You Won't Be Hearing About My Surgery

On privacy, transition, and coming out.

This past Wednesday was National Coming Out Day, an annual event that’s always sure to resurface discourse on the concept of “coming out”. I have no doubt that, to many LGBTQIA+ people, this day is an important opportunity to share their journey into queerness with the world. It is ultimately good that we have the language, and the opportunity, to stake our claim to certain marginalized identities.

At the same time, many have critiqued the concept of coming out, or more accurately, what the concept of “coming out” means about our broader society. The fact that there is an assumed norm that we must announce our deviance from is, itself, part of the whole problem with society. I am in love with our community’s reframing of the issue, from Maybe Burke’s opinion that “closets are built around us, not by us” to humorous flyers that share information about cisgender people in the same condescending tone with which trans people are often talked about.

sexchange.tbt

A post shared by @sexchange.tbt

We’re living in a strange cultural moment for LGBTQ people, a moment where society does not yet have a uniform reaction to queerness. In much of broader society, being cis and straight is considered the “default”, and coming out as either trans or queer is seen as a Big Deal. In some spaces, coming out as queer is not a Big Deal, but coming out as trans is. In some cultural pockets, coming out as anything is so unsafe and unacceptable that dudes are literally shooting cans of beer because the company making the beer collaborated with a trans woman as part of a marketing campaign. At the same time and in the same country, it is easier than ever to hear a trans person’s perspective; simply visit any social media site or blog and you’ll find countless trans creators articulating the nuances of their experiences. Myself included! There are plenty of queer and trans-affirming spaces, online and offline. There are even spaces that are so open and progressive that, in response to the trauma inflicted by the aforementioned groups, have incorporated toxic elements to their disclosure; there are online spaces where simply being queer is not enough, you must aggressively and openly perform queerness, and where performing your queerness without some radical posturing means you might be a fraud/assimilationist/grifter/not progressive enough, an insult commonly levied against closeted bisexuals. (These latter spaces are mostly online.)

All of this whiplash must be endured daily by queer and trans people as we move into and out of spaces where we might be loved for who we are, or physically attacked for who we are, depending sometimes literally on the street we walk down. It’s also been accelerated by an era of Internet posting where one’s personal identity is so entangled with one’s personal “brand” that it’s typically assumed that the two are inseparable. I’m reminded of this Cardi B tweet from last year:

A tweet from Cardi B, is response to a tweet reading “Celebrities that came out as bisexual but never dated someone of the same gender.” Cardi says, “I ate bitches out before you was born …..Sorry I don’t have razr phone pics to prove it to you 😅😅” (Twitter)

As nice as it is to know that certain famous celebrities share the same identities as us, we also need to remember that a) we are not entitled to other people’s personal lives and b) we never truly know what other people have been through. The original post here also features Billie Eilish, who was 20 years old at time of writing, and implies that the singer-songwriter should have divulged who she was dating and/or having sex with while she was a teenager, which I hopefully don’t have to explain to you is creepy as hell, on top of being biphobic. I feel similarly about Gaylor conspiracy theories; why do we need Taylor Swift to be gay, especially in an era of abundant of queer media?

I used to be very open about my transition story on social media. In front of a private audience, I still am. (You can book me for speaking engagements, by the way!) But the older I get, the more I want to keep certain parts of my life militantly private.

This coming January, I am getting facial feminization surgery, or FFS. I’m of the position that transitioning is a life-long process, that one’s relationship to gender is ever-shifting. Still, in terms of strictly Medical Transition (as opposed to my transient, ever-shifting internal world), this will likely be the last “big step” I take in my gender transition.

And none of my fans are gonna hear a goddamn thing about it.