National Coming Out Day
“While the circumstances of coming out are different for everyone, I think perhaps there is one commonality all LGBTQ+ people share when we do come out.
Trust.
We are placing with the people we come out to our trust in them. Our trust that they will accept and welcome our news. Our trust in them that we are not wrong about them, and they will not react badly. Surprised, pleased or happy, sure; but disgusted, no.
And a hope that we can trust them with holding safe that very precious (and likely secret) part of ourselves we have shared with them.
It seems even today, after decades of social progress, that coming out is still harder and carries more risk for people than it should.
My own relationship with the coming out has been a mixed one. Even as a young person in the 80s and 90s, when I was realising I wasn’t totally straight, I felt I shouldn’t have to ‘come out’. Surely it didn’t matter if I had a boyfriend or a girlfriend so long as we were happy with each other? Or if I had said I thought I was really a girl, that I might be listened to?
At this time there was an invasive and prurient obsession among some in the press to ‘out’ people against their wishes with all the damage to them and their career that might do. This, along with the then Conservative government’s Section 28 policy, which scarred the lives of queer young people like me, and made us feel wrong, which wrought a collective damage on us all which we all carried for decades.
So, yes, it has taken me quite a while to reframe my thoughts and feelings on ‘coming out’ and the power those words hold.
It took decades for me to come out to myself, first as queer, then much later to reach the knowing I am trans. While at times I wish I had known earlier that I am trans, I accept that I knew when I was ready to know. Leah came out to me when she finally felt safe to do so, in a place in her life when she knew she could – to herself, to her colleagues and to her friends.
I know I am lucky in where I work, the people I work with, and to have the support of my firm. Acceptance of me as Leah at work was always a certainty for me, and I’m pretty sure that if I had worked anywhere else, Leah might have stayed hidden for even longer than the forty years she had already done.
But I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I was, and coming out is something that is just not possible for them. Despite the massive strides we have made, coming out and being out can still be a dangerous position for people to place themselves in.
Queer people do not just come out once, we come out time and time again to each new person we meet. I came out two and a half years ago, and am still coming out. The first months as a trans woman still in the early stages of her transition were a period where I spent a significant amount of my personal resources navigating all the coming outs over that time in my life, with each one never the same as the last.
Even today I find myself coming out in new situations. Holidays where I am presenting as the woman I am but where I elicit sideways glances, travelling for work to parts of the country I seldom visit, social gatherings in my neighbourhood with neighbours I rarely see. Almost every day I suspect I am perhaps the first or only trans person the people I move past in the streets or on the tube have seen. So for me, every day feels like Coming Out Day.
With all that said, I hope that, on National Coming Out Day, that by being out, being seen, living as a trans woman in her middle-age, that someone somewhere who isn’t out sees me, trying to live my best life, my authentic life. And even if it’s just for those moments where I pass through their life, they feel a little bit less alone, a little bit safer and stronger, and a little bit further along their own unique journey to hopefully finding someone they can trust with their own coming out.”
-Leah, Trans in the City Director
