Graduated high school in 1990. There was one guy in my class who was bullied and called gay because... he liked wearing eyeliner. That's it. he had a girlfriend. He's still, afaik, straight and cis. But he wore one item of makeup and had a fashion sense and that was enough. I left my small town and went to college at an extremely liberal private college and immediately met trans and gay and bisexual and lesbian people and started considering my own identity, which it had not been safe to do AT ALL in high school.

And later learned that a number of people I'd known in high school were queer. By later, I mean 20 years later when we all found each other on facebook.

Kids started calling me a "lesbo" on the playground and beating me up for it while I was in elementary school. I became "boy crazy" as a form of self defense. If I was a slut, at least I wasn't a dyke.

It was a joke in my family that my youngest sibling hated dresses, which of course were mandatory for "girls." Ha ha, it's funny, ha ha. Because of course we just have to put up with wearing dresses.

That's my brother. Jake. He graduated from HS in 2001.

Fuck that asshole. We broke ourselves trying to survive. Some of us didn't.

If you were in the UK, there was a little thing called Section 28 that made it illegal for schools to discuss "homosexually" (which was the catch all for any non-het, non-cis identity) in a positive light. Three internet wasn't an easily accessible thing yet, and positive representation in the media vanishingly rare. Many of us who have grown up to be some variety of queer literally did not know there were options beyond Gay Man (predatory or tragic, will be dead from AIDS by 30), Lesbian (ugly and shrill, always predatory) or Transvestite (see Gay Man but more laughable).

Aside from similar experiencing similar levels of violence and ostracisation to those described by previous posters, would my mental health been better had I known I was bisexual and genderqueer at 15 (rather than 28 and 39 respectively) instead of being keenly aware that I was Doing Woman Wrong despite trying Really Hard to be normal and not sure how I was still failing? Almost certainly.

Do I remember Eddie Izzard describing herself in the mid 90s as "a lesbian with a man's body" and feeling a strong sense of kinship, albeit the other way around, and then immediately dismissing it because female "transvestites" didn't exist, so I guess I couldn't feel like that? Painfully.

So why didn't you get kids coming out at trans prior to 2000? Because if we weren't getting any non-conformity beaten out of us by peers/teachers/parents, we were beating it out of ourselves thinking we were the only ones who felt like this so it could be real.

Yall are talking 2000 and earlier but ik kids at my fucking school who are too terrfied to come out bc they're in a bad class.

I spent middle school clutching my identity in secret because if it came out I was more then a emo girl with funky colored hair we'd be fucking dead. Litterly.

We went to a good school, in a big-ish city. Our current school is considred one of the queerest, and yet we can still point out each and every closeted person we only know to be trans because they've confided in us.

Its still like this. It's better, but it's never been the time. It's been that if we come out, we're fucking dead.

Graduated high school in 1996. One of the first people I met in the school who wasn't awful to me was a splendid, but awkward individual who took me home and handed me off to their big sister as a more suitable mentor for a weird, loud, mouthy little baby lesbian.

Said person was several grades ahead of me, and graduated long before I did, but I remained very close with the sister.

Said person fully transitioned the minute we were all out of high school, and he was my manager at my first full-time office job. No, he never talked about being trans on campus. He would have been beaten to death by the other students. But he was trans, and the minute he could live his truth, he did.

Graduated HS in 2010 from a private high school. There was one gay girl at our school and she was slowly forced to leave by the school banning her from all activities that involved changing clothes cause “parents were worried about their daughters”. She couldn’t do PE unless she changed in the bathroom at the other end of the school which made her late every time. She was banned from acting in any plays cause she wasn’t allowed to use the dressing room. She joined us in tech cause none of us cared (and 9/10 of us ended up coming out as queer later in life) but I was partnered with her anytime she had to go behind stage during costume changes ‘just in case she tried to go in the dressing room’. She couldn’t do sports or any activity that involved overnight trips. They took away everything from her. Most of us students didn’t care that she was gay, she was a great friend and smart kid, but the school didn’t care. The faculty and staff bullied her out of any group activities.

I came out 2 years after I graduated and slowly 9 other members of my 60 person class have come out since. 5 of us are trans in some way. 0 of us talked about it until after graduation cause we all watched how this girl was bullied by her own school and it didn’t matter how many of us students tried to say we were chill with her on our teams or in the dressing room, the faculty didn’t care, they had decided she was an “other” and she was gonna be treated like it.

I graduated from high school in 2001. (At the time, Ontario had an optional fifth year of high school. I’m that old.) I didn’t know anyone at the time who was out as trans; however, I know a few people from my graduating class who have since come out as such. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they weren’t trans back then. It just means that it wasn’t as safe to be anything but cishet at the time. It sickens me that things are getting to be that bad again.

Graduated in 2011

Girls in my grade passed around a petition asking that I be banned from changing in the same change room as them.

Guys followed me when I was walking home and threw hot dogs at my back so I’d “know what a dick felt like.” They got ketchup and mustard on a brand new hoodie (I grew up super poor, new clothes as a kid that weren’t hand me downs were nearly unheard of). I told the principal. He said he’d talk to the kids parents. I found out later he didn’t talk to the kids parents. Or the kids. They got no punishment at all. My dad though, beat the shit out of me for getting stains all over the back of my new hoodie. So that was cool.

Friends I’d known for years stopped wanting to hang out with me, or go to sleepovers I was invited to. I got constantly asked if I was attracted to them when I’d known them for years and shown zero attraction.

One of these friends told another friend she felt uncomfortable around me now because she felt like I was always “staring at her”. Like, I’ve barely said two words to this girl as we weren’t close but just hung out in the same friend group and she thought I liked her suddenly because I she found out I liked girls.

My best friend also got bullied as a result of me coming out because they assumed if I was gay she must be gay too.

And that was just what I dealt with for coming out as bi.

I currently identify as genderqueer and bi, and definitely I would not feel safe coming out as genderqueer in 2011. Honestly if I could go back in time I probably would’ve waited to come out as well.

Here's the rest of the Chromas! You may recognize some of them if you've been following me for a while…