National Coming Out Day

National Coming Out Day has a lot of purposes. It says we are not silent. It says we are not invisible. But it also says you are not alone.

I always want to send you to read Racheline, because she writes so well about everything. She is one of my best friends and I probably would not be here today writing this post without her.

I am bad at belonging or being on teams or anything like that, despite my childish yearning for it to be otherwise. I've spent a lot of my life reticent about my own complicated gender and sexuality, because it felt exhausting or hard to have to talk about it. It took until I was nearly thirty before I said it aloud and even in the safety of strong relationship and supportive friends, that was terrifying.

When I was little, I knew I wasn't really a girl. I can remember sitting in the front room of the house in Lubbock, wearing my cowboy boots and feeling this settled certainty on the subject. Somewhere, somehow, things got mixed up and any day now my scifi future from the hardback books my parents owned would come along and everything would be alright. There would be spaceships and Mars and someone would fix me back to being a boy like I supposed to be.

I was five years old.

For most of my life, I didn't tell people because I learned very quickly that it was not something anyone wanted to hear. Instead I tried as hard as I could to be the boy I wasn't getting to be. I climbed trees, went hunting with my father, read science fiction and wore pants all the time. The times I tried to be a girl were disasters - getting kicked out of Girl Scouts for having a smart mouth and no religion, my mother refusing my request for ballet lessons by telling me I would always be too fat, being shamed in the locker room by rich girls at school. My close friends were mostly boys, from band to journalism to the backstage of the theater crowd and academic competitions. I always ran with boys, trying hard to find some way between looking up to them and fucking them that would let me into the other side. I wanted to be the boys I knew so badly and sometimes I thought sleeping with them would be enough.

It never was.

Somehow, it never occurred to me that there was anyone like me. I never even looked. I spent a lot of time just wondering if I was truly insane, if this was some part of the terrible depression my mother said we would all have in our genes. I wondered if maybe I was just an arrogant asshole, that maybe my feelings were about sex and gender were screwed up because of bad relationships and the rape and the suicide attempt and everything else that happened before I was seventeen. Maybe I just needed a lot of psychoanalysis and someone to tell me that I hated my mother and adored my father because of some insignificant quirk of life and that is why I always felt like a man instead of a woman. Maybe I needed to leave town and change my name. I used to fantasize about leaving everything behind, starting over somewhere else. But I was too scared to really never come back.

The truth is I just needed to see it outside of my own head. I needed to know I was not alone. I needed to know that other people lived through this weird sensation of being in the wrong body, that other people knew what it was like to keep waiting to wake up as someone else. When that happened, it was like something shattered inside me. The stranglehold I kept on those feelings for decades cracked and it really did feel like I had stumbled into sunlight after ages in darkness.

None of that really changes me, my essential nature. I am still the same sarcastic, difficult person. I am still bad at belonging to groups. I'm still short, too short to be an astronaut. But I am able to say now that I am a trans person, that I am a man and a pretty queer man at that. I may be short and carrying some breasts, but I am a man from Texas and know our state song and the thousand colors of the open sky at sunset. I have loved women and men and don't feel any need to pick either side of that fence.

I also still have a husband who loves me, even though I upended his orderly world. Mike has been steadfast and patient beyond words with me. Everyone should be so lucky to be so loved.

The actual process of transitioning is still very much a work in progress for me. I'm trying to lose some weight so I will be in better shape for the mastectomy I plan on having. I am on the fence about hormones. Some days I think yes and some days I think no. It isn't really something that feels good to hop on and off, so I don't want to commit to that until I feel more sure of my answer. I'd love my voice to change and to look a bit more masculine, though honestly the thought of facial hair is awful. But that decision can come after the top surgery, because that is the important thing for me.

I changed my name socially about a year ago. For the most part that has gone well, with very few people not adjusting to it quickly. Most everyone I know uses Anton and the male pronouns. I know some of my friends slip at times and they always look so horrified when they do - it is okay. Half the time I don't notice and the rest of the time if you just correct yourself and move on everything will be cool. I know that in some situations we still end up using my old name, like with Mike's older relatives. While we told his parents and sister last year, it seems needlessly hard to go through it when it comes to much older relatives we see once every other year or so. I don't actually really talk to my family so I haven't come out to them.

My feeling is that it will be easier to handle once I go through with a legal name change. Having changed my last name twice already for marriage, I am dragging my feet on the hassle of changing my first and middle name. (When we refinanced out house recently, I had to sign an enormous affidavit with every variation of every name I've legally had - it was a lot of freaking signatures. Doing it again might give me hives.) Additionally I have yet to settle on something for my middle name. But it is on my list of things to do.

I worry a lot about what transitioning legally will bring. I live in a state where gay marriage is illegal, and I feel a sort of guilt about taking advantage of the privilege of passing as a straight woman to have my marriage and home mortgage and tax benefits. But I think maybe my homeland owes me for all the shit I went through growing up and so I feel less bad.

This summer I went to California for the wedding of my oldest friend. He wrote to me some months before and said some of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me. (Even though he's known me since I was a majorly screwed up teenager.) Even so, I was terrified of actually seeing him again and letting him see me. I shouldn't have worried, because his welcome was kinder than anything. On such a day for him, he made me feel loved and accepted too. It was such a thing that I never imagined I would get to experience during all those years when I was sure I was just a broken piece of flesh.

I am trans and queer and a lot of other things. I am here.

You aren't alone.