Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
Gay people. When I was much much younger I remember telling a friend that while I didn’t have a problem with people doing their own thing, I still didn’t like gay people. My friend said I hope when you have kids they’re gay. Guess what happened and how I feel about it now. I was such a dumb ass. When my kid came out to me I wept for joy at their bravery. I don’t take hard stances on my opinions now and try to remember that my perspective isn’t ultimate or necessarily right. There’s always a chance that I’m wrong.
There weren’t many gay people when I was growing up. At least not openly. I was first introduced to some gays at a gay bar. They basically made me feel like a juicy steak in a meat market (not in a good way). Several comments about my dick within 10 seconds of meeting them.
Today I have many gay friends that I enjoy their company but that was a huge setback for me.
Did you tell them your name? Because I think that might have led them to make some assumptions.
It took one of those meat market experiences to make me self-reflect about how I treated women as a straight man.
Thankfully I was relatively young when it happened, but I’ll always regret how I treated women before then.
You know what, I never treated women that way but I certainly gained a lot of empathy for them after that.
It’s crazy to me now that there wasn’t a single (open) trans or gay person in my high school in the 90s. I sometimes wonder who actually was, but wasn’t able to be themselves.
My high school class was in mid-'00s, and there was one girl who very much had that butch/tomboy vibe going on. I drifted away from the class, so only heard rumours after graduation, but I think she never actually came out as anything. On the other hand three others of us (two of whom, including myself, I never would have guessed back in high school) eventually came out as various shades of queer :D
There were a couple of people who were “different” that, in hindsight, it was very obvious they were “confused”. Some of them came out later but were much less obvious.
I was in high school in the late 70s and early 80s. Nobody was out. But people kind of knew. One time I was on a train into the city (San Francisco), and I saw two students along with one of our teachers headed there. I thought that was kind of cool, but seemed also a bit dangerous and ill-advised at the time. I am fairly certain that our very popular senior class president was gay. Very sadly, he took his own life.
You really tempted fate, there!