my journey coming out as trans

2023-08-05

One of my trans friends told me that she was anxious about coming out to her friends and family. It reminded of my own struggles about coming out, by far one of the most difficult parts of my transition.

For trans people, coming out is one of the most visible acts of defiance against the assumptions of gender within our society. It feels like a lot to take on and it keeps a lot of people from transitioning. Reddit is filled with trans people who are struggling to come out to others, let alone themselves.

Who can you trust? How do you tell people that your gender is different than what it appears? This feels like such a big deal to drop on people and I already have trouble talking about myself.¹

In the end, I did manage to navigate coming out. What helped me the most were stories of how other trans people came out. They gave me examples to build upon for myself. In that spirit, I figured I would share my own experiences in coming out here, so that they can act as a reference for others.

I divided my journey roughly chronologically and by relationships, but it certainly isn't a perfect division. Relationships are dynamic and intersect across different categories. For instance, there was a point where I started to introduce myself to strangers as Lili while my coworkers still knew me by my old name.

myself

Look I don't know. I definitely did not "always know", although in retrospect my issues with my hair and my voice make a lot more sense.

My most visible awakening is probably when I stumbled upon the egg_irl subreddit. It was odd to find a community of people who shared very similar wishes as me. The subreddit also made me realize how most people don't deeply wish to be another gender.

I wasn't entirely sure that I was "trans" at this point. I mean, what does being trans even feel like? Still, I started experimenting. Every little step in a feminine direction made me incredibly happy and so, before I knew it, it just became easier to describe my whole life as a transition rather than justify every single choice.

partner

It's hard to say when I came out to my partner exactly. She is very perceptive and I feel like honestly she figured out before even I did. I remember that I had asked her to call me her "girlfriend" in private because it just ... felt more right?² She watched me as I dressed in increasingly feminine clothes and played around with different names for myself.

At this point, my partner lived in an apartment with some housemates. For a few weeks, I visited completely dressed up and would sneak around to avoid the housemates. This became unsustainable. After failing to tell them myself, I ended up asking my partner if she could tell them about my transition. The housemates were really chill and this made it a lot easier to visit my partner.

close friends

At some point, I just started going out almost exclusively in fem clothes on personal outings and I felt increasingly uncomfortable being referred to by my old name. So I started to come out to my close friends, at least those with whom I interacted regularly.

In these early days, I felt incredibly self-conscious about my identity and partially embarrassed as well. Plus, there was always the fear of my friends being transphobic. Overall, this felt like an incredibly intimate thing to share for me.

At first, my plan was to come out while I hang out with my friends. For a few friends, I was actually able to do this (after so much mental back and forth). For others, I couldn't quite insert it into our conversation. It made reflect on my friendships. Why do I have trouble putting focus on myself and expressing intimate thoughts in some of these interactions?

After a lot of deliberation, I started sending texts to my friends, often right after we hung out and I somehow failed to come out. They would be really simple, like "hey, actually i realized i'm trans recently. i've been going by lili and she/her pronouns". They would often follow up with congratulations or questions. I think this provided just enough distance for me to comfortably explain my feelings. Sometimes, we might have a phone call to talk through it in detail.

Gradually, I came out to half a dozen close friends in this way. After this, I would just live only as Lili in my personal life, which brought me so much joy.

family

I came out to my brother and sister pretty early on, just through text. My brother was really excited and called to talk about it, in the process coming out as nonbinary himself. Recently, he has come out as a trans man and I was able to support him through this process thanks to my own experience.

mother

Out of everyone, I was most scared about how my mom would react to the news. In the past, she had reacted very poorly when I came out as bisexual, so I braced myself for the worst. In preparation, I watched a few videos by transphobes, trying to get a better sense of how the discussion could go and what questions and concerns she might have. To respond to the concerns, I read the transfeminist literature extensively, anticipating each argument and counterargument for my transition. I wanted to have a framework for myself to stand on in the face of severe questioning of my identity.

Finally, after several months of this, I just messaged my mom on a random night to tell her. I told her that I am trans, started taking hormones, and have started the process to change my name. As predicted, she had a bunch of concerns. With the framework and building on my experiences, I was able to address each one, so none of them hurt me too much. It helped that I waited a bit to process my transition and also that I had some emotional distance over text. If I had come out in my fragile state a couple months before, I would likely have gotten depressed over any one of her comments and delayed my transition.

