Closets and The Leaving Thereof

Or, why its never a good idea to harm yourself for the benefit of those who hate you.

Do
Do my work
Do my dirty work, scapegoat

Do
Do my deeds
For you’re the one who’s shamed

-Sad But True - Metallica

Someone once asked, if being out of the closet is a recipe for harassment from conservatives, why not just stay closeted for your own peace of mind, and I wrote a long Quora answer about it. I can’t be arsed to wade through Quora’s sub-anemic search functionality for that answer but writing it, back in the day, helped me to articulate some stuff about closeted-ness and visibility. I’ve since had more time to think and articulate more ideas on the subject, so I’m stealing the basic premise (from memory) and expounding on the topic some more. Anyway, times have changed. There’s new veins of context to be mined.

The question, of course, comes with a naïve assumption that while there’s an obvious cost to coming out, staying closeted comes at no cost, thus surely staying closeted is the best option. So let’s explode that assumption first. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that queer identities and lives don’t always mesh comfortably with mainstream western sensibilities.

Being in the closet is absolutely costly. Firstly, the constant nagging discomfort of forced inauthenticity is not to be discounted. This ranges from mild to debilitating, and even when it’s mild, the effect is cumulative and corrosive. And when one is closeted, the cost is fully borne internally, at least at first. Eventually though (and sometimes not so eventually), that corrosive attempt at conformity breaks down the human being forced to bear it, and then not only are they in pain, but they’re rendered unable to participate in the life of their families and their communities. So in this scenario, the benefit accrues entirely to the bigots who cannot abide queerness (as they don’t have to confront it in the public sphere), and the cost accrues entirely to the silently suffering LGBTQ+ person and their family, friends, and co-workers.

Coming out of the closet is costly too, but in a much different way. The cost of this path is the friction between queer identity, queer sexuality, and the base assumptions of cis-het society. Again, these can be little things.

“Are you married?”

“Why yes!”

“Oh, what’s your wife’s name?”

“Er, Husband, actually.”

That one is no big deal, but again, these frictions, these little mismatches between our lives and the assumptions people make about them, add up. There’s also, as alluded to earlier, the cost of existing publicly in a world that contains people who loudly and sometimes violently wish you didn’t exist at all. Well, that cost is borne half by the uncloseted, and half by the bigot who hates them. Those bigots want us to suffer, and they’re kind of lazy about it. They’d much prefer the former scenario, where we torment ourselves and they don’t have to lift a finger. They yearn for a society like that of the past, when the mechanisms of society and the easy threat of violence caused LGBTQ+ people to police their own identities, and suffer silently, and pay the cost entirely. Bigots really don’t like it when they’re reminded that society has to some extent left them behind. They don’t like to see non-white people, LGBTQ+ people, women, and disabled people getting centered in the media. They hate the reminder that their bigotry has gone wildly out of fashion.

They’re mostly getting the point that attacking queer sexuality is a non-starter these days. Even most republicans don’t mind gay marriage. That’s why the culture warriors are going all in on attacking trans people, they need to regain some sense of control over the discourse, they need to hold on to the idea that there’s some marginalized group that they can feel superior to.

So there’s a clearer view of the choice. In the closet, doing the bigot’s work of tormenting yourself for their benefit, or out and proud. Both suck to some degree, but being out of the closet sucks less for you and more for the bigots. And let me just say, I’m not inclined to do their dirty work for them. If they want me to suffer, they’re going to have to put in the effort, and I gotta say, most of them are really bad at it. Like, they’re bullies, but they’re not particularly effective bullies. They’re pretty much incapable of inflicting the kind of pain on me that I could inflict on myself when I was closeted.

There’s another angle to this that has been more on my mind lately given *gestures vaguely* all this. The enemy wants us small, frightened and quiet. Staying closeted works to that end, and aside from everything I wrote above about the personal costs of staying in a box, for a minority, especially a minority as lacking in numbers as transgender people are, this is tactically unsound.

Like the enemy of any good fascist, trans people are at once strong, taking over western culture, “erasing women”, corrupting children; but at the same time small, weak, morally bankrupt, and pathetic. But if we stay hidden, never communicate with our LGBTQ+ brothers, sisters, and siblings, we let the fash win by default; I don’t intend for this matchup to end in a forfeit because we couldn’t field enough players for a proper match.

She scratches a letter
Into a wall
Made of stone
Maybe someday another child
Won't feel as alone as she does

-Why Go, Pearl Jam

Having the numbers be known and counted is valuable, true, but solidarity, communication and mutual aid is even more vital. Hell, just knowing that other people had faced the same struggles, internal and external, was what pushed me out of my own closet. Having seen others put a name to my nameless anxiety and a diagnosis for my undiagnosed pervasive dread, I was able to better contextualize my own experiences and give them a shape I could perceive and tackle. One of the main reasons I write on the internet in front of allies and enemies alike is so that others can see the shape of my own journey, the places of my strengths (and failures) and feel maybe just a bit more at home in a world that’s been shaped to exclude us. If even one trans teenager, young adult, or middle-aged egg gets to hear my experiences and feel less alone and less hurt, then I think I will have successfully paid it forward.

Of course, this doesn’t go unopposed, and the attempt to divide us from our allies is forever ongoing. They seem to have essentially failed at keeping straight allies from supporting gay rights, but they’re trying hard to put a wedge between the LGB and the TQ. Some try to turn intersex people against trans people. Within the trans community, they try to silo transmedicalists and paint social transition as somehow insincere (as if there’s no cost to social transition). The respectability politics goons try to paint non-binary people as “too different” to make common cause with binary trans folks. As that fails, they once again try to polish off tired talking points from the 90s and paint people with xenogenders and neo-pronouns as a bridge too far for respectable trans people. Along the way, you get your Blair Whites and your Brianna Wus and your Buck Angels, individuals who are willing to gatekeep transness and destroy solidarity for personal benefit, but I’m happy to say those are the exceptions, not the rule.

VERY early in my coming out process I was talking with my therapist about my fears of transition and I remember telling her I didn’t at all dislike the idea of being a woman, but that I was deathly afraid of that slow awkward phase of being a work in progress. That part of transition is, let’s face it, a very vulnerable place to be. Change is incremental. Every interaction is an unknown. Every step in the process is terrifying. Every instinct for safety cries out “keep your head down, for fucks sake!” and all you want to do is go hide in a chrysalis and not come out until you’re that glorious butterfly you’ve always secretly dreamed of being.

But reality is a harsh mistress, and transition seldom works that way. In my own case, I’d been on hormones for all of about six weeks when the strain of being closeted at work (and out to my family and friends) just got to me. The constant code-switching was enormously wearying, and even though I could easily hide the meager changes my body had started going through, I couldn’t handle living a lie. I still can’t.

Now more than ever, our visibility is our only path to victory. There are an estimated 1.6 million trans folks in the USA. 1.6 million isolated, scared people who never talk to each other are not capable of any wins. 1.6 million strong, proud, healthy people who support each other emotionally, who have each others backs when the shit goes down, who share their truths so that others know they’re not alone… Those 1.6 million people (and their friends, family, and allies) can scatter the fascists to the four winds.

Think about it.