How To Come Out Anywhere

A practical guide for when you've had enough of the closet

I look up at B—, heart pounding in my chest. I can see the snow falling gently outside, through the window just over her shoulder, and she gives me a kind, gentle smile. It’s December 15th, 2020. Almost the end of finals week, and the end of the semester, and a part of me is screaming that it’s about to be the end of my career too.

I’ve known I was trans for, now 141 days. Four and a half months. I’ve been on HRT for just over two and a half of them.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says.

A huge part of me is certain that it will most certainly not be okay. The idea that my peers will actually believe me when I tell them I’m trans seems absolutely ludicrous—especially K—, who I’ve always kindasorta looked up to, who transitioned back in the Bad Old Days.

There’s no way that she, of all people, will actually believe me.

“I’m scared,” I say, instead. B— pulls me into a hug, holding me tight. We stay that way for I-don’t-know how long, and I cling to her, fighting tears. If I cry now, I don’t know how I’ll be able to stop. Eventually, we part, and she holds my head between her hands, my earrings pressing into my jaw beneath them.

“You’ve already done everything you need to do, honey,” B— says. “You just need to hit send.” And she’s right. I’d come out to my boss back in August, in the absurd idea that I’d be able to boymode at work for a year before coming out. It only took a few months of quarantimes-teaching, staring at my boymode face and flat chest, to see that that wasn’t going to work. I’d come out to a few coworkers, who were delighted to be my collaborators in my coming-out, the price of working in a huge department where you’re not necessarily close friends with everyone. I’d come out to Human Resources a month and a half ago, to start the gears turning so that everything would be changed over to my new name.

Today. It’d all be changed today, no matter what I did right now. I nod to B—. She’s right, as always, but that doesn’t make the fear go away.

“Would you do it with me?” I ask, putting my hand on my mouse. Her soft hand settles on mine, and together we click send on the email for my coworkers. Another, slightly different, for the students I advise, because if I don’t tell them, they’ll be mighty surprised to see a gal in lipstick and earrings at their advising meetings in a couple of months. Then, one last post, on Facebook, for everyone else.

I screw my eyes shut and wait.

Within moments, I get a Discord notification from one of my students—we’d abandoned Zoom in early November because we’d all gotten sick of it malfunctioning over and over again, and had been using it for class ever since. I open the DM, trembling, and see—

I FUCKING KNEW IT!
Congratulations, Zoe!

Now my inbox is pinging over and over, as responses to my emails come in. Friends, colleagues, greeting me with joy and warmth I never dared hope for. And then, after a bit, K—’s email arrives. I steady myself before opening it.

Zoe,

It was both an honor and great joy to receive your email and letter this morning. It, of course, brought back a flood of memories, and I’m not ashamed to say, a few teary moments. Your letter to the department and Ferris community is just brilliant, and I deeply appreciate the courage it took to come out to us. Thank you for making our department your professional home. It would be impossible to overstate how remarkable you are and how much we value you as a colleague.

Were I on Discord, I’d reach out to you today, but alas, I’m allergic (no doubt, pathologically :-) to social media of all sorts and do not have an active account. When I transitioned at Ferris fourteen years ago, despite its challenges, inevitable bureaucratic myopias, and whatever prejudices were there at the time—I ultimately found support and acceptance. I hope you will find these in even greater measure here all these years later. Please know I am in your corner as you continue your personal and professional journey.

You are mighty!

With all best wishes,

K—

I spend the next several hours responding to well-wishes and, eventually, flower deliveries through a storm of overwhelmed and happy tears.

The closet sucks

One of the hardest parts about being trans is that, sooner or later, we kindasorta have to come out publicly. Our names and genders are some of the very first things that people learn about us, and to be seen and treated as the people we really are, we have to, at some point, stand up and say “this is who I really am.” It’s different from any other queer coming-out, because with sexuality, it really only matters to whoever your partner is—you get to pick and choose whether or not, and who to, you tell them that you’re queer.

But not being trans. We’re visible in a way that nobody else in the queer community really is.

And when you combine it with the personal, familial, and professional risks we have to run by being out publicly, well… coming out as trans is uniquely scary, and really understandably so. But staying closeted is devastating to a person’s mental, emotional, and physical health, so it usually turns into a situation where you’re trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

This is a guide for navigating those tender moments, and finding ways not just to come out, but to make it really wonderful—and we’re going to take a science-based approach, and I’ll even show you the exact examples I used to tell the people in my life I was trans.

