Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

The Artist D

I’ll go out on a limb here that you may have heard this week about model Andreja Pejic coming out as transgender. Congratulations to Andreja for doing what makes her happy. I just have to wonder about this coming out deal. Everyone’s always coming out and escaping the closet while some of us never had the privilege or curse of the closet.

Come out, come out, wherever you are! We used to say to each other as children. There was never much of a hiding place for me as a kid. My friends would always find me! The open door policy on my life seems to have followed me from birth. People can deny it and ignore it, but when all is said and done I was always a flaming homosexual with severely feminine qualities. Even now when there is hair on my chest and a Mohawk on my head people still seem peculiarly confused as to what gender I may be. It must be how Andreja has felt. This very feminine boy the media got to gnaw on because he looks so much like a girl actually turned out to be a girl. Well, sort of, I mean, they kind of get it, but are trying to cope as much as it turns their brains inside out with puffs of smoke.

I’ve always been labeled with female pronouns by passersby. Even my confused grandmother while on her death bed would tell my mother what a beautiful girl she had. This really freaked out my mother because grandma wasn’t supposed to know “my little secret,” yet she could just tell. Some secret, huh?

I haven’t had the pleasure of hiding very much about myself. Even now that I am leaning masculine there are people instantly weary when asking if  the ring on my finger means I’m married to a nice girl “or um I mean, who is your partner?”

Living my life born in a glass closet has always left me wondering why people bother coming out. I know why they do and why they feel they have to. They have been living in stealth and it’s killing them. I just wish the perfect wish of all things perfect that everyone was born with the disadvantage of always being out. Life would be like a Twilight Zone episode about how the main character cannot tell a lie. It would be a rocky start for humanity if people couldn’t hide who they really were. At the end of the day when all the blood is washed from the streets people would start to deal with it.

Surely there would be a pinnacle moment where everyone finally said, “Okay, alright y’all, this is getting us nowhere, everyone is different, so let’s go work on better solar power options. . .” Right? They would eventually, surely? Yes? Are humans at least that smart or would it truly be until death do us part as we all kill each other out of sheer label-less insanity?

In one grasp I wish that everyone would just go on being who they are and everyone else would shrug, falling into step. In another grasp (and gasp) I loathe the normality which everyone seeks by coming out of the closet in efforts for acceptance, rights and normalcy. I sit upon this fence. It is a pointy painful fence but I don’t want to be like everyone else just as much as I don’t want to be unlike everyone else.

I guess that makes me just like everyone else.

Tags: closets, coming out, featured, gender, Identity, secrets, sexuality, theartistd

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion