Do I Really Have To Come Out?

On coming out (or not) in middle age

I’m 45 years old and I’m just (finally?) coming out about my gender.

My first coming out was when I was fifteen, reading the wonderful Annie On My Mind and realizing that my world had shifted just an inch and everything suddenly made sense. Every queer person knows that your identity is the gift that keeps giving: you have to keep coming out over and over again, whether you want to or not. Sometimes it is awkward, blurting out that you’re a lesbian on your third day at college to the girl down the hall and feeling relieved when she says she’s bisexual. Sometimes it’s easy, falling into tight companionship with someone you vaguely know from campus events and never saying it, but knowing anyway.

Other times, it is downright scary.

Queers and kids

I’ve been a childcare professional for the majority of my adult life. I grew up when teachers being gay wasn’t cool, wasn’t accepted. And I worked with the ittiest of bitties, babies, and toddlers.

I kept my trap shut. I learned that it was just easier. Until . . .

The lunch that changed everything

One day, I went over to the cafeteria to get some lunch. I was going to take it back to eat in the office, but one of my kids’ parents saw me and waved me over, so I sat down. We started talking and I slipped up, used an odd phrasing or something, and she stopped me. Asked if I was gay.

I took a breath and said yes. Rushed to explain that people were sometimes funny about gays working with kids —

“No,” she said. “Not here. We’re like a family here.”

So I stopped hiding it. I wasn’t really public, but I would drop my wife’s name. When the moms came to nurse their babies, I sometimes found myself answering questions; that was when I developed my motto:

Ask whatever you want. If it’s too personal, I won’t answer.

Because on some level I wanted to help people understand that we weren’t some odd specimens, pinned on trays or observed in our natural habitat. In my next nanny job, I made it clear in the interview with a very Catholic family that I was gay. It didn’t matter. It didn't matter at my job after that, either. I like to think that if I were job-seeking today and came out as non-binary, nobody would care.

The kids wouldn’t, anyway, I’m sure of it, because little ones just accept you as you are, every day, without fail. They love you because you’re the person who feeds them and changes them and pushes them on the swings and knows the right way to comb their hair or lets them climb up the slide when nobody’s watching.

… little ones just accept you as you are, every day, without fail.

It’s the adults, loved ones, and strangers alike, that I worry about. That I think of and wonder, “Is it safe? Do I even need to come out?”

I told my BFF first, and then my writing partner. A college acquaintance who completed his transition a few years ago. Last summer, I told my wife. I’m now out to more strangers on the internet than I am to people in my life, and it’s probably going to stay that way. My mother has been sucked into THAT biased conservative news channel’s anti-trans rhetoric, and I think of the rest of my family like I did my grandmother when I was first coming out: it’s something beyond what they understand, so what’s the point?

I’m curious what others have experienced, coming out as trans when you’ve always presented publicly as cis.

And if you were/are queer, are you sick of coming out again and again? How open are we obligated to be about the inner workings of our lives and hearts? What was your breaking point, or are you an open book? Let’s have a conversation in the comments.