You know the end of a mystery movie when you find out "whodunit" and then there is a quick retrospective of all the clues that you missed that should have clued you in to who the culprit was. That's how "coming out" to myself was. Lots of little clues I missed, adding up to an inevitable truth. It was February 9th, 1998 (I know this because I drew a little rainbow on that date on the Beatles Calendar that I kept on my room). I was watching the Real World thought... "Oh Man! That girl is hot!!! Oh Shit! Oh.... That explains a lot..." If anything... "being straight" was a phase for me. And once I figured it all out, I felt so liberated! But as I heard more and more people say "it's just a phase", "you are too young to know that" or "you just haven't met the right guy" the more I felt silenced.
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| Senior Potrait- 2002. I was the gayest High Schooler EVER. |
The funny thing about silence, is the more you are silenced, the more you are likely to stop using your voice. It was easy to feel like I was wrong, about myself; and a truth that was so simple
and apparent to me. So I fell silent. I spent my freshman year of high school scared and silent. Until I realized my silence was paralyzing me... And I promised to never be silent again. People may say I was "out and proud" but I like to think I was just "out and Chris". I just started talking about being gay like it was "normal"... because to me it was. And people responded. That's when I realized people are more likely to talk about you, when you are unwilling to talk about yourself. If you give them all the information that they need... they won't need to fill in the gaps, and you become uninteresting... but alas, I digress.
If coming out as "gay" was hard... coming out as trans is like climbing a mountain. And it certainly isn't wrapped up in a nice "fable"-type package where the good guy (that's me) learns a tidy message It is a process and is in now way complete.
There are many contributing factors as to why its hard to come out as a transmasculine genderqueer boi (that's what I choose for a gender today), but it is mostly steeped in the fact that our society believes in "2 and 2 only" genders. Most people believe that you are born with a penis and you are male, or a vagina will make you female, end of sentence, no variations. People with a more evolved view of sex and gender may understand that there are people who are born with one set of organs, but their identity indicates the opposite sex (ex. a person born with a penis who is actually a female). But there are few who can dig deep enough to understand there are those of us who live in the middle of the two...
When I have tried to explain to people that I am neither male nor female, I am usually met with a blank stare (at best) or the denial that being neither M nor F, Adam nor Eve, Romeo nor Juliette isn't even a valid identity. Similar to "its only a phase", after a while being repetitively told that your identity isn't real makes it hard for you to feel like you have a place. The more times people tell you your identity doesn't exist, the more you feel like you aren't doing your own "identity" incorrectly and you begin to ware at the corners, and assimilate into molds where it is "easier" to be understood.
When I became pregnant, I wanted to do it on my own terms. It was imperative that my identity as a trans-identified pregnant person was understood and respected, especially by our care team. There is so much vulnerability in a birthing situation for ALL people, but with my discomfort with my body, I feel like I was more vulnerable than most. I have certainly had my fair share of being made to feel uncomfortable in my own skin by people in medical professionals... Once, when discussing how I felt like I was never fully female with a THERAPIST, she asked, "But you don't want to HAVE a penis, DO YOU?!?"... not that I will be discussing with you Madame Therapist...
These types of experiences over a lifetime left me weary that anyone would/could ever "get" me. I had become conditioned to be misunderstood, or doubted. This was not the experience I got from those who we chose to work with for our birth. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could talk about who I was without being shut down, dismissed or silenced. Our midwife group, our doula, and our lactation consultant all took special care to make sure that they were sensitive to this special caveat of my identity. ( I find it very sad that only after 31 years of life do I feel like I was respected as a whole person in a medical situation.) What is even more interesting, is the more my gender identity was validated, the less it made a damn bit of difference. For the first time I really feel like I really was existing in a space that was free from the rules of male and female... Where I could just be myself free from the constraints of societal pressures to do or be anything. When we gave birth at OSU hospital, with a full goatee and a buzzed head, you would have thought that everyone who had ever given birth there was a transmaculine guy with a wife who was planning on doing the breastfeeding...
Really being "heard" has finally made it easier to "speak" about who I am. All the "its just a phases" and "you have to choose male or female" have faded away a bit. Obviously, my work to continue to speak my truth has just begun, but I after having the experience of validation, I can no longer be complacent in silence.
If coming out as "gay" was hard... coming out as trans is like climbing a mountain. And it certainly isn't wrapped up in a nice "fable"-type package where the good guy (that's me) learns a tidy message It is a process and is in now way complete.
There are many contributing factors as to why its hard to come out as a transmasculine genderqueer boi (that's what I choose for a gender today), but it is mostly steeped in the fact that our society believes in "2 and 2 only" genders. Most people believe that you are born with a penis and you are male, or a vagina will make you female, end of sentence, no variations. People with a more evolved view of sex and gender may understand that there are people who are born with one set of organs, but their identity indicates the opposite sex (ex. a person born with a penis who is actually a female). But there are few who can dig deep enough to understand there are those of us who live in the middle of the two...
When I have tried to explain to people that I am neither male nor female, I am usually met with a blank stare (at best) or the denial that being neither M nor F, Adam nor Eve, Romeo nor Juliette isn't even a valid identity. Similar to "its only a phase", after a while being repetitively told that your identity isn't real makes it hard for you to feel like you have a place. The more times people tell you your identity doesn't exist, the more you feel like you aren't doing your own "identity" incorrectly and you begin to ware at the corners, and assimilate into molds where it is "easier" to be understood.
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| This is from the portion of my life when I lived by myself and dressed up like Kid Rock for fun (before he turned into a dick). Also... just a note, that is a fake goatee and my real goatee now is far more lush. |
These types of experiences over a lifetime left me weary that anyone would/could ever "get" me. I had become conditioned to be misunderstood, or doubted. This was not the experience I got from those who we chose to work with for our birth. For the first time in my life, I felt like I could talk about who I was without being shut down, dismissed or silenced. Our midwife group, our doula, and our lactation consultant all took special care to make sure that they were sensitive to this special caveat of my identity. ( I find it very sad that only after 31 years of life do I feel like I was respected as a whole person in a medical situation.) What is even more interesting, is the more my gender identity was validated, the less it made a damn bit of difference. For the first time I really feel like I really was existing in a space that was free from the rules of male and female... Where I could just be myself free from the constraints of societal pressures to do or be anything. When we gave birth at OSU hospital, with a full goatee and a buzzed head, you would have thought that everyone who had ever given birth there was a transmaculine guy with a wife who was planning on doing the breastfeeding...
Really being "heard" has finally made it easier to "speak" about who I am. All the "its just a phases" and "you have to choose male or female" have faded away a bit. Obviously, my work to continue to speak my truth has just begun, but I after having the experience of validation, I can no longer be complacent in silence.
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