Should I Have to Come Out?

I mean, who’s gonna make me?

I occupy two identities that traditionally require “coming out of the closet,” and I have handled neither of these requirements with any semblance of grace or even self-awareness. I was in my teens when I casually blurted out my queerness in response to someone assuming that I would marry a man someday.

I’d clearly learned nothing by the time I discovered my transness a decade later: I simply began referring to it in such a way that the people who actually read my posts on social media were bound to find out about it.

[As it happens, I can testify that this is an excellent way to find out which of your family members are even considering donating to your GoFundMe.]

Because bisexuality is more widely understood and visible than being non-binary, my sexuality is pretty widely known while my gender remains something of an open-secret. My passive approach to informing people of my identity leads to me being misgendered quite a bit.

I have my pronouns in my email signature, but most people don’t read the signature. People know my legal name is quite feminine while my preferred name is more androgynous, but most people assume that this is simply a quirk of mine. People I’m close to who know my preferred name default to my birth name, because I never explicitly told them to do otherwise. And there are some people who simply will never know how to regard me unless I tell them.

This is, of course, insane. If I was cis and my name was Deidra, and people kept calling me Paulo and using he/him pronouns, I would be monumentally ridiculous for not nipping this bizarre misunderstanding in the bud. After a while, it would seem like a prank, like a form of aggression. “Hmm, how long are they going to continue to believe something incredibly stupid? I should correct them on my birthday, that’ll be fun.”

From what I can reap of the ruinous Lovecraftian hellscape of my emotional world, there are basically two reasons that I do not go out of my way to explain my preferences to others. I don’t want to impose on them, and I feel like I shouldn’t have to tell them.

Inconsistent? That’s my preferred middle name. I’m an inscrutable mess of contradictions and fatally contradictory impasses.

…Which squares with being a bisexual gender fuck, in my opinion.

Let’s ask ourselves if I should or should not come out, and why. And let’s do so in a way that conveniently affirms my instinct toward laziness and passivity, shall we?

Why do we come out?

First of all, is being non-binary the kind of thing one truly needs to ‘come out’ about? I don’t plan on seeking out a medical transition and I have no plans to change my legal documentation. What I want is merely to be referred to by a couple of words that people don’t currently use for me. Is that even something one can come out as?

I think that ‘coming out,’ or the potential for doing so, is what makes someone LGBTQIA in the first place; at the risk of using slightly inaccurate terms, ‘queerness’ is not about who one is attracted to or how one identifies themself, it’s about how society as a whole regards your perceived desires.

Now, I do group transgender identities in with queerness here, and I would argue that certain cishet people with unconventional gender expressions could fit in as well. The way I see it, you could substitute it for the word ‘gay’ and you would get the point across just as accurately. The way society perceives your desires is what matters.

For instance, you could be a completely asexual and aromantic trans girl and you will still have to deal with an overwhelming assumption that you are either a “homosexual transsexual” or “autogynephile” (thanks Blanchard, you edgy fuck.) And because of that untrue assumption about your desires, your identity becomes a subject for categorization and debate.

There’s a reason no serious person refers to Alexander the Great as gay or bisexual: he was born to a society that did not consider his sexuality peculiar, and it therefore did not require a label to explain it. Despite the kinds of people he was interested in, he had more in common with ‘heterosexuals’ of his day than with queer people now.

So, the need to come out only exists if there is a peculiarity to be noted. If my gender is perceived as an extension of my desires, and my desires are incongruent with the norm, it then becomes possible for me to come out.

It’s interesting, my dad knew that I was bisexual since I was 15 or so. He didn’t seem particularly vexed by this, and we peacefully avoided the subject for the next several years.

And yet, when he learned that I am an enby, he admitted to a bit of sadness. Not disappointment or disgust, just a sense of loss. I asked him to clarify, and he said that it was only natural for a parent to want to see their children grow up to have a family. This revelation seemingly took that ideal away from him.

Okay, that was unexpected. It was far from the worst thing he could have said, but I didn’t understand what he meant. Being non-binary has no part in determining whether or not someone will have kids. Personally, I’d been telling whoever would listen that I never wanted kids for the better half of my lifetime. If anything, his revelation that I was queer should have evoked that reaction, because if I ended up settling down with “another woman,” it would be impossible to have a child with me and my partner’s DNA.

My dad’s not stupid: he’s pretty far from it, in fact. So I have to assume that he did not have that reaction because he wasn’t smart enough to grasp what I am trying to communicate when I say “I’m non-binary.”

It’s far more likely that he has a sort of vague notion of what it means to be the kind of person who grows up to have a family: probably something along the lines of being a man or a woman who enters a monogamous relationship with someone of the opposite sex.

(To be absolutely crystal clear, my dad used to attend Pride events and get into fights with homophobes, so we can’t chalk this up to garden-variety bigotry.)

All this to say that being alive in the 21st century, as I am, and living in a country influenced by Christendom, as I do, while belonging to an identity that is perceived as having abnormal desires more than qualifies me as the kind of person who I can come out.

However…

Dress for the world you want, not the one you have.

Being the kind of person who can come out says nothing about the morality of whether or not I should come out. I certainly don’t feel or believe that coming out is what makes someone queer or trans. So what exactly is the point of coming out?

Well, I recall the words of a friend who once questioned my use of the term bisexual. She’d just come out as pansexual herself, and couldn’t understand why I (then identifying as a cis woman but pretty hip to the non-binary vibe) would default to a term that recognized a fallacious gender binary and explicitly excluded enbies.