I have to say it was a relief to come out to my mom despite everything. It at least made my issues with her a lot more concrete and freed me from considering every possible way that she could respond, which occupied so much of my mind.

Over time, I have changed my approach on arguments over my identity. At first, I was naive and hoped that through extensive discussion she might come to recognize my trans identity and accept me as her daughter. This never happened. Even if she might concede on a certain point, she would never yield on the whole discussion.

Anticipating each of her arguments took up a lot of time and became emotionally draining. For instance, at one point she kept talking about the cancer risk of hormone therapy, which made me go down a rabbit hole of scientific articles to prove the risk is rather low. In the moment, it felt like the most important thing, but afterwards I realized it was just a small battle in a larger war. All our conversations about my identity felt like this, with her continuously giving sideways reason for me not to transition which were hard to argue against and were never the key issue anyways.

Listen reader, don't debate about your identity. You're worth more than that. It's too emotionally fraught and honestly pointless. Why should other people decide how you identify?

I had to make the difficult decision to stop contact with my mom. It hurts us both, but honestly the constant arguments just made me more and more depressed, to the point that I couldn't focus on anything else. Besides, I realized no discussion will bridge our diverging perspectives, at this point only time can do that.

father

After my terrible experience coming out to my mom, I expected just as much trouble with my dad. For context, my mom lives in the United States and my dad in Russia. Both have some loud transphobes, but in Russia these transphobes are in power and have introduced some severe censorship of trans expression in media and general public.

To come out to my dad, I ended up messaging him as well. Surprisingly, he told me that he had similar feelings before. When I asked him more about it, he said he doesn't think about it now.

I was glad to have him understand, but it did make some initial conversations difficult, as I felt he was trying to reconcile his shame with his support for me. He told me he experienced several cycles of intensely wanting to be a woman then having those feelings subside. At first, he told me that maybe I should experience a few more of those cycles to be really sure. I said no, I had already experienced enough of these and I don't want to wait any longer.

He calls me Lili now and we still talk as much as we can. He's in Russia and he's dealing with a lot of other things as well so we can only communicate so much.

coworkers

I came out to my advisors in one of our weekly meetings soon a few months after coming out to myself. I was really awkward, I had them close the door where we met so no one could hear us and their faces got really serious. I got really stressed and was silent for a full minute. Then I told them that I identify more as "female" and started hormones already. They were actually very supportive, which helped a lot.

It took me a couple more months after that to come out to all my coworkers though. I don't really know what I was waiting for. I think coming out to my coworkers just felt really scary and I kept pushing it back more and more. It is such a personal thing in a place where I don't share quite as much personal details. I agonized over how to come out for months.

Eventually, I came out at work by just posting a short message on slack: "Hey all, in the new year, I'd like to go by the name Lili and pronouns she/her." It was quite anticlimactic.

My coworkers overall were nice about it. They switched to call me Lili and use she/her pronouns from then on. People definitely slipped for a few months, but they basically got it now. Everyone has used Lili and she/her consistently for me after about 4 months.

I think just one or two people actually asked me how I was feeling about the transition, and most everyone else avoided the subject. I don't know if it's because they didn't know how to talk about it, or if they thought I might not want to talk about it. Perhaps I'm just not good at bringing it up?

It has made me wonder about what boundaries are appropriate for discussion of personal lives, what would be ideal, and what is expected. Others in the lab have talked about pregnancy and weddings in the past, yet somehow I have felt that discussing feelings around gender transition to be off limits? I'm not sure why.

conclusion

Well, that was a long post. I hope it gave you some perspective on how coming out can go. Every gender transition is different and has its own challenges. Personally, I have definitely found it worthwhile. For me, the pressure of living as the wrong gender was so much worse than all the anxiety that came with coming out.

Being visible has also given me some benefits. I formed deeper bonds with my trans friends. I am able to better support my brother through his transition. My close friends say that I have gotten a lot more confident since coming out.

I will close by saying that I have been fortunate in being financially independent when I came out, having the means to help me transition, and living in a place with legal protections for trans people. Although being able to come out and live as your gender should be a fundamental human right, in reality it is not. Many people³ must still trade off their personal safety with living authentically.

Someday, I hope that we can get to a level of acceptance of trans people that coming out could really feel like an afterthought ("oh by the way, I'm trans"), as opposed to the journey it is now.

#trans