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 who I am and more to comprehend it fully. Along the way I'd had help from some amazing people, two women in particular who helped me to survive the roughest two years but come that final year of high school I was on my own.
I wasn't popular in school, though I was respected by a lot of the students and all of the teachers. An odd thing to be able to say but it's accurate. The school you see was the only one in Ireland to have an indoor climbing wall and I was by far the best rock climber in the school, in fact I was at the time one of the best climbers in Ireland full stop. It still amazes me how much respect athletic achievement can garner.
What no one knew was that my training six days a week was more about keeping my body undernourished than being the best. That I was trying to fight off the last stages of male puberty by starving myself. I was nine stone and nearly six foot tall but I told myself that it was better than bulking out and any sense of even androgynous form being completely lost to me. No one knew the truth but one person eventually came to figured it out, Amanda.
I can't say she was my best friend in school, In truth there was no one I would have called my best friend and hadn't been for years. But she was someone I trusted enough to tell a lot of things in confidence to. One of those things was that I was transexual and lesbian. I trusted her enough for her to be the first person I told as an adult and I was right to she never breathed a word of it to anyone else. But what I didn't know was that when I told her I was overheard by someone else who decided it would be used against me though that didn't happen for quite a while.
Anyway I sat my exams and just about passed. Said "Goodbye." to school and prepared to live my life on my own terms. Starting with the graduation ball. Amanda and I had discussed it and I had decided to go to it as the real me. To use it as a golden opportunity to step out and show the world I wasn't scared. We had planned it well, I used the money I had saved to buy my first dress and a great pair of shoes. She got advice on how to make me up so everything would look right.
Shortly before school ended I'd had to empty my locker. I never really bothered to use it to be honest so it was an easy enough job to do. I rifled through the class notes and the novels I tended to read at breaks and had forgotten to bring home and found various notes shoved in there by people I knew over the year. A lot of them were good luck wishes for various competitions or for exams. But one was chilling. It said that they knew what I was and they'd teach me for being such a freak.
I hadn't told anyone. I wasn't easily scared back then. Back then when I caught a 4th year bullying a 1st year by hanging him over a toilet and flushing it on to his hair I fixed it by doing precisely the same to the 4th year. I didn't like bullies. So I'd ignored it.
Word got out as it was always bound to of what I was planning. People who had seemingly liked me started to shun me, ignore me in the street. But I still intended to do what Amanda and I had planned. That was until the morning I found a letter with my name printed on the envelope waiting for me. It quite simple said that if I went I would be knifed. Something inside me broke. It took years for it to heal. I didn't go.
I spent that night cutting my first dress into one inch squares with a scissors. That was the second time I came out to someone and it's outcome.
Ultimately the result was that I dove back into the closet for safety. I played nicely and pretended to be a good boy for a long time. I had girlfriends all of whom felt I was the perfect boyfriend but also felt that something was wrong with their boyfriend. Only one put her finger on it and left because she got tired of being in a "lesbian relationship with a man.". But in truth I did my best to forget the truth about myself. I never came even close and finally it all caught up to me.
Five years ago a day dawned that changed everything for me. My health which has never been good was seriously failing me and in a deep, dark pit of depression that part of me that broke all those years before finally made itself truly known. I woke up and started to cry. I cried the entire day. I cried for the little girl I had never been. I cried for the young woman I could never now be. I cried for the babies fate had robbed me of the chance to bear and for a thousand more reasons I cried.
After the first few hours my heart started to feel like it was made of shattered glass and I felt I couldn't go on any longer. I started to write letters. Lots of letters. One to each of the people I loved most, saying goodbye. I finally finished them late in the evening and took a huge dose of painkillers helped down by some aqua vitae. I lay myself down for the last time and closed my eyes.
The next morning I opened them up to the worst hangover I have ever had the misfortune to experience and to a world that had been changed for me in some way. I rang my little sister and told her I needed to talk to her. Half an hour later I was in her house.
"Pyx I think I need help, I'm transexual and I don't know what to do. Please help me?"
She hugged me, told me she loved me and proceeded to help me. In the following weeks I wrote a short autobiography and gave it to the people who mattered to read so they would understand that I wasn't jumping into anything but that I was taking the next step in what had already been a very long road.
That road has ended with me finally being me. A tall gothy, punkish, geeky woman who wears whatever she damn well likes and does whatever she damn well wants too. I've gained so much but I lost things too.
I gained a body I love but I lost so many people I called friends.
I gained a new way of living but lost the ability to ever have children.
But I also gained an understanding that I think sometimes is missed by LGBT folk. There is for most of us a moment that we each point to as the moment we came out of the closet and danced into the light. That moment in many ways helps us to find our way to who we should have always proudly been. But in truth there is no real singular moment of coming out. It's a process like so much in life which is on going.
In the beginning there are the little signs that lead people to that clichd phrase "I kind of always knew". Then there are those faltering steps as we grow when we try to tell people what we feel often with semi-disastrous results. Eventually there comes that moment which we all point to as "The Moment" when we took our lives in our own hands and chose to stop being ashamed.
But there will always be people who we have to choose how much to tell them. There will always be that one situation, that one location, that one person who we can't be out with for what ever reason. Or those people who can know a little of the truth but not the whole truth. I think that someday we all hope deep down that we will never again have to hide anything about ourselves again, that we can be truly 100% out and proud.
It may never be achieved but I sometimes think perhaps the pride we find in our own personal courage as we reveal our true selves to each new worthy person is ample reward from a universe that often seems to care so little for our particular part of the human family.