HAPPY COMING-OUT STORIES! CAN WE DISH?
My Happy Transgender Coming-Out Story
It ends well. But it starts long ago.
When I was a little girl I knew I was a little girl. But that’s like saying I knew the sky is orange. No one knows the sky is orange, because the sky is by definition blue — except in places like Chicago along the lakefront at night, but that’s a different story. So I knew I was a little girl, but I didn’t know that, because I had that thing between my legs.
Does that make your brain hurt? I hope so, because if it does, you may be getting an inkling of how it feels to be a transgender kid.
When I was a teenager, I learned about hermaphrodites[i] — people who are genetically one sex but morphologically look like the other. “Maybe I’m one of those!” I thought. So I knew. All I needed was an authorized avenue to make my identity expressible. After a few days of euphoria, a new layer of obstruction asserted itself.
“Nah!” I told myself. “Those people are very rare. You’re probably just a pervert.”
I thought about having my genetics tested just to make sure. But I couldn’t do that without explaining why I wanted to do that, and I certainly couldn’t do that! Besides, what if the test told me I was a boy? I couldn’t face the…
