: If I felt excluded from my own group, is the unique language, symbols, literature, music, and so forth, of the queer community alienating some would-be supporters? I love this community and believe its members are diverse, unique, special, and incredibly insightful, but I don’t want to see us considered as so different we are not worthy of a seat at the table of power and decision-making, something we sadly largely are. By being seen as “others” we are both feared and dismissed — something clearly evident by the ongoing violence and political attacks against us.

Each member of the queer community is human and, like “The Breakfast Club,” I wait for the day when all people outside the queer community realize that we are really not all that different from them. We are all children of a higher power, and all worthy of love.

Mariel E. Addis is a native of Florence. She left the area for 16 years but returned in 2013.]]>