Jennifer Wood
Kennewick High school
Kennewick, Washington
My name is Jennifer Wood, and I am pansexual. Even from a young age I knew that I was different from the other girls. Some of my first crushes on girls started way back in kindergarten, about the same time I began having crushes on guys. At such a young age I didn't realize what it meant of course, but as I continued to have these crushes up into higher grades an inner conflict began. Confusion set in and suddenly I became highly unsure of myself. I didn't know if I liked girls or guys, I didn't know if I was straight or lesbian, and the feeling of not knowing who I was, stressed me out to no end.
In fourth grade I had my first major crush on a girl, Mackenzie. I also my first major experience with intolerance. I expressed my feelings to a few guy friends of mine and I was laughed at, told that I was weird. So instead of approaching this crush like I had with boys I went in convincing myself I just wanted to be her friend. Looking back I realized that that couldnt have been true because no one wants to be friends with someone else that bad without totally crushing on them
. Even to this day I have a stuffed horse she gave to me for Christmas.
After that year Mackenzie moved away, leaving me broken hearted and even more confused about myself then before. On through 8th my conflicting feelings continued until one day, my freshman year a google search of my confusion brought me to the Kinsey scale (Ironic right?) . The Kinsey scale mesures on a scale of usually 0-6 but occasionally 1-10 of how homosexual a person is. 6 being the most heterosexual and 0 being most homosexual. Being only 14 and not exactly sexually active I improvised on the test, but the results of even the improvised test astonished me. A 3 on the scale gave me a word I had never heard of before. Bisexual.
Hours of frantic research both at school and home brought me more quizzes, stories, and a definition: someone who can be attracted to, and love both sexes in nearly equal amounts. What these hours of research also brought me was a whole view of the LBGT world, and even the whole liberal world. I didn't know it at the time but these discoveries lead me to my political affiliation as well as a deeper understanding of myself.
Only a short year later I discovered A boy Daniel, a Pansexual, who was willing to explain to me even more of this world, I had only scraped the surface of. He showed me that I was liberal and showed me another part of the LBGT community, Transgender, and gender queers. I found these newly discovered people in my world to be beautiful and I was as attracted to them as I was to people with standard gender definitions. That is when Daniel explained to me that I might in fact be Pansexual, someone whose love and attraction doesn't care about simple labels such as male or female, but instead sees the beauty of a person inside and out with no limitations. From that moment on I finally knew who I was.
This boy who helped me discover my world and the young woman I am today is now my boyfriend of a year, and I am now a proud member, and part, of the LBGT community. I feel that it is so incredibly important to stand up and help these people who may not feel as though they have a voice, or a place in the world. I work to give them their place, their voice, themselves so they can continue on living more fulfilling lives because they finally know who they are, and who they love. <3