Published October 1, 2020
Three hundred sixty-six days ago, I uploaded the photo above to my website media library for inclusion in a post commemorating the second anniversary of my coming out as a transgender woman. I had a lot to say. A year later, words seem to be colliding with each other as they search for a way onto the page.
So much has changed since October 1, 2019.
We are still in the early stages of a pandemic that has changed the world and the way we move through it. I haven’t worked anywhere but at home in months. I haven’t worked a 40-hour workweek since April, and it’s not a given that I ever will again. When I go somewhere, which is not often, I act about the way you’d expect someone who’s basically been alone in a studio apartment for half a year to act.
The outside world is at once too loud and too quiet. It moves too fast and too slowly. I feel like what I imagine Tom Hanks must have felt like leaving the island in “Cast Away” after four years alone. He had a volleyball to befriend. I have my Wonder Woman action figure.
Anniversaries are an opportunity to mark time and to measure what has happened from the one year to the next, or from one year across several. In this case, it’s three years since I reintroduced myself to the world and asked people to call me Carly and to use the pronouns she/her/hers when referring to me. It’s more than four years since I resolved to come out.
Fall 2016 seemed like the run-up to a series of milestones that would precede my life-changing and life-affirming announcement. A woman was going to be elected president of the United States, and the strides that we had taken with LGBTQIA+ rights and acceptance under the first Black president were the foundation of the forward movement to follow. The country was increasingly becoming a safe place for someone like me. A few months after Inauguration Day 2017, I was going to come out.
Then came the punch in the gut.
In subsequent days and weeks, I put away the women’s clothes I had been buying for months. It didn’t even feel safe to dress in them in the privacy of my apartment. But I couldn’t live like that forever. I had come too far.
Nearly four years later, I have been out publicly for three years, and increasingly worried that my days of feeling safe as a trans woman are numbered. The Trump administration continues to weaken or threaten existing protections for transgender people, and for many of us, the clear intent to weaken insurance protections across the board represents a double whammy. The impending confirmation of the next addition to the Supreme Court holds much peril for the LGBTQIA+ community.
Much hangs in the balance over the next 33 days, when ballots are due. So much is uncertain, so it’s hard to look very far ahead.
It’s also difficult to look back and frame my coming out with the same enthusiasm that I had one, two and three years ago today. Able for many months to dance between the raindrops of the cruelty and lack of support so many trans people experience, I finally had my soakings. They come in many forms. There are people who state their support performatively, on social media and in social settings, but who take it no further when there is zero opportunity to look good by doing so publicly. Others pretend until they can no longer live that lie, and it’s for the best that they are honest with themselves. I lived a different lie for decades; I know what I’m talking about here.
Some people will respect your new name — perhaps because it’s legally changed, and to ignore that would just be awkward? — but will never use your pronouns. It’s a tell. Still others just disappear out of your life. To others, you are invisible. You do not exist. They may feel emboldened by a federal government intent on making that official. I feel privileged to live in a state and to be under the care of a health system that pledge to preserve protections even if the administration in power next year revokes them.
I hope you can be confident of the same type of assurances of a safety net if protections for your preexisting conditions go away. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on that next year.
♦
Here I am, then, a year older. A year more “out.” Sitting here before sunrise sipping coffee from that very same mug (with lipstick stain long gone), I have managed to squeeze out more than a few words to mark this anniversary. And yet, I don’t know if I have said anything at all.
The story that some people still seem curious about — some kind of “proof” to put their mind at ease and allay their doubts — is not the story that is trying to claw its way toward oxygen and a chance to be told. That’s a much harder narrative, because its pieces are still scattered, although I am slowly reeling them in. It includes such dark, uncomfortable phrases as “I lived the wrong life,” “I fell through the cracks,” and “I was a mistake.” It is colored by words and terms I wouldn’t have known in my youth, such as ADHD and the likelihood of being somewhere on the autism spectrum — and unquestionably neurodivergent in ways that both sustained me and stood in my way.
If I ever tell that story here, I will truly be “out.” It is one that would require the kind of courage that people mistakenly ascribe to me for having finally come out three years ago today as the real me. As hard as that has been lately, it remains the easy part, the one piece of the puzzle that carries joy with it.
To those who still show their support, thank you. It means everything to me.