How did you handle coming out?
Coming out is a different experience for everyone, for some it's a fraught and stressful experience, for others it's an easy and smooth process.
People react differently to the news, geography and demographics can play into the likelihood of a negative reaction, so many factors that can be difficult to handle or worry about.
So how did you go about it and how did it go?
How have things been since and is there anything you'd do differently?
For me personally (a trans woman) it's a long and ongoing process. I first came out to my best friend in 2018, she's trans just like me so it was easy and she and I were always very close and trusting. We've since started a relationship and are now engaged. I literally just spoke to her and talked about my feelings and she accepted me immediately.
Next was my mum, my family are friendly and loving but none of us are overly close or open about our feelings with each other, I have a long history of anxiety which created a barrier for me coming out, I don't think I came out to my mum until either late 2019 or early 2020. She was in the living room on her own and I asked to speak, we sat down and had a heart to heart and she was understanding and supportive, though she didn't know much about trans people. Things seemed fine initially but a few days later when she picked me up form work she broke down in the car crying, saying how it's a big change and how she felt like she was losing her son. It was a lot, more than I could handle and this may be selfish of me, but it was the opposite of what I needed at a time when I was feeling very fragile. We talked more and she came around and has since been very supportive and helped me a lot.
Other family members I never really formally came out to, but folks have slowly cottoned on to what's happening and it hasn't been an issue.
Work however is a different situation. That aforementioned anxiety has prevented me from coming out to this day. In work I hide my feminine features and pretend I'm a guy. It's getting harder by the day to hide it but not knowing how folks will react is worrying. Legally I'll be protected from harm, but socially this could ostracise me from my colleagues. I live in the UK and anti-trans rhetoric has been on the rise in recent years, and if the folks I work with directly don't take it well, while they couldn't openly discriminate, they could make my work life unpleasant and difficult. It'll have to happen eventually (possibly soon) but I'm putting it off until the last possible moment. The fear is paralysing.
On the topic of work, at my last employer I did come out to my two closest colleagues privately, they're still my friends to this day and have had no issues. It was difficult, my heart was pounding and we were saying farewell to another colleague who had been a strong LGBT+ ally in the workplace, it felt like the right time and things worked out well, there were hugs all around which was honestly a far better reaction than I could've hoped for.
So for me, to this day I'm still coming out, slowly, one step at a time. I'd probably do it differently if I could go back, just rip off the whole thing with everyone at once, but that would rely on me being braver than I actually am. The approach I have taken however has been safe and cautious, and has mostly worked out for me.
Apologies for the long story! I'd love to hear all of yours.
Thank you for sharing your story! It's ingesting hearing everyone's journey. Being safe is so imperative and I'm happy to hear you are being safe! Coming out for me was quite the adventure. I'm a trans woman and I knew that from childhood. It was just this innate feeling that how I was treated and expected to behave was the opposite of who I was. I didn't have the words for it back then and events that took place kept me in the closet for 30 years. I came out to my then fiance and soon to be wife. I told her I was trans and didn't lie exactly what that meant for me. She said that was okay with her and we got married. When I wanted to come out to others and transition though, well that's when she decided to come out as a biblical literalist. She knew I detested religion and considered it the greatest threat to humanity. She lied for 8 years and thought getting married would fix me. I loved her and tried to turn it around but she had both feet firmly placed in her beliefs. Our marriage ended in 2020 and after all that was said and done, I came out to everyone! Started transitioning in 2021 and I have lived openly, freely, honestly, and without a single damn regret since then. I'm a chef so work is very easy. In kitchens you can either hold your station down during a rush or you can't. Only thing that matters to cooks and I love it!
Thanks for sharing your experience!
I'm sorry to hear about your experience with your ex-wife, I honestly couldn't imagine how difficult that was. But I'm glad things have worked out better for you since!
Thank you, it's all okay now! I'm happier, she's happier and life is so good! It's weird sometimes to think of those 30 years, like I don't even know who she married. The person I was is basically a stranger to me and I now have the memories of some random dude in my head.
I finished coming out as trans at the start of this year. I actually came to terms with it myself over two years ago, but was taking my sweet time over coming out to Everyone, mostly through nerves and worry that it wouldn't go well.
You know all of the horror stories you hear of family, friends, colleagues, or randos refusing to accept you? I had none of that. My family have been wonderfully accepting and inclusive (I'm going to be a bridesmaid at my sister's wedding, eek!). My friends embraced me with open arms. Work didn't consider it to be a surprise at all. And I haven't experienced a single negative interaction with someone out in the wild. Hell, my 94-year old, hardcore Catholic grandmother is totally on board! This is a woman who I have memories of saying how you can get a doctor to "fix" being gay.
I fully recognise the rarity and privilege of this situation, and it makes me feel like a fraud. Don't get me wrong, I'm incredibly grateful for the smoothness of my transition, and how easy the whole thing has been (socially at least, the medical side is a different ball game). But there is a bit of imposter syndrome always niggling away inside of me. Logically and rationally I know and understand that we are not our trauma, and we are not defined by how good or bad our comings out are. But there is also a core part of a lot of queer people's coming out which is one of rejection and loss of close connections. I'm not sorry to have held on to every important relationship, but honestly I sometimes feel like I'm not doing the thing properly if I haven't lost at least one person I love. How messed up is that?
In my opinion you shouldn't feel like a fraud. Your experience is the kind of thing the LGBTQIA+ community has been fighting for, for years. Every smooth and painless coming out story is a victory in my book.
The wider the spread of acceptance of queer folk is, the easier our lives become and your story is a positive result of both loving friends and family, as well as a wider community that is slowly becoming more accepting.
I'm nothing but happy for you.
Take it from someone who had a very accepting family, and is out to all of their friends, and who never transitioned: you are not a fraud, you are an inspiration. Live your best life, be who you are and who you want to be. That's all anybody can want.
I think it's evidence of negative social reinforcement, nothing messed up with you. We think coming out is likely to cause some big social rupture, and yeah it fucking can do -- some people aren't bright enough to see past the received "normal," and that's tragic.
But media representation of coming out is always this fraught, high-emotion thing, and I honestly think most people just aren't interesting in shattering relationships over it. Some are, and they just make better TV.
edit: I should also specify that I'm thinking about adult relationships, even young adults, when you aren't all living under one roof. I wouldn't expect much of what I typed above to apply to kids who are still in their parents' house; that's a different kettle of fish.
I first came out to my mother when I was 17. It's important to note two things. First, this was in 1991. There was no public representation at that time. The second is that she adopted me when I was a mere week old. She was 45 at that time. So in 1991, she was 62. She was born in the South at the tail end of the Great Depression. She hit her teens in WWII. To say that she didn't fully understand the trans "thing" is a gross understatement. But she accepted me, immediately and without reservation. Unfortunately, this was still 1991, and society wasn't ready for me, at least not that I found. I went to therapy (as required) and was dissuaded from even attempting to transition. So, sadly, I never did. That's a footnote though, I am still trans and identify as female, even if my body does not.
These days, I am not "out" out, as I am publicly closeted. Online, however, is a different story. I am completely honest with people I know online, especially friends. The people I know in various communities likely know me better than anyone in the "real world." To put it mildly, I am Thrabalen, it's merely people offline who know me by my pseudonym. The one written down on government papers.
It's so heartwarming to hear of parents being supportive even when others like them may not were they in the same situation. That sort of acceptance is such a wonderful thing.
I can understand not being out in person, it's a difficult thing and not necessarily suitable for everyone. What matters is that you're able to express yourself in a way that is comfortable and suited to you.
Thank you for sharing, Thrabalen.
I'm a cis man, and I've known from an early age that man wasn't the right configuration for me -- "configuration" because we all know it takes in so much more than biological sex.
It was easy coming out to my partner of 20 years. She's a cis woman, but she's always been pretty radical and politically queer. I think one of the keys to our success as a couple is that she doesn't want or expect me to act like a stereotypical man; I also think that if she'd been on her own a little longer, she'd be with an AFAB woman today and not me.
