When I realized that I was transgender at 14 years old, I never came out to anyone. Partly because I didn’t know I had to, and partly because my transness belonged to me. Why did I have to share this aspect of myself with people in a way that granted them the power to accept or reject me?
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I wasn’t “deceiving” people as some transphobes would say, nor was I hiding a part of who I am out of shame. What I was doing was practicing the art of inviting in, the new alternative to coming out.
Like most queer folk, I knew there was something different about me from a very young age. Not only was I aware that I liked boys by age five, I always knew that I didn’t quite feel like one either.
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I didn’t discover the language for the discomfort I felt in my body until my freshman year of high school. During a bus ride on my way home, a friend of mine told me about a trans girl who went to a school about five minutes away from mine. I had never heard the term “trans” before, so I hopped onto the web later that day to read all about it. I didn’t have to scroll for very long before it all clicked — I am transgender.
I never told any of my friends that I was trans. I simply posted photos of myself with my hair and make-up done and went about my business. It wasn’t long until people started using she/her pronouns when referring to me, which of course was profoundly validating. By the end of the school year, everyone, including my teachers, knew that I was trans. When people asked if I was trans, I would answer truthfully, but I never went out of my way to tell anyone.
The only time I ever came out was to my family the year of my 18th birthday. When I told each of them individually that I was trans, they all responded with their own variation of, “Yeah, duh!”
I was relieved to discover that they didn’t care and loved me regardless, especially considering not everyone is so lucky. But I was also humiliated. I had spent the days leading up to my coming out riddled with anxiety, afraid of my family’s response, only for them to give me a blank stare and a hug to say, “Thanks for stating the obvious.”
When I thought about this experience recently, it only convinced me that the entire concept of coming out was silly and perhaps even unnecessary. My recent chats with members of the alphabet gang only reinforced my feelings.
Joshua, my 21-year-old friend, and I have a few things in common: We both come from loving families who don’t care about our gender identity or sexual orientation, and we both felt annoyed by our coming out experiences.
“I came out as gay to my aunt when I was 19, and she seemed underwhelmed by what I told her because I had made it seem like it was really important,” Joshua said. “She told me that the whole family knew, and that they’d even talked about what they would say if I ever decided to come out. I felt so stupid. I decided to spare myself further humiliation by not telling the rest of my family. I’ll ‘come out’ to the rest of them when I bring a boyfriend home for Christmas some day.”
Annoyed as we were, we both recognize how fortunate we are because our experience isn’t every queer kid’s experience. In fact, a Lesley University study on The Cost Of Coming Out stated that 68% of queer teens experience family rejection after coming out, with 1 in 4 being forced to leave the house. So if coming out either leads to ostracization or kind indifference, what’s the point?
The origins of coming out were fairly innocuous. Originally, coming out referred to the process of gay people coming out to other gay people in the late 19th century, a time when queer people were less visible and less proud. Over the years, coming out blossomed to become a “rite of passage” that’s meant to end self-hatred and promote a better quality of life.
While I want nothing more than for queer people to thrive, we’ve already established that coming out doesn’t always help achieve that. Additionally, spotting or meeting another queer person in 2024 is relatively easy as newer generations tend to have larger populations of queer folk.
A report titled, A Political and Cultural Glimpse into America’s Future found that the population of queer-identifying adults in Gen Z stands at 28%. This is an impressive number compared to the 7% of Baby Boomers and 16% of Millennials who identify as queer.
If there are more out-and-proud queer folk today and queerness is becoming more and more accepted, what is the point of coming out?
When asked whether coming out was still a necessary concept, Kate Steinle Chief Clinical Officer for FOLX, a nationwide LGBTQ+ healthcare provider, cited different generational percentages, saying, “Coming out can definitely be an outdated concept in a lot of ways since the idea of ‘the closet’, or assumed heteronormative identity is not as common as it was decades ago. The percentage of people who identify as LGBTQ+ has been steadily increasing over generations from approximately 2.5% in the Baby Boomer generation to over 22% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ+.”
Steinle goes on to say, “This substantial increase in the [queer] percentage of the population has impacted visibility and acceptance of individuals who identify as part of the community, which in turn makes ‘coming out’ less of a necessity in certain circles since there are fewer assumptions made that would require coming out.”
Coming out being less of a necessity — and even dangerous in some cases — doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t share our queerness with the world, only that it may be time to reconsider how we go about doing it.
“Inviting in” is a relatively new concept coined by Australian scholar and therapist Sekneh Hammoud-Beckett. In her article, Azima ila Hayati-An invitation into my life: Narrative Conversations about Sexual Identity, she offers an alternative to coming out which she initially referred to as “coming in” before changing it to “inviting in.”
“Inviting in” was meant to refer to the process of consciously choosing who one wanted to invite into “one’s club of life.”
When asked why inviting in is a better concept than coming out, Dr. Jess Clodfelter a licensed clinical mental health counselor, said, “The idea of coming out is one that feels performative and other-centered, whereas the idea of inviting in is very person-centered. The idea of inviting in helps shift the power dynamic so that the person who wants to talk about their identity is in control again.”
Dr. Clodfelter goes on to say, “Coming out feels a lot like a confession to other people, like we have done something wrong. When the individual has the power back, they are able to invite people in their world and choose when to bring them into this more vulnerable space. The concept of inviting allows us to choose who gets to come into the space in our life that is special.”
Despite the term’s newness, it is already used by many and has yielded far better results.
“Reframing coming out as inviting in is the best thing I’ve done,” Bri, a 25-year-old queer person told me. “It made me realize how much power I was giving to the person when I really should’ve been focused on my experience and comfort. I don’t come out anymore. Instead, I invite people I believe are safe into my life.”
Inviting in doesn’t replace the need to share our queerness with other people, nor does it diminish the importance of doing so. It simply offers a different way in which we can share our queerness, a way that also happens to be up-to-date with today’s culture.
To this day, I don’t come out to people, including love interests. This isn’t to say that I don’t tell men that I’m trans. I do. But I do it because I want to and on my own timeline. I do it in a way that prioritizes my safety and ensures that I share this intimate, fabulous part of my identity with those who are worthy of it because my queerness is sacred.
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