Your Opinion is Not My Reality

Over the past few days, I've been having a conversation with someone very close to me about opinions and labels. These days, our society is obsessed with labels. You must be a specific gender, a specific sexuality, a specific personality type, etc. No one perfectly fits in any specific category, though. We all have quirks to us that make us different from one another, which is not a bad thing. We are able to express ourselves and our feelings in any way we feel necessary that makes us feel true to ourselves. The only drawback to this is that others are allowed to do this as well, and their opinion may conflict with yours. This is the beauty of us being different- a diverse range of thoughts and feelings and opinions that can influence you to see the world from an entirely new perspective. However, conflicting opinions can cause one to become offended, which can result in a variety of things. An example of this is the views on transgenders. Those who are transgender and several liberal thinkers feel that they should be able to be themselves without consequence, meanwhile, those that are more conservative feel that being transgender is nonsense and that you should stick to the gender you were assigned at birth. This difference of opinions has resulted in an array of conflicts, reaching from small things such as arguments and being forced to hide one's true self, to large things such as suicide and assaults and revolts. So many of our world's problems would be solved if people learned to care less about labels and others opinions. If you're staying true to yourself and what others are doing is not a direct threat to you, why do others' choices matter?