Coming Out

Our Whole Foundation Cracks

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Sand Dunes

A few nights ago I finally told my sister that I’m planning to start testosterone in a couple of months. I had predicted that her response might be surprise, or confusion, or neutral acceptance, or even a gentle “I’ve suspected for a while, I’m glad you finally told me.” But what she actually said caught me totally off guard: “Wow, that’s so exciting!!!” She seemed genuinely enthusiastic and excited about me starting testosterone. Of course, it was a huge relief to know that she’s supportive and I felt a surge of gratitude. But her excitement on my behalf also served as an uncomfortable reminder of my own lack of excitement at the prospect of starting testosterone.

For me, starting testosterone is no more exciting than starting an antidepressant: it’s just a pharmaceutical treatment, with no guarantee of benefit, aimed at managing a disorder that I wish I didn’t have. Except that with testosterone, unlike most other medications, the effects are systemic, irreversible, and impossible to hide past a certain point.

My sister also commented, “I am a bit surprised… all this time I just assumed that you were a girl who liked short hair and wore boys’ clothes.” I told her how badly I wish that was the case, how badly I wish that I could just be comfortable living in a female body. I don’t think that desire represents internalized transphobia. No, it’s just a painful recognition that it would be so much easier, so much less confusing, so much less distressing for me to feel comfortable in the body I already have.

It is not my intention to pathologize or medicalize gender dysphoria, which for most trans people seems to be a matter of identity rather than a “diagnosis” or a “disorder”. So I am speaking only for myself here. But I have ransacked every crack and crevice of my brain, searching desperately for any hint of “gender identity” – searching for something that would resemble what others have described as a “feeling” or “internal sense” of “being male” or “being female” or even being somewhere in between – and I have been unable to find anything like that.

In fact, I have no clear understanding of self-identity even beyond gender. I have no internal sense of “being me”. I – well I think we, as humans – are constantly changing and evolving as a result of gaining self-awareness, acquiring knowledge, and adapting to the influence of other people and external circumstances. Amidst this constant chaos, I cannot isolate a stable “identity” for myself. I simply recognize patterns in my thoughts, behaviors, and preferences, some of which have remained relatively stable over time and some of which seem to shift and change as easily and as often as sand dunes in a desert. Across this ever-changing landscape, I have a hard time understanding who or what I am. Perhaps, with time and further exploration, I might find out who I am. Or perhaps I will just learn to live with the uncertainty.

“[We are] incapable of certain knowledge or absolute ignorance. We are floating in a medium of vast extent, always drifting uncertainly, blown to and fro; whenever we think we have a fixed point to which we can cling and make fast, it shifts and leaves us behind; if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips away, and flees eternally before us. Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks.”
– Blaise Pascal (Pensées, 1688 – english translation)

Not A Simple Question

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Ashes

There are numerous articles and blog posts discussing the many ignorant, intrusive, and inappropriate questions that are all too often aimed at transgender people. These articles are on popular websites (Everyday Feminism, BuzzFeed, Astroglide, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, Autostraddle), as well as on personal blogs written by trans people (janitorqueer, American Trans Man, Matt Kailey’s Tranifesto). There are even artistic projects devoted to this issue (A Series of Questions). There are differences within the trans community regarding willingness or unwillingness to answer these types of questions, depending on their relationship with the asker, the context in which the questions are asked, their desire for privacy, and the extent to which they want to educate others. I will not rehash what has already been discussed so extensively on other sites.

But, from here in my small corner of the internet, I would like to add something to this ongoing conversation. This is a question that I have not seen mentioned in any of the existing articles, but one which I have heard multiple times and have always found difficult to deal with:

“Which is harder, coming out as gay or coming out as transgender and going through transition?”