It was also easy coming out to my sister. She and I didn't have much of a relationship growing up, and for about ten years we've both been working to fix that, so we aren't having to meet as adults for the first time when our parents die. She's gone through some shit that has distanced her from our parents, and she doesn't have many friends, so there's a kind of urgency around honesty between us that made telling her about it easy. She's hyper-pragmatic; she doesn't care about normalcy, only whether a thing works. I don't really know if she believes she gets it, but she helped it to be a low-stakes conversation.
I don't know why I'd tell my parents. I'm in my early 40s and they've just turned 70. They see themselves as progressives; they'd probably be able to digest the information, but I'm not sure I see a reason to ask them to. I don't know what I'd gain by making them feel like I'd had an unhappy childhood, because of a disorientation they couldn't see or couldn't handle. I already had an unhappy childhood; making them feel shitty about it doesn't buy me anything back.
The person I think most about telling all this? A girl I thought I was in love with all through middle & high school. I wanted to be her, but I didn't have the vocabulary for that; instead I decided it was love, it was fate, whatever it was in my favorite movie that week. I read Gatsby and The Sorrows of Young Werther and was like, ah yes, me. 🤦‍♀️
I regret having battered her with all these transactional propositions for five or six years. Reading the internet's discussion around nice guy culture as an adult has helped me identify a lot of really awful behavior on my part towards her, even if just in the way I framed our worth to one another. I wish I could re-do our friendship with the clarity about it that I've got now. I think we could have been much better friends than we ever were if we'd both had the words for the truth. We lost touch after high school, alas.
Telling my current friends that I've been transitioning for a couple of years now has been cake, because I have the right friends. I wish I could go back and come out at a point when I had the wrong friends (I mean, not really), because those were the only friends available and, as a result, the only ones for whom I lived a lie, even if I didn't completely get it myself.
I'm in a similar situation to you with regards to high school friends. There was a girl I liked, she and I became close friends but even then my feelings got in the way of our friendship, I handled things wrong at the time since I was a dumb teenager and wish I could go back and be a better friend to her.
I often wonder how she'd react to the fact that I'm trans, I like to think she'd be supportive of me.
I'm happy that things have been easy with your friends, and hearing your partner and sister have handled it well is wonderful too. I hope things continue to go well for you on your journey.
My apologies, but it doesn't sound from your description that you're cis at all. It sounds like you're a trans woman, assigned male at birth, in the process of transitioning from being physically male facing to your sex matching what's inside you. If any of that is incorrect, I again apologize. Either way, I commend you on your journey!
Oh, I agree; cis man isn't the right phrase, but I guess I mean clockability. A year ago I was much more into being femme-presenting than I am right now, but today I've got all my body hair and a big Sam Elliot mustache. If I had to fill out a form I suppose I'd call myself a non-op (for now) trans woman.
I'm poor, and after a couple years on HRT I could see the ceiling on where I was going to be able to go without lots of money for electrolysis and FFS. Secondly I began to feel like my obsession over feminizing had become a preoccupation and was its own hangup on a gender binary.
It was distracting from other areas of my personal work, so I decided to stop HRT & sit with my body as it is and see if my feelings of revulsion toward myself have evolved since high school, too. Jury's still out tbh. It's always something I can re-start.
I'm transfeminine nonbinary, though I just abbreviate that to "trans woman" in most cases. I transitioned a few years ago. (I'm also lesbian, but I never "came out" as that, so much as just stayed with the same female partner I had before.)
Most of the people I came out to took it well. My mother needed a couple of reminders, but now sends me birthday cards with my new name on them. My partner had some reservations that, after some discussion, reduced to "trans people seem to have harder lives on average and I am worried for you on that basis". A few of the people I worked with at the time privately came out to me, as either already-transitioned-and-stealth or pre-transition-but-thinks-about-gender-unusually-often.
With the few others, I probably had the optimal kind of bad experience: the people who stopped talking to me were the ones whose company I really didn't enjoy much anyway, but still had in my life because they weren't yet bad enough to completely drop. So when they started to react poorly, I could just say "k bye!" and metaphorically ride off into the sunset and leave them to their discomfort. I'm okay with this.
