You Won't Be Hearing About My Surgery

This past Wednesday was National Coming Out Day, an annual event that’s always sure to resurface discourse on the concept of “coming out”. I have no doubt that, to many LGBTQIA+ people, this day is an important opportunity to share their journey into queerness with the world. It is ultimately good that we have the language, and the opportunity, to stake our claim to certain marginalized identities.

At the same time, many have critiqued the concept of coming out, or more accurately, what the concept of “coming out” means about our broader society. The fact that there is an assumed norm that we must announce our deviance from is, itself, part of the whole problem with society. I am in love with our community’s reframing of the issue, from Maybe Burke’s opinion that “closets are built around us, not by us” to humorous flyers that share information about cisgender people in the same condescending tone with which trans people are often talked about.