In my more generous moments, I want to believe that people who ask this question are making an honest attempt to use an experience they think they understand (coming out as gay) to provide a frame of reference to help them understand an experience that seems more foreign (coming out as trans and going through transition). In a neutral frame of mind, I might view this question as the idle curiosity of an interested audience. But I cannot ignore the dismissive presumption inherent in that question, the way those words reflect a simplistic desire to neatly rank and categorize unfamiliar experiences along a linear scale of difficulty, the way those words erase the incredible diversity of individual experiences with the assumption that one person can speak for everyone who is gay and everyone who is trans.

So whenever someone asks me that question, I feel an odd mixture of anger and resentment conflicting with my effort to be tolerant and give them the benefit of the doubt regarding their intentions. I could choose not to answer the question. But so far I have always chosen to answer, because my desire to be understood exceeds my desire to disengage.

“Which is harder, coming out as gay or coming out as transgender and going through transition?”

This is what I say to people who ask me this question: I think the question is irrelevant and impossible to answer. Each person’s situation is so different. The challenges each individual faces and the distress they experience are dependent on so many complicated factors: their social support system, their home and work environments, their personality, concurrent physical or mental illnesses, economic status, race, perceived gender, the list is long. And I think perhaps one of the most powerful factors influencing LGBT experiences is a person’s own acknowledgement and acceptance of their sexuality or gender identity. The internalized homophobia and transphobia generated by a lifetime of societal conditioning can create such deeply entrenched and overwhelming shame – shame like a slow-burning bonfire that eats away at the edges of your soul until you are entirely consumed by the raging heat.

Speaking only for myself: the constant physical dysphoria that comes from living in a female body with a brain that resists this body so intensely – this incongruence made so glaringly evident in every mirror, every motion, every moment – and the physical effects of the hormonal and surgical aspects of transition are a notable difference between my experience and the experiences I’ve heard gay friends describe. The physical aspects of gender dysphoria and my fears and uncertainties about the medical aspects of transition are more disturbing to me (though no less important) than my fears about the social repercussions of transitioning.

Speaking once more for myself: despite the physical distress that is so painful, my journey so far has allowed me to accept gender dysphoria, authentically and shamelessly, as part of who I am. My shame has stopped burning and now I sift through the ashes to reassemble the charred pieces of myself. And though my landscape still looks bleak and scorched, I get to decide where I go from here. This acceptance has given me an extraordinary freedom that many trans people and gay people have not yet achieved if they remain burdened with shame or denial. For this part of my experience, I have the utmost gratitude.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for asking such a simple question.”
– The Gryphon (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865)

Falling Out of the Closet

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Falling Out of the Closet (1)

Lately I have found myself quite often on the verge of coming out to my sisters and close friends about my gender dysphoria and transition considerations. Perhaps I feel like I owe them some honesty in return for their generous support while I was recently hospitalized for treatment of depression. Perhaps I feel an increasing urgency to share my fears and excitement with them as time ticks closer to the date of my appointment to discuss starting testosterone. Perhaps I have simply grown tired of constantly editing what I say and cropping out so much of myself around them that the prospect of finally dropping these pretences feels so incredibly enticing. I don’t know exactly why I feel this inner pressure to come out to certain people, but I must acknowledge that this pressure is strong and sometimes almost unbearable.

But even stronger than that pressure is a vague and deeply unsettling discomfort that has so far kept me from coming out to them. I have had many opportunities to tell them and I am reasonably confident that their responses will be supportive. But this mysterious reluctance always mutes the coming out speech that I’ve rehearsed so often in my mind. The only way I can describe it is that sharing my gender journey with anyone I haven’t already told feels like I’m losing control of my story, like my voice is getting drowned in an increasingly crowded conversation. Twice I have discussed my gender issues in a group (one a transgender support group and the other an interpersonal therapy group), and the group setting ramps up my discomfort to an extreme, like I’m not just losing control of my story but that the group members have actually stolen my rough draft and are busy making red-ink edits on words they barely understand. So I have inevitably withdrawn the gender topic from the groups that I’ve attended.

