Dyke with a Trans Man
When I came to Bates in 1990, I had a lot of questions about being an out dyke on campus. Would I run into trouble with superiors? I tried to find other dykes on the faculty or staff, but people I asked gave me a blank look, whispered the name of a few suspects, or mumbled something, embarrassed by resorting to stereotypes, about trying the athletic department. I also wondered about coming out in my classes. Would my students feel put on the spot by what they might imagine to be my politics or prejudice? Of course, queerness has no more potential bias than heterosexuality. But would students get that? What strategies might work best: coming out on the first day of class to get it over with? Slipping something about “my girlfriend” in some relevant anecdote a week later? Trying to make it a “teachable moment”?
As it turned out, while I did have teaching issues to consider, I could have skipped most of the strategizing about how and when. It didn’t take long for students and faculty to hear about “that lesbian in the art department.” In fact, I heard ten years later that a faculty member I’d met at a conference that June had gone around announcing before I’d even moved to Maine that the art department had hired a lesbian. How scandalous. Oh well, so much for self-determination.
None of that, however, changed what I thought would be the end result: me as an out dyke on campus. I arrived with the intention to be out right away; I just thought I’d have more ability to plan how it happened. Over time, I gave up that expectation, and I got very comfortable being out all over the place.
In fact, I didn’t realize how comfortable I had become until I had to struggle with coming out about something else, something that could cause me to lose that public dyke identity. Over a year ago I started dating a trans man. Suddenly I had a new set of issues: what happens if someone thinks I’m straight? If we are affectionate in public or I mention having a boyfriend, I certainly look straight, at least to people who don’t have bisexuality or trans possibilities at the forefront of their minds. Maybe the fear of looking straight seems prejudiced, but it’s not how I see myself (or as bisexual either—but that question of categories is another story). Plus, I simply miss that look of shared recognition out in the world that comes from being visibly queer. I could be thinking, “Hey, we’re queer, you are, too” but those three dykes coming our way could be clueless. And I hate to feed normative values that get deployed to oppress or exclude people. For example, one of my nieces has been bugging me for years about why I don’t have a boyfriend or husband. I just didn’t want to tell her I had one, thus enabling her, and her parents, to keep avoiding issues they’d managed somehow to avoid during all the years when I brought a woman to family events.
What to do? If I try to amp up my queer credentials by telling people that my boyfriend is a transsexual, I’ve outed him. Not that he’s closeted, but when I tell people, I’ve taken away his choices about where, when, and to whom to come out. I made that mistake early on, when I thought I was simply telling friends about a few hot dates, not about someone they’d be meeting after the few dates turned into something more. As a result, I took away some of his control over how he wanted to present himself to those people when he met them, and I’d also subjected him to risks that no one can ever predict exactly: who tells whom else, who knows what, when information might slip beyond one’s circle of queer/trans-friendly allies—or when the people you think are trans-friendly might really not be. In other words, I did to him what had been done to me when I first got here. Even if you plan to be out, and even if the feeling of control over the information may always involve a bit of fantasy, seeing that control taken away rarely feels good.
Coming out always involves issues of safety, risk, and politics. Now before I out myself about the current particulars of my queer life, we discuss it beforehand. This essay is an example: we both thought that issues about coming out, identity, and visibility raised by a dyke with a trans man were important to share here. In other contexts, there might be other decisions, and I still have a lot more to think about. They say coming out is an ongoing process. In my experience, it is.~ Faculty
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