I was 20 years old before I told anyone else in my life that I had gender dysphoria. Or, as I said back then, “all these gender feelings.”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell anyone. Throughout many different seasons of my childhood and teen years, I’d tried to write letters and speeches to tell my parents and friends what I’d been experiencing. From what I’d absorbed in media, though, “coming out” was a dramatic proclamation. My understanding was that it meant you were confidently displaying your “true self” to the world—being “brave,” letting your flag fly, making a grand statement that said, “I’m here, this is me, and you’ve gotta deal with it.” To be sure, many people do not think about coming out this way—and in the years since that time, I’ve been moved by countless examples of coming out that occurred in gentler, more intimate ways. But that was what I had internalized then.
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