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I have feelings about Coming Out Day, as someone who was read as a bisexual woman before revealing my True Form.
(1) The day before I came out as enby I was getting mean Tweets telling me I should stop mentioning queer issues since I "didn't belong to the community." I was out.
(1) The day before I came out as enby I was getting mean Tweets telling me I should stop mentioning queer issues since I "didn't belong to the community." I was out.
(2) You could argue that this was because I "passed as straight." But I still do. I wear clothes from the guys' section, I bind, I'm on a bit of T, but I have an ass and I'm normally seen next to a cis man and a small child. People just assume I'm a cis woman who's weird-looking.
(3) Yet now, I don't tend to have my credentials checked by queer people quite so much. I got a lot of welcoming messages -- and I loved them! Everyone should welcome me! -- on the second coming-out, and almost none at all on the first.
(4) I grant you: I, myself, am more comfortable with the label that fits better. When I mentioned being bi before, it was uncomfortably, awkwardly, with the sense that this wasn't all the way true but as close as I could get. I'm now in my all-rainbows-all-pride-everything era.
(5) But the sense of having to constantly come out, over and over, constantly being assumed to be a faker or a cheater or a tourist, constantly assumed to be one kind of coward or another... that was all worse as a "bi woman." People genuinely treat those girls like shit.
(6) So if somebody comes out as a kind of queer you think is "not queer enough," if your first impulse is to ask for their resume, if you want to shrug off someone's disclosure as small: Be nice anyway. It may be a big deal to them, and it may sometimes be part of a larger story.
This all comes with the caveat that people aggressively used the wrong pronouns and openly accused me of transitioning for Twitter clout and still casually misgender me when they're irritated with me. It's not like either state of being is easy. But I do notice the differences.