My response was, ‘come on, I’ve been using bi since I was 14, don’t make me change my behavior to account for new knowledge. Ugh.’ Even now that I don’t call myself binary, I know there is a debate happening somewhere on the internet about whether or not ‘bisexual’ is an enbyphobic term. And frankly, that discussion is completely uninteresting to me. No offense to anyone who feels strongly about it, I understand why it’s a point of contention, but I just have no desire to seek out a discussion on the topic.

My friend insisted that I was using incorrect language. That it’s simply false to call myself bisexual if I am attracted to more than two genders. But, I don’t really buy that. The term has never failed to communicate what I mean when I use it.

Sure, if the day ever comes when a cute enby wants to hit on me but then learns that I’m bisexual and decides not to do so, I’ll consider using a different term. But for now, I assume in the absence of evidence to the contrary that people who know I am attracted to men and women will understand that I am attracted to non-binary people too.

If the term is descriptively accurate, if people know what I mean when I say it, is it reasonable to state that I am using language incorrectly? Obviously, I don’t think it is.

My friend was not satisfied with this: the fact is that the content of the word I use does not square with reality. So, why would I knowingly use a term that made enbies feel unseen? Non-existent? Made them feel as though they had no allies?

The answer was, and still is, that I don’t put social duty above personal preference. Sorry. I would love to contribute to the end of enbyphobia, but I don’t put my obligations towards the world above my sense of self. The world is huge, and abstract, and wild: my infinitesimal effect on the state of our modern understanding of gender is proportionally smaller than the effect my self-imposed labels have on my mental health. And I’m barely a human being where self-cognition is concerned; if I find a label that nails down a part of my personality and it works for me, I can’t afford to let it go.

This was where our conversation arrived at an impasse. That answer was simply unacceptable to her. I understood that, but I decided to propose a hypothetical.

Consider a heterosexual man who exclusively and repeatedly falls in love with or is attracted to women. One day, he meets and falls head over heels for a man. Bolt from the blue. He and the guy have sex and enter a relationship, only for the spark to fade after a time, and the two go their separate ways. The man then goes back to exclusively being attracted to women and never has a romantic or sexual feeling about a guy ever again. It’s not unheard of, it happens. So, I asked, does that guy have to start calling himself queer?

Her answer was immediate: yes! Of course he does. It is in fact selfish for that man to go around claiming to belong to the power majority. He is making the queer community smaller, weaker by not choosing to join it.

Well, what if he’s an ally? Every day of his life before and after his relationship with a man, he makes a conscious and diligent effort to support and advocate for queer people.

It’s not about being supportive, though, she replies. He needs to stand in solidarity with a group he rightly belongs to. He needs to take on the vulnerability and marginalization that comes with being queer.

But that’s begging the question: he’s not queer “yet” because we have not determined whether or not having a single incidental attraction for someone of the same gender ought to make him identify as queer.

But that doesn’t matter, she said. He is queer and he has a responsibility to identify that way.

And then our next round of drinks arrived and the subject was dropped.

I still agree with the argument I was making there. The utility of language, specifically the personal utility of language, is ultimately the determining factor. The man in our hypothetical situation was not interested in men. He was interested in a specific man. If any other man hit on him, it would be unwanted flirting. And no one wants unwanted flirting. Therefore, it doesn’t pay for our guy to refer to himself as anything but straight.

So, to the initial question: does it serve my interests to come out as non-binary in a more official capacity?

Well, arguably.

But what would really serve my interest would be if I lived in a world where I did not have to come out in the first place.

We’ve come around from curtailing our identity to match what’s best for the world, to attempting to curtail the world to match our identity more comfortably. Dare to dream, kiddoes.

Maybe I get a small kick out of the frustration of being misgendered.

After all, it is in my signature. You’re telling me these people want me to work for them, but they won’t bother to check my pronouns? How gauche.

I feel a bit enlightened, dare I say, woke, because I remember to check pronouns when I meet people. Because I know not to assume gender based on looks. I know that not everyone who meets the schema of a binary gender I learned as a baby does in fact match that gender.

You heard it here, folx. I am smarter than a baby.

But does that twitch, that short flash of pleasurably righteous anger, really invalidate my point? That sense of superiority isn’t imagined, not in this regard. I am right. People don’t always match your expectations, and you shouldn’t go around foisting those expectations on others, especially when they are making an effort to counteract your expectations.

If someone finds out that I have been a “they” the entire time we’ve known each other and asks me why I didn’t say anything, I can just say: “I think what you meant was ‘I’m sorry for calling you a woman when you clearly made efforts to communicate that you weren’t one,’ for which I benevolently forgive you.”

I know the people who misgender me aren’t bad people. I assume genders all the time, albeit usually when I have no chance to ask pronouns in incidental meetings. (I’m not gonna ask the lady whose groceries I helped pick up the other day what her pronouns were, but I am inclined to think that my assumption of her gender won’t have any effect on her). The people who seem to wear pronoun blinders simply don’t realize that there has been a development in the way we meet other people. Asking one’s name is no longer enough to get a working profile on them, and they don’t get that yet.

But shit, why is their ignorance my problem?

Why do I, someone who clearly does not have a concrete or even comprehensible sense of gender, have to be the one to explain that gender does not always match sex or expression?

Why don’t I get to question their assumptions? Why is it my job to patiently educate them?

Why don’t I get to question their assumptions?

Why should I have to come out?