Coming out twice
My heart was in my throat as I sat with my best friend. He meant and still means a lot to me. We learned kung fu together. We drove every week to our classes together. He was my best man at my wedding. I sat with him and took a particularly deep breath, one that I’d learn is unique to this situation. I’d swung swords at this man but I couldn’t look him in the eye when I told him:
“I think I’m trans.”
He smiled at me and said simply, “We kind of guessed. Lasering off your beard was a bit of a give away.”
Since his warm reception I have always been very open about my gender and health journeys. I have a podcast, Classroom Psychology, and of course this blog, RollingForInitiative. I’m hardly private. The people in my life who know me well all know that I have multiple sclerosis (MS) and that I’m trans.
I am also open with new people in my life even when I first meet them. Whenever I give public speeches to new groups of people or run workshops about gender diversity I always tell them I’m trans. I usually don’t reveal this information right at the start, but I always find a good moment to tell people.
Revealing one’s identity is an act members of the LGBT+ community colloquially call ‘coming out’. I have come out in so many different ways. I once came out during a Local Authority service ice breaker activity asking delegates to introduce themselves with a surprising fact. Needless to say, mine was a doozy. I once came out by standing to pee against a building on a night out, startling some nearly bursting women who immediately asked to borrow whatever device I was using to make it possible. I once came out during a karaoke musical number singing both the male and female parts myself. For a while, family dinners became slightly strained after I came out as trans with everyone gathered round the table. Tensions hung high in the air anytime rigatoni was served.
While I generally tell new close friends about my gender history, meeting new people casually in my daily life is a completely different story.
When it comes to being trans there is a huge difference between someone knowing you are trans prior to meeting you, and finding out a little later. When a new acquaintance has heard about my gender history before meeting me, they tend to approach me with a thinly disguised kind of scrutiny. They search my features for signs of my secret masculinity. The features I cannot easily hide, that feel like the scars of my gender history, people scan for proof of some shameful secret. Transition is comprehensive but it cannot undo all of the changes that come from a masculine puberty.
Most people who spot the signs of my gender history, known by the community as ‘clocking’, are an uncomfortable inconvenience. I find it much harder to feel affirmed in my gender by people who have ‘clocked’ me. Though the experience of that moment is upsetting, it isn’t generally dangerous. It provokes a self consciousness that nudges uncomfortably close to shame. It’s a little like when you have a terrible hair day, looking like you’ve been buzzed low by an attack aircraft before being caught in a small hurricane. When you meet someone who lingers a look at your dishevelment with an expression somewhere between horrified and sympathetic, it’s hard not to reach for the nearest hat.
There will always be people who must not discover my gender history. Some people have strong feelings about transgender people and those folk discovering my gender history is the recipe for a bad day. The worst case scenario is one of these folk finding me attractive just before they ‘clock’ me. Those situations can turn dangerous remarkably quickly.
This is why I’m so open about being trans with people when I meet them. It is a way to stay safe.
But to tell people I am trans also sacrifices something important. It steals the chance to experience the world just as the girl I am. There are precious moments when people don’t know I’m trans and just get to know me as Cora, which is an experience I truly treasure. It’s weird to think that an experience so familiar as to be habitual for most people is so rare and precious to me. The affirmation of someone just seeing me for Cora, not as the trans person in the room, just as me… is like breathing for the first time.
These days of course I’m not just coming out as a trans woman, I’m coming out as a trans woman with multiple sclerosis. Revealing that you are disabled is a surprisingly similar experience to coming out as trans. The decision to tell someone about your medical history is deeply personal and doing so comes at the cost of changing how people relate to you. People knowing you are disabled changes how they treat you almost immediately. They frequently apologise. They sometimes outright tell you that they couldn’t live your life. They sometimes offer you kale, or yoga, or prayer. They often offer help. Today I was pushing my way up the hill, my arms rippling with muscles, ok maybe more bubbling, simmering really, and a guy came up to me to ask if I was ok. I took off my headphones to tell him I was fine and he looked ahead to warn me seriously… that the road… had cars in it…
Revealing that you are disabled is quite a big decision. I remember telling my friends that I had MS. Coming out in this way was as awkward and difficult as coming out as trans. It’s a little worse, actually. Coming out as trans is unusual and it takes some time for friends to understand what you’re saying, but in time they often realise that this is ultimately an act of liberation. Coming out as disabled, however, changes how people interpret your quality of life, the future they can anticipate for you darkens, and they feel the loss of what they thought might have been. They grieve.
Coming out as disabled has been much easier since I started using a wheelchair. Now I roll around with a big “I’m super disabled” sign flashing above my head. I don’t get to choose whether to come out as disabled. I’m flying a disabled flag and singing the disabled anthem. I’m suddenly very obvious. It triggers me, all of the tricky ways people perceive me, that I have to bypass in order to live fully. It’s still somehow simpler, though, that the choice of when and how to tell someone is no longer mine.
And it all comes at a cost. When people meet me knowing I’m trans and seeing that I’m disabled I don’t easily get to connect to them as my authentic, flawed, complex self. I’m so much more than just trans and disabled, but sometimes I get lost in the labels.
Of course, I’m not immune to my own internalised stigma either. I often find myself hiding my transness and my disability. In part, I’m trying to avoid other people making assumptions about me, but also to avoid my own negative perceptions of myself as trans and disabled. I still feel, deep inside somewhere, that it is a bad thing to be a disabled trans woman.
What I need is to update my internal representation. I am Cora, and I am a transgender disabled woman in the world, not the able cisgender woman I wish to portray. I forget that my transness doesn’t make me less a woman, and my wheelchair doesn’t make me less a person. But the world is what it is, and it wasn’t built with disabled or trans people in mind. So I still frequently hide in plain sight. I try to portray a more palatable visage for the world to scrutinise. And I choose carefully whether, when, and how to tell a new friend about who I am.