Overall, it was a pretty good experience. I'm glad, in a way, that it took me so long to get here: if I'd come out a decade earlier, I'm sure it wouldn't have gone nearly as well. Society, or at least the bubble of it I lived in back then, wasn't ready for it.
I'm honestly a little envious that you were able to drop the intolerant folks in your life. I honestly find that some of the people that I worry about are too involved in my life to be easily cut out. But that's just my own situation and I'm glad you've had a generally positive outcome!
Thank you for sharing your experiences!
In a way, it's a privilege I'm lucky to have. In another way, that's a really weird sentence to apply to the relationships I'm applying it to.
The most notable one is my father, who I didn't talk to for several years after I moved out of his house. We'd kind of tenuously repaired our relationship, and then this happened, and it just reverted to how it was before.
I am now fully convinced that "we're on such bad terms we refuse to speak to each other" is a much better state for a relationship to be in than "we begrudgingly pretend everything is fine for civility reasons".
I hope whatever happens with your people turns out alright! It's not easy and I was definitely nervous about some of the people I am on good terms with.
I’m a transmasc nonbinary 30-year-old who’s been on a slow and steady journey since about the first lockdown. I’m lucky to have fundamentally supportive parents and a very queer friend circle.
My coming out was a kind of stream-of-consciousness musing spread over many months. First, I shared with close friends and family that I thought I was genderqueer, and nothing would change for the moment, but it was something I was examining in myself.
At the beginning, I felt uneasy about adopting they/them pronouns. I knew they would make my life more difficult, and they still sounded strange to my ear. I didn’t want to confuse people. I didn’t want to impose. I knew some would judge me for them and I felt embarrassed. I wished so much that they were commonplace too, but simultaneously knew that the path to that place will be made by those who claim them, use them, teach them and normalise them. So, eventually, I decided to try.
First came new pronouns in English, and I lived there for a bit. In time, a new name; I lived there too. HRT began, I loitered awhile, and last year I switched gender in French. That’s where I’m staying right now. I don’t know exactly where I’m going or when I’ll be finished, but I’ve got a ways to go until I settle down.
It took me a long time to get to where I started. I’ve always known that I’d rather have been born male, and looking back, there were a lot of clear signs, but my understanding of the nuance and diversity of trans experience was flawed for a very large part of my life.
When I first learned about trans people as a teenager, it was a very narrow, black-and-white affair. They were presented as people so distressed by their body that the only way they could live a happy life was to undergo a total medical transition and live fully as the “other sex.”
At that awkward point in my life, all my self-esteem and insecurities stemmed from how I was perceived; I was completely dominated by the outside gaze. I didn’t really have my own opinions about my body, and the opinions I did have were aligned with societal standards. I liked my long hair because others liked my long hair - I got compliments on it all the time. I wished I had a bigger chest because “attractive” women in entertainment had chest. I didn’t hate my body, so clearly, I wasn’t trans.
For a long time, I also had no notion that someone could be both trans and gay. I liked men, so clearly, I wasn’t trans.
I thought transitions were all or nothing, and I never wanted surgery down there, so clearly, I wasn’t trans.
But I also wasn’t happy. A part of me, one day, I don’t know when, had started to grieve.
I grieved a childhood I hadn’t lived, friendships I never had, roles I’d never play, things I’d never hear. Every story I ever loved was bittersweet, because I saw myself in them and it hurt. All my admiration was tangled up in sadness.
But it was a calm and quiet longing, and the truth is, I could have lived with it. I would have been okay. I don’t know that I ever would have truly been happy, but I would have been okay. To be honest, transition or no, I still don’t know that I’ll ever truly be happy. There’s a lot of work to be done in my life, and I may never really know exactly who I’m trying to be. But, I’m content at least in knowing that I’m giving myself the best shot.