When I first started exploring gender identity and transition options more than 18 months ago, coming out to my closest friends felt so simple and natural, like taking a framed picture off the wall and revealing the hook that held it up – something that they had known must be there, even without seeing it, something unquestionably necessary to the suspension of that hanging frame, but which, when glimpsed for the first time, seemed stark and unexpected in an unsurprising way. With these friends, my gender journey is a constantly evolving conversation, not just one dramatic and irreversible leap out of the closet. I am continually amazed and grateful for their patient curiosity and acceptance. They allow me to explain my experience and explore my uncertainties, acknowledging the difficulties I encounter without claiming tritely to have “been there too” and without dismissing it as something so unusual and so weird that they “just can’t relate” – irritating responses that I’ve heard all too often from other people. These friends also allow the urgency and enormity of my gender issues to ebb and flow with time, accepting this process as a non-linear progression.

Sometimes with peripheral acquaintances, people I’ve just met or barely know, I come out to them quite quickly, almost carelessly, tossing this huge disclosure at them like a handful of nearly worthless coins, a defiant challenge to test whether this is something that might interfere with a budding friendship still in its fragile infancy, unwilling to invest the energy in developing a doomed relationship. This is maybe not the best approach, just a pattern I’ve noticed with myself.

I am most afraid of coming out to my parents. Because I am currently living at home with them, this fear prowls behind every familiar doorway in the house that I grew up in. One of my friends had an extremely traumatic experience coming out to his family many years ago – he said that when he came out to his parents, he did so very abruptly which may have contributed to their feeling shocked and overwhelmed, and he did so while struggling immensely with his own questions and uncertainties which may have facilitated their unfortunate belief that they could exert their parental influence to control his choices. So with my parents I have tried to approach coming out slowly and strategically, setting up several steps in advance and thinking several moves ahead, laying tentative groundwork for future possibilities, like a delicate chess match. I frequently bring up trans issues in the news and media to discuss with them, edging ever closer to the truth while keeping the discussion neutral and impersonal, referring to transgender people as “them” and not “us” – not yet.

On some level, I think my father already knows the truth. Over the past few years he has become much more open-minded and more tolerant, able to re-evaluate the many restrictive ideas his generation grew up believing. Since I was a kid he has always accepted and supported my obvious gender non-conformity. So I have played a gentle match with him, his Pawns relenting peacefully one by one, and his white King waiting in a patient stalemate while my dark Knights rein back heavy horses.

My mother has perhaps begun to suspect the truth as well, although her fear and prejudice slam the door on those suspicions and cut off any opportunity for reflection. I am often ashamed at the bitter depth of my resentment towards her, resentment built up by the years of hated dresses and ponytail hair she forced onto me, resentment maintained by the irrational childlike fear and guilt I still feel around her. With her I play a much more timid game, time and again caught off guard by her aggressive, reckless, unpredictable moves. But I have tried to practice being more assertive in our inconsequential daily duels, practicing for the inevitable big discussions. My front-line Pawns remain defensive, trying mostly just to minimize losses while they repeatedly withdraw and regroup before bravely inching forward once again, encroaching incrementally on her imposing Queen, until – eventually, explosively – checkmate, mother.

One of my friends – with his ever-sparkling insight – told me, “I know that I never felt ready to come out. It just sort of happened because the pressure and anguish of staying hidden just overwhelmed me and I fell out of the closet. I would trust your inner voice here… hopefully the time will feel right, or it won’t and you’ll just fall out of the closet and pick up the pieces and carry on.” His idea of falling out of the closet – as a necessity more than a choice – resonated so strongly with me. It is an eloquent description of how it has so often felt when I have discussed my gender journey with others. But I am working hard to give myself permission NOT to feel pressure to come out to anyone else right now, to keep writing my own rough draft, to be okay with falling out of the closet and picking up the pieces if that is the way it eventually has to happen.

“Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessman had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary’s men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your Knight could shuffle himself on to a new square on the sly; if your Bishop, in disgust at your Castling, could wheedle your Pawns out of their places; and if your Pawns, hating you because they are Pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own Pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.”
– George Eliot (Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866)