Читать книгу The Savvy Ally - Jeannie Gainsburg - Страница 39

Okay, I’m actually kidding about it being fun, but some folks definitely go through the process of coming out twice or even more times than that. I know several straight, transgender men who came out first as cisgender lesbians. Most of them didn’t even know the word transgender at their first coming out, so they didn’t have that identity word to latch on to. (Remember our earlier discussion about the importance of all of those identity words?) So as they began looking out into the world during the identity comparison stage, they grabbed hold of the term lesbian. They knew they were attracted to girls/women, and lesbian fit a lot better than straight. Many of these men got all the way into the identity pride stage before they heard the term transgender, met some transgender people, and eventually realized that the reason they felt so different wasn’t their sexual orientation but instead their gender. Then they had to backtrack and come out again with their new identity as straight transgender men. My friend Sean, a bisexual trans man, who traveled a long, winding road of self-discovery around both his sexual orientation and gender, jokes about how at one point or another in his life, he was every single letter of the LGBTQ initialism.