*Disclaimer: my wording of choice and decision is how other people see your lifestyle. We, your supporters know it is not a choice or a decision. This is your life.

I've learned not everyone is going to support you and your decisions you make.

Yet they have the right to respect you and your "decision." I could be talking about so many different things but I'm going to be talking about the LGBTQ+ community. I know a lot of people who apart of this community and they haven't been anything but greeting me with opened arms and love.

Maybe that's because I'm a theater major and a lot of the boys here are gay, or maybe it's because I treat them like they're human.

I recently went to a show (surprise) with my mom. My mom ran into an old friend who was fumbling pro-nouns around, getting frustrated when she got them wrong. She raised this girl her whole life, and now he has decided to transition. To explore the life, he wants to live. I can tell she supports him and respects his decision, but it is hard. I can't even imagine. Yet she is trying to get the pronouns right and that is one of the only things that matter. Putting in the effort to respect someone's decision, their name, and their pronoun.

You don't have to support their choice, but you need to respect their decision and lifestyle.

Don't go out of your way to harass them and go out of the way to use the wrong pronoun because you feel like being a dick. Leave them be when they go into the bathroom based on their gender. Leave them alone if they want a birthday cake because if not you're going to lose business. Leave them alone when they're trying on clothes in the dressing room, or pumping gas.

Leave them alone because they are human too.

I've been learning a lot about the LGBTQ+ community and maybe that's why I got shunned in a church the other day. I'm an Episcopalian and my mom calls it, "Being Catholic without the rules." My grandmother taught me to open my arms to anyone in the church. We didn't care about their gender, their race, or their story. We welcomed them.

That is something we should be doing everywhere. Children going through their life should go home to their parents who love them even if they're gay, or trans, or non-binary etc., Too many kids are being kicked out of their homes or killing themselves because they don't have the support they need. Their own blood abandoning them at sometimes a young age.

You don't have to support them, but you should respect them. If they're your child or not. Call them by their preferred pronoun and their preferred name. Let them go out with their crush or bring their crush home after school. Let people live the life they've always dreamed of living.

They are no different from your average joe and deserve the respect you would give anyone else on this planet.

They have the same bad jokes and same order as your chipotle burrito. If you didn't harass them and maybe complimented them instead you would see how normal the LGBTQ+ family really is.