I regrettably was put through the christian “school system” in the 90’s-early 00’s. It was shit. I spent my first couple years in college having to learn some basics and unlearn a lot of bullshit. Being neurodivergent (ADHD) I got put into their special ed programming, which mostly consisted of getting tracked to low paying service work and stuck in a study hall where the alleged SpEd teachers just sneared at us delinquent kids. Anyway, in highschool you have christian classes including Bible studies, and Christian ethics. First one is true to the name, studying the text, but the second was nothing short of conservative bigot indoctrination. I can’t stress enough how much this shit was just cult brainwashing, but that’s not the point of why I’m sharing this.
I had a dream yesterday where I remembered one of the segments. The teacher showed us a Calvin Klein ad poster and explained why it was so bad. You see, this feminine looking model here is actually a man!! Basically, every model was “not really” the gender they presented as. ‘Be careful what you expose your eyes to so Satan doesn’t work his way into your head’ or whatever the lesson was. I remember having this learned response of “oh no, bad thing!”, but not understanding what the actual problem was. I also looked closer at the picture and still didn’t understand, they looked nice… Of course I know now that he was just being a transphobic bigot, but there was no language for it, they would just call it “the work of the devil” or some shit like that. I didn’t know what to call people like that.
I just feel gross, they deprived me of language for so damn long. The whole system is a cult, and they kept me so isolated and uneducated I didn’t know who I was till I was in my 30’s. God damn America, that’s in the Bible!
Feel this. Decades of my life gone, and I didn’t even go through a Christian education system just the basic American defacto Christian education
Same, but for me it came from going to public school in the 90s-00s.
It feels so weird thinking about all the years of my life where I literally didn’t have the words to describe myself - and then when I get to college it’s just open transphobia in the dorm from all the people who did get the christofacist indoctrination.
The only word we had to describe it was gay. So, I had these feelings of wanting to be a girl, but I could only interpret that as gay which was stressful because I’m not attracted to men.
Two of the people from my graduating year were gay men for a decade before transitioning into women after the idea of transgender entered the mainstream consciousness. I’m willing to bet they would have transitioned earlier if they knew it was an option, but honestly none of us knew that was a thing you could just do. There was only gay.
That was my exact experience, I just wasn’t into guys enough and just opted to not pursue any relationships at all for the longest time.
US-american gender-segregated droms in university seems insane to me. Even the highschools with dorms here (in also often shit europe) were not gender segregated. The individual rooms, yes, the dorms itself, no. Seems incredibly puritan to me.
My university (private, in Texas) desegregated them in the 1980s or so. I imagine mixed dorms in US universities has been increasingly becoming the norm.
I actually ended up in a mixed gender dorm- all of the others were gender-segregated, but for some reason they had all put all the people that indicated a strong religious preference in the same dorm, and it was not particularly segregated internally. At one point a guy (drunk) pissed on a girls door, just a great environment. I made the mistake of indicating I wasn’t religious which landed me in there along with one other person who did the same thing.
going from public high school to private university was a wild ride, one of my neighbors was explicitly going to college to find a husband!
So, very religious, and not religious were put in there? As long as there was any opinion on religion it got you put in that dorm?
It was kind of a shitshow, I even had a soviet flag on my wall and the level of awareness of what that was was so low that nobody even commented on it.
I feel it, so badly. June is wrath month for me. I detest the cult I was raised in, it’s not faith.