can people stop being fucking weird to strangers

I'm so tired of getting treated like shit when I go out in public just because of the way I look. 

Most of the people who do this are kids and it's really not a "big deal", but I've seen literal adults do this too. Once I was at the mall with my friends, one of them is a punk so he's used to being stared at. He obviously got a lot of stares, but most of them weren't in a bad way, like little kids who liked his mohawk. Even some guy complimented his style and a woman asked him how he did his hair. But we were at a burger king to get something to eat and I see this group of guys who looked like young adults, between 18 and 24 probably, already staring at us and one of them took a picture of him. The fact that he was literally an adult taking pictures of a 14 year old is fucking weird. I don't care if he didn't do it in a "bad way", if you think we look cool there's no problem in talking to us, I've done that before and people have done it to me and most of the time we are nice. I've met lots of cool people doing this. And if you don't, well that sucks for you, because you have no control over what a stranger that you're never going to see again looks like. I've seen people whose style I personally don't like too because it's impossible to like every single aesthetic on earth, but that doesn't give me a free pass to harass and publicly humiliate them. 

I have lots of experiences like this, but the most remarkable and recent ones are for example when I was at the park and some guys yelled "go away, we don't want otakus here" at me or when some girls took a picture of us with the flash activated in the middle of the night and they ignored us when we confronted them about it, or when like 40 guys that knew my friend yelled at us in the street. 

Once I was hanging out with my friends at the park and a group of guys, they were a lot maybe like 20 of them, started yelling at us and I think they also took pictures. then they came close to me and started asking for my Instagram which i didn't want to give them because they were being weird. then they asked THE question: "are you a boy or a girl?". They kept asking even though I was obviously uncomfortable and I already said no, and then they proceeded to make fun of trans and nonbinary people. and right after that they asked me if I would give them a blowjob. at the moment I didn't really care that much because they were like 12 or 13, but it was really weird especially now when I think about it. when i told my parents they just ignored me. 

There's also this group of people that are constantly taking pictures of us without our consent to make fun of us because my friend used to be at their school and she got bullied, and because she's a goth who hangs out with the weird emos. once I was at the mall and I see a notification of a message from my brother, something already odd because we don't send things to each other. it was a tiktok link, and when I open it I see a video containing a picture of myself and my friends at a pizzeria, and I remember the day it was taken the people who took it, which are from my friend's former school, were making us uncomfortable by staring, gossiping and laughing to the point where we had to leave. that day I told my mom we had to leave because of it and she said I was overreacting. the day I saw the video I told both my parents and they told me to "just ignore them", as if I hadn't been doing that for months. 

I've been told a million times both by my parents and other people that it's normal that this kind of things happens to me because I should expect to be treated like this if I dress this way, but I wonder if they have the slightest idea they're using the same logic as literal rapists. "Well, it's normal that they did that to you if you were wearing that" doesn't that sound familiar? I expect it to happen because it's just the reality we're in, but this shouldn't be normalized because it's fucking sad that kids are scared to go out in the streets because they are scared of getting harassed, or something even worse. 

But this isn't that deep, right? I'm overreacting and it's just a bunch of kids joking around because it's so funny to make fun of the emos, right? but, when does it stop being a joke? if it is not that serious when you record people without their consent, when you yell and laugh at them or when you insult them for their looks, is it still a joke when you threaten to hurt them? or when you actually hurt them? or when you beat them up? or when you kick them to death? I wish I was exaggerating, but all of this did actually happen, for example check out Sophie Lancaster's case. It makes my blood boil that there are some people willing to beat strangers up just because they don't fit their definition of normal. And no, the "just ignore them" thing won't work because they're going to think it's okay to do that, and they will do it again, like my friend's ex classmates. 

I know talking about this here won't do much because this website doesn't have many users, and said users mostly aren't "normal" people, because if you hate emo people why the fuck are you in a social media where around 95% of the users are into alternative subcultures, most of them being emo or scene? I'm posting this here because it's the only place I have to truly express my thoughts, and to make other people more aware of this issue. And to make others that are going through this see that they aren't alone, and that you should never hide who you are just because of other's opinions. Remember that people who harass strangers just want to feel better about themselves, and never stop being yourself because it's beautiful that we as humans have so much diversity, but at the core we are all the same species.