by Harper Gallagher

Created on: July 22, 2008   Last Updated: October 31, 2008

Coming out for many lesbian, gay, bisexual or transexual people is a significant if not the defining moment of their lives. But for some of us that word "moment" belies the fact that coming out can be a long drawn out gradual process. It certainly was and is for me. I came out three times in my life. The first was just funny, the second one of my greatest heartbreaks and the last has become my enduring and always on going victory.

First off I must point out that I am both a transexual and a lesbian. The Goddesses choosing to gift me with not just one way to cause my family heart attacks but with two. So it was a real shock that aged five I realized I wasn't like the other girls.

I was sitting in my favorite chair in our living room watching television. In fact I was watching a cartoon which to this day is still one of my top ten cartoon shows, Flash Gordon. Flash had rescued Dale Arden from Ming the Merciless yet again when it suddenly hit me that everyone kept calling me a boy like Flash and that they were wrong. Very wrong. I mean come on I was so obviously a girl and going to grow up to be a girl just like Dale. I waited until the credits were over, I loved the theme music to the show just as much as the show itself and walked into the kitchen where my mother was cooking dinner.

"Mummy?"

"What?"

"When I grow up can I be like Dale?"

"What?!" She actually dropped a plate.

"When I grow up can I be like Dale? But can I go out with someone like Princess Aura and not Flash? I don't like boys very much."

So all of five years old I had outted myself to my mother with no clue as to the importance of what I had just done. It was probably not the brightest idea I ever had it must be said. After some prodding she found out that I thought everyone was wrong when they called me a boy. That resulted in my being told I was being silly and a quickly dispensed exile to my room for the rest of the day. My mother swears blind she doesn't remember any of this.

Years passed, fifteen years in fact and I was in my final year of high school. I had realized what I was fully by then and truly resented the rest of the world for being normal. School of course had been torture of the most excruciating kind. Not only did I get to struggle with course work and all the usual social mistakes but I also had to watch the other little girls grow up, blossom and become women. All the while I had mutated into something else, something I loathed.

It had taken all of those years to realize the truth of

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