3,000 gay people in a hotel. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.

3,000 gay people in a hotel. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong. Well. Maybe that sounds bitchy of me, criticizing your sexual mechanics like that. And while we're at it, unlike the rest of you losers, I am not waiting until December 21, 2012 to get laid. But hey, that's your prerogative- which is the perfect segue, pronounced segway for the non-grammar connoisseur (I apologize for being more pretentious than Naked Juice when it insists that its recipe calls for no less than 178 acai berries), into the topic that I am addressing in this blog post.
Tomorrow afternoon, I am leaving for Minneapolis, where I will be attending the largest and most important LGBT leadership conference in the world. From February 2nd-6th, I will be receiving 600% of my daily dose of gay. I mean, I don't know how gay it could possibly get, seeing as temperatures in Minneapolis hover around a pretty consistent yet psychotic -9 degrees. That's hardly a hospitable climate for flaming.
But in spite of that petty inconvenience, I can already foresee that this conference is going to be the hallmark of my spring semester. To put it briefly, I need this conference so badly right now. This gathering of gay, as well as an assortment of other savory characters, is also going to yield quite a promising transgender turnout. This is my chance to be perceived in my entirety, to occupy and embrace the extreme end of the spectrum, those uncharted waters known as my true self. Such an unprecedented opportunity will, at least in my own eyes, serve as an optimal experiment in which I will end up either labeling the rest of my life as a full blown transgendered individual as plausible or implausible.
These next five days are going to be incredible. No one really knows what will go down within the four walls of the Creating Change Conference. In fact, I am bringing an entire box of condoms just in case there are really five walls, so that there are no surprises.
But even though the majority of human beings are apprehensive of the unknown, we should all be entitled to approach it in our own way. This brings me back to the point that whatever you want to do with your life, or your love, or your bed, so long as you hurt no one else, is your prerogative, and yours alone. I have expressed a desire in recent blog posts to have my individual agenda respected and, essentially, ignored. Perhaps Creating Change will transform my definition of being left alone. Perhaps it will come to mean something more. Maybe it will even mean being acknowledged.
There is so much room for change.
Today, I was checking out food in the Student Center cafeteria, and at first glance, the cashier referred to me as "sir." A longer look at The Jordan Experience caused her to retract her former supposition with an apologetic, "I'm sorry, I meant ma'am."
Me: It's quite alright.
Cashier: No it's not.
Me: It's fine, I really don't mind.
Cashier (snapping at me): Um, yes you do. I've been around the block a few times, so don't even try to say otherwise.
Me: Um...have a nice day.
Okay, authoritative cashier lady, YOU'RE RIGHT. Apparently, you know more about my gender identity than I do.
Besides being a fine addition to Story Time, this here charming tale is a perfect example of a society that is deeply uncomfortable with any examples of expression that deviate from the gender binary. The guy who prepares sandwiches in my school's main cafeteria once apologized profusely, with plaintive sincerity that both amused and unsettled me, when he called me "sir." It took five apologizes on his part and five reassurances on mine that it was indeed pardonable that he had addressed me as something that is incongruous with my biological sex.
I think society needs to understand that gender variance is not only okay, it's beautiful! I challenge our present day conceptions of male and female. At Creating Change, I will take these words and turn them upside down and inside out (unless the word is umbrella or condom, in which case, I would just be breaking it). Shakespeare alone invented over 2,000 words. It helps that he happened to have worn tights.
At this point, I would like to avoid pronouns altogether, but for the sake of efficacy in today's society, I have to choose one. By process of elimination, female automatically falls off. And hey, why should I have to identify as something when it feels inappropriate to do so? Why should I respond to being called something that is technically correct but at the same time feels so wrong?
After all, serendipity means, "An unsought, unintended, and/or unexpected discovery and/or learning experience that happens by accident and sagacity," but that doesn't mean if your condom goes MIA and you end up conceiving said accident that it needs to be named Serendipity.