Most importantly of all: a coming-out is an invitation to a deeper and richer relationship with you. It’s very sad that anyone would choose to say no to an invitation like that, but it does happen—if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be here, reading this article, would you? What I’m about to describe is there to help people see what your invitation for what it is… but, like any invitation, people have the right to turn you down.

The Rhetorical Situation

I spend a lot of time around here talking about biology and psychology, but my real area of expertise is rhetoric: the art and science of persuasion. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of how you can put together a coming-out that works for you, it’s a really good idea to sit down and put some tools together, so we can understand what we’re trying to do, and what tools we can use to get the job done.

There’s a whole lot of complexity in rhetorical studies, but we’re going to stick to one of the really foundational ideas: the Rhetorical Situation. In a nutshell, a rhetorical situation is the whole, near-infinite combination of people, places, things, and contexts that create argumentation. Now, in this case, I don’t want you to think of argumentation, or an argument, as two people shouting at each other. Instead, an argument is something one person says or writes that gets another person to do something.

Okay. That means that any rhetorical situation can be broken down into five parts that we need to keep track of:

1. The reason we feel like we need to do something. This is usually called an exigence or a purpose—a “perceived imperfection marked with urgency.”

   1. Basically, an exigence is the reason we’re trying to change the world with words. It’s important to remember that exigences are always subjective, not objective, and what one person sees as an exigence, other people might not.

2. The topic that the writer wants to make an argument about.

   1. The difference between the exigence and the topic is simple when you think about it: the topic is the what, while the exigence is the why.

3. The speaker, and their known history to everyone else involved.

   1. Even when we’re writing, we’re going to use “the speaker” here. The technical term is “rhetor,” but throwing around “rhetor,” “rhetoric,” “rhetorical situation,” all very very similar words with very very different meanings, can get a little confusing. Let’s keep it simple.

4. The audience, and their known history to the speaker. This could be one person or a whole lot of people.

5. The physical reality that the speaker and audience share—or, more accurately, their perception of it. We call this the context.

   1. It’s super super important to remember that this perception is also subjective, and often the writer’s and the audience’s perceptions don’t match. That can be a huge problem!

The technical term for these five are the constituents of the rhetorical situation, but that’s not super important for what we’re doing today. Some people also throw genre in there—the type, or approach, that the writer uses, but since it’s not universally agreed-on whether the genre is its own part of the rhetorical situation or just part of the topic, I’m going to just mention it and move forward.

Anyway, what all that means is that this is how arguments work, on a scientific level: a writer perceives a topic and sees an exigence that they want to change with an argument. They think about the context that they share with their audience, and that context reduces the number of arguments that they could make that would persuade the audience to act in the way that the writer wants. From those reduced options, the writer picks one argument which they think is most likely to work, and goes for it. If the argument is successful, the audience acts in some way that matches what the writer wants. This is a pretty good diagram from a pretty good textbook chapter on how all that stuff interacts:

Diagram Copyright © 2016 by Justin Jory, used under CC-NC 4.0.

Okay, nerd, but I didn’t sign up for English 101

Yeah, I know, but this stuff is really important because I see a lot of coming-out letters and statements that really, really whiff, and for preventable reasons. Knowing the rhetorical situation and using it to look at what’s going on before you make your argument can help defuse a bad reaction before it happens.

Take this really common example, for instance: a trans person is coming out to their evangelical, conservative parent. They expect a really bad reaction, for obvious reasons. So, when they write that parent a letter, they lead with a description of the pain they feel, the struggle they’ve endured, and that they’re transitioning as a last resort, hoping to show that parent that this isn’t a decision they’ve come to flippantly… but what the parent sees in their child in pain, and that pain connected directly to a trans identity. The argument the trans person tried to make is “this is serious,” but what their parent gets is “being trans is hurting my child.” So… the parent responds in a predictable way: they tell their kid to go see a therapist to make this all go away, and things devolve pretty predictably from there.

That happens because the writer’s perception of the context didn’t match the audience’s. Our trans writer saw one exigence: a parent who’s likely to resist their identity, while the audience they needed to persuade saw something very different: a child in pain from a single, identifiable source.

