The idea of coming out stories is so multifaceted for so many of us. Which ones do I even count? How many times did I have to come out to myself, to friends tentatively while I didn’t know even half the story of my identities?
Telling friends I was “bi or something” when I was a baby dyke in the ’90s wearing boy-scout uniforms to school with doc martens and had a scant few and loyal friends in a stiflingly Catholic town. But high school was 15 years ago, and sometimes it’s easier to just let it fade out.
“I fought so hard to cling to a cis illusion”
Another coming out story is when I fought so hard to cling to a cis illusion at my all ‘women’s’ college. I knew I needed a gender-neutral name and changed it as soon as school started. But then insisted to anyone who asked that I used “she” pronouns.
Maybe I was scared, or just felt like I was failing at being a girl, or just mad that supportive people were seeing the writing on the wall before I could face it. But I finally lost it on my 21st birthday when I watched Ma Vie En Rose for the 11th time and cried and cried because I knew this was going to be very hard and it was also very true.
“I remember putting this rarefied thing on and feeling new and free”
I knew then that I was trans. My friend gave me the old binder he had worn when he lived in India, it was stained through with all the colours from Holi. Back then you could only get binders from maybe 1 or 2 places at all, and they were expensive. I remember putting this rarefied thing on and feeling new and free.
After that, there were so many careful and maybe less thought out conversations with my (amazing) parents, friends, a letter to my grandparents when they visited New York. The morning after I had given them my letter telling them I’m trans, my grampa comes up to me and put his great big hands on my shoulders and told me “that’s just fine, we love you.” I guess those are some of my coming out stories.
After that there are so many more, they are sort of daily with my fey gender expression and queer sexuality and being married to a queer cis femme woman who so often gets pitying looks from people who read us as a gay boy “tricking” some poor oblivious girl.
No, darling, you just don’t see us at all, it’s fine, try again. There are those coming out to aggressive drunk co-workers at holiday parties who insist they know everything about us because we don’t make sense to them. But those are the tiresome and really unimportant ones, the casual microaggressions that I can take on because someone should and I have every reason to.
“It’s just going to get even more confusing for the binary obsessed strangers from here on and I am here for it”
Now we are starting a family, hopefully having a baby in 7 more months. It’s just going to get even more confusing for the binary obsessed strangers from here on and I am here for it.
My name is Ketch Wehr, I am a genderqueer transfeminist queer artist. I make things all day and I’m trying all the time. My life is full of love.
Ketch Wehr
Edited by Ash O'Keeffe
LGBTQ+ Artist