I’m grateful to have made the realisations I have in a place that grants me the freedom to act on them, because I know so many people like me never will. If I had known when I was young what I know today, I think my life would have looked very different. Of course, at the time, the people around me were different as well. I’m sure my parents would have handled it more poorly, though only as a result to their own inexperience. They were younger then too.
It’s what makes me so angry at all the efforts to stifle queer education. I would give anything to grown up with the knowledge we have today. We have everything we need to make this generation’s lives better and it’s being suppressed. I’m glad that on the internet, at least, there are more resources and communities than there have ever been.
I can relate to the issues in childhood. I too had to deal with being served a very narrow definition of trans people. The sex education I was given was quite good and expansive, and supportive of trans folks (this was back in 2010 for what it's worth), but the understanding of the trans experience wasn't necessarily there.
As such I also never "knew" that I was just "born in the wrong body", I was just me and I disliked me for reasons I didn't understand. I hated the person in the mirror for reasons I didn't understand.
It wasn't until adulthood and someone in my life coming out to me as trans and sharing their experience with me that I began to realise who I was.
Like you I somewhat grieve for a childhood I missed. I often wish I could take another shot at those teenage years but as a girl, but c'est la vie.
I'm glad to hear the people in your life have been accepting, and I can sympathise heavily with the path to self discovery not being as clear as it could have been. Thank you so much for sharing your experience, it was enlightening to read.
I'm a cis gay man. My coming out was a really mixed bag, but I consider my story to be a fairly positive one in general.
For context, I had a really bad childhood. I was constantly bullied, and I had gotten into so many fights because of it that I was taken out of my local school and into schools meant to educate miscreants - which was much worse for me because I really couldn't make friends there at all. On top of this my father had undiagnosed psychosis.
I was in very deep denial about being gay for a long time. I would look at gay porn and think "Oh, this is just a weird kink for me," even though I was never able to get that primal, hormonal connection with women - I even had a girlfriend at one time, whom I was completely chaste with. It wasn't until I went online into an informal role-playing situation that allowed me to experiment with what it would mean to accept affection from other men that I began to realize that I couldn't deny it any longer: I was gay.
The reason why I came out of the closet is really simple; I was desperately lonely and terrified for my future. I saw a future in which I stayed closeted and the idea of being that lonely forever felt so torturous that I couldn't forsee surviving it. The only way to persue happiness was to come out, and it felt like a matter of survival.
So one day, my father had driven me to school and I asked him to wait a moment before I got out of the car. I had figured that if he was going to reject me then that school was the best way I could get resources to survive as well as get access to some emotional support. And so I told him... that I was bi. I didn't learn until later how that was problematic for bi folks; "being bi means you're too afraid to come all the way out of the closet" was a common phrase I'd learn of, but it was true for me at the time. But could you blame me for being such a coward? This was during the time of DOMA and massive disapproval of gay people in general.
The good news is that my father took the news in stride. There was no rejection. The bad news is that it really took a long time before I was able to tell him the whole truth, and he said some really harmful things partially as a result of it. The worst was when I would suffer a breakup and he would tell me that I should date women because they're more faithful (which is honestly a really disgusting concept no matter the context).
The one truly bizarre thing is that after I came out of the closet to my peers, things got dramatically better! I'm sure that part of it is the timing; It was my Junior year (year 11 of 12, for those outside of the states), so most of them had become reasonably mature at that point. But I never had anyone bully me for being gay. In fact, I was never bullied again! And while I never made friends with any of them, I would eventually realize that I wasn't the only gay kid at school. Somewhat ironically within the next year or so Dan Savage would begin the It Gets Better project.
As it so happens I had recently found and read an old journal that I had written a few years later that went over a certain unrelated traumatic event that would happen shortly after and one of the things I realized was exactly how constrained my life was at that time. That era of my life was absolutely horrible, not just because of the bullying but because of how bad my home life was, and the only thing that kept me there was the idea drilled into my head about how much worse things could be. But the truth was that they were already horrible. I had depression and was suicidal at points. Coming out of the closet was the first time when I was able to really put my foot down about how I was going to live my life. To this day, I say that my life only truly began after I was able to leave my parent's house. So I will never have a single regret about the things I did in those times, even if they were cringe, selfish, or short-sighted. I did it all to be the person who I needed to be.