I mean, set aside the conservative Christian part for a minute. What’s any halfway-decent parent going to do when they see their kid in pain?

That’s why we need to look at the rhetorical situation, because when we make our arguments, we need to think about our audience’s perception, not just ours. That is how we persuade them to act the way we want them to.

And that’s what rhetoric is all about.

So, what’s the plan?

What we need to do is to try and actually put ourselves in our audience’s shoes, and that means understanding what they see the rhetorical situation to be—and that means we need to think about what they think the topic, exigence, and context are. An argument doesn’t succeed when it makes some sort of objectively-good case (which, spoiler alert, there’s no such thing as) for what we, as the writer, think all of this is. An argument succeeds when we, the writer, make a persuasive case for the problem that the audience sees.

[Letter has been removed]

First of all, the letter starts by establishing a shared problem, one that both my audience and I will agree is a problem: because I’m trans, they haven’t properly met me. The letter sets itself as a reintroduction, to solve that problem. That framing makes a slightly different problem, though—my coworkers had all known me for years, so there has to be a reason for this.

I got there by explaining a few snippets of what it was like to live with dysphoria and then—and this is the crucial part—I explained that those problems had been solved by my private transition. It’s hard to sidestep the whole “being trans is pain” narrative that cis people like to obsess over, so instead of even trying, I framed it as a problem that had been, and was continuing to be, solved by my transition.

So, the audience was able to move back to the initial problem I laid out for them: that it was time for a reintroduction. This gave my audience something crucial: an action item I wanted them to do. That exigence thing we talked about earlier, if that makes sense—the purpose for the argument. People understand how arguments work, and so when they see one, they know what the correct social response should be, and are primed to make it, especially when that response is simple.

And that framing worked really well. Here are a sampling of actual replies I got from my colleagues:

Zoe,
Welcome and nice to meet you (again). 

Nice to meet you Zoe!

Zoe,
It's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you so much for sharing this Letter with me; I feel honored to have received it.

It's wonderful to "meet" you, Zoe.

Dear Zoe, amiga mía,
Very nice to meet you! Thanks so much for sharing this wonderful news with us. I am honored to work with such an awesome woman!
I can’t wait to have a conversation with you, my friend! Let zoom sometime over the winter break.

Zoe,
It's a pleasure to re-meet you.

Hi Zoe,
Thank you so much for introducing yourself. I truly feel honored to meet you.
I’m so happy for you.

Zoe Ann, 
That is a beautiful letter, and it's just beautiful to see that you have figured it all out. I'm very impressed and I'm honored to know the real you.

I could go on, but the point is that the vast majority of my responses at work took up the exigence I presented them and responded as a reintroduction. It wasn’t just my coworkers either—my students responded in kind so universally that when one wanted to write a story for the student newspaper about my coming out, she used the same framing I’d used.

Keeping it simple

I came out the same way, with variations, in a bunch of other places. For example, here’s the first page of my coming-out announcement from Facebook:

[Example deleted]

And there, just like at work, people introduced themselves to me over and over and over again, just like I’d hoped. That one, simple little action gave pretty much everybody the “oh, here’s how I’m supposed to react” that they needed and that I was hoping would keep things cheerful and upbeat. I wanted people to celebrate with me, but for this to not be that big of a deal, and people really took it that way.

So, all of this complicated stuff boils down to a pretty simple series of actions:

1. Find a simple exigence—the easier the better—that you and your audience will agree on.

   1. Think carefully about their perspective here!

2. Meet their expectations.

3. Keep it positive! Even if your transition has been hard, framing your coming out as a good thing will keep your audience from jumping into problem-solving mode.

   1. When your audience starts trying to solve problems, they suddenly become writers/rhetors too, and that turns a simple rhetorical situation into a very chaotic one.

4. Give them a simple action they can take.

   1. People will fish around for something to do if you don’t give them something. Again, we want to keep things simple.

Reintroductions are a simple and effective way to do this, but you can do anything that fits you, from throwing a party to asking for recommendations for better hand lotion.

Remember: people tend to match your energy, no matter what it is, or what it’s about. So, give people a reason to smile, and coming out can be one of the best days of your transition.