Complicating The Coming Out Narrative: Becoming Myself

Adolescence: The first time that I legitimately encountered homosexuality was in the eighth grade when my best friend came out to me as bisexual. Up until that point, the idea of non-heterosexual sexuality had been too distant to comprehend, but when my friend came out to me, it became a concept I could understand personally. The label instantly resided with me. I didn’t need time to consider, I came out to her as bisexual less than a week later, making use of the first sexual label I encountered. In “Complicating the Coming Out Narrative: Becoming Oneself in a Heterosexist and Cissexist World”, the authors discuss the different experiences that LGBT youth have in order to complicate the traditional coming out narrative (Klein et al. 298). She writes, “Developing relationships with people with shared identities was a complex process for youth, both facilitating and complicating their understandings of their gender and sexuality (Klein et al. 310-311).” This quote explains that finding people with a shared identity helps LGBT youth better understand their own identity and feel safe to explore it (Klein et al. 310-311). Since I lived in a small, conservative town at …show more content…
I often found masculine looking and dressing women, and even women that were indiscernible from men. Seeing this allowed me to start presenting in a more masculine way because I felt that it was normalized within the lesbian community. To reflect this, I soon cut my hair and started expressing my dislike for feminine clothing such as skirts, dresses, and heels. Judith Halberstam addresses this line between identifying as a transgender man or a butch lesbian in her journal article “Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Boarder Wars and the Masculine Continuum”. She discusses experiences that are quite similar to mine when discussing the experiences other trans men had with the lesbian