I'm sorry you had those struggles through childhood, I can't imagine the difficulty of having all these different elements in your life working against you, but at the same time I'm happy you were able to go on that journey of self discovery and experience personal growth for the better.
It's seriously inspiring to see people such as yourself face their problems and learn to accept who they are, I thank you for sharing your experiences, I'm happy I could read about them.
I never really bothered to come out. I'm lucky enough that most of my immediate family doesn't care.
My father and his side of the family is very religious and would likely be against it, but I never had contact with him or his family for most of my life.
I worried over it for a while, who to tell, how much to tell them, under what circumstance and so on overthinking everything. I would lay awake trying to think through every possibility and attempt to plan for every contingency, it's my nature to overthink things I suppose.
Eventually I gave up, the anxiety was eating away at me. It made me irritable and generally unlikable. I chose to just get it over with, invited my boyfriend over for dinner with my family and introduced him as such. I don't remember much of the night as I was extremely nervous, I answered a few questions and afterwards just fell asleep.
After that I kept it on a need-to-know basis. It turns out most people don't need to know about your sexuality, and so I never told them unless it was necessary.
That's honestly a totally valid and understandable way to approach things. Ultimately that kind of thing is nobody's business but your own, tho I can only imagine the anxiety, I think I'd be running on pure adrenaline personally.
I'm glad things seem to have worked out and I really appreciate you sharing.
I'm lucky enough to be raised by a family that couldn't care less in a town that couldn't care less (in the UK). I wasn't even going to do it, I just suddenly felt like I "should" one day.
So I went downstairs for breakfast, and eating my cereal I said to Mum, "So there's something I should tell you", and before I even took a breath she blurted out "You're gay!"
Which was nice of her. I corrected her, saying "No, bi, but close enough" and then gradually just texted or told everyone else in my family over the course of the day. As I said before, nobody cared - half of them were like "no shit".
I realise I'm very fortunate. It's a shame it doesn't go this way for everyone.
Honestly that's hilarious in a really sweet way, I'm envious but also glad that you had such a smooth experience like that, I'm sure that's what we all wish for both ourselves and others.
Thanks for sharing, it brought a smile to my face!
I unfortunately didn’t get to come out, another girl chose to out me.
I knew I was a lesbian from a young age and I grew up in a conservative town. I had known my best friend since elementary school, and at the time she was surprisingly cool with it. That is, until I hooked up with a classmate.
The next day, she publicly cut contact with me and made it clear we were no longer friends and our friend group got divided up. Me and that girl were historically inseparable so even the teachers tried to involve themselves (all this happened on a field trip, so we were trapped on a bus for 5 hours to get home) and I was made out to be the bad guy. She didn’t communicate to me why she was upset with me, just that we were no longer friends.
When I got home my mom asked me if I was gay. I tried to deny it, and I got grounded. I asked how long I was grounded for, and she said until I was no longer gay (lol). My grandmother bawled like I had broken her heart, she said I was choosing a hard life. I had to go to therapy where the therapist would ask questions like “why do you think that you are a homosexual?” It wasn’t conversation therapy, thankfully, but they all tried to convince me I was confused. My mom also told my primary care provider like it was a fucking medical condition.
I had a lot of shame thrown at me from different directions. I was brought up catholic, so my religion encouraged the guilt. I just couldn’t believe how quickly my life changed and how different people saw me. I wasn’t even sure how my family found out.
That is…until I saw my mom’s phone. She had a few calls from my ex-best friend post blowup. I asked her about them, and I found out it was my friend who outted me.
About a few years later, that same ex-best friend also came out as lesbian. One of the people that stuck by her side when the friend group split told me that the reason she originally cut me off is because I broke her heart and that she was in love with me.
The thing that gets me is if I had known she was in love with me, I would have gotten together with her instead of the classmate. I loved her too, but I didn’t think she was into girls at the time. In all honesty, she did me a favor by showing me her true colors because I feel like I truly dodged a bullet.