Uncomfortable Labels

by Laura Kate Dale

  CHAPTER 4

  Coming Out of the Closet

  Between the ages of 16 and 17, while I wasn’t yet ready to seriously come out as trans, I experimented more than once with gendered presentation, in ways that in hindsight I honestly find a little bit hilarious. I’m going to tell you some stories, and these are all of things that occurred before I came out as trans. They were all just silly joke goofs, definitely not anything serious I wanted to explore. Of course not, that would be ridiculous.

  At age 17, I had a couple of friends I was attending college with, one of whom was at the time female presenting. Over lunch, they suggested I’d look really cute in one of their tops, and we joked back and forth that I should wear some of their clothes and come along to their art classroom for lunch, under the guise that I was a new student at the school. The idea was to see how long I could get away with pretending to be female, and if anyone would notice or say anything. When asked my name, I told them it was Laura, and I spent the rest of that lunch period presenting as female. Such a funny goof. All guys do this at some point, don’t they? All assigned male at birth people at some point pick a female name and pass themselves off as female without any kind of joke reveal at the end.

  A couple of months later, I was preparing to attend an anime convention with some friends, and we were trying to pick out our costumes. We had been watching as a group a show called Ouran High School Host Club, about a group of students in a Japanese school. One of the characters has a parent who is presented as being a trans woman. They’re referred to as being the character’s dad, but are very clearly femme presenting and have a preference for female pronouns. I offered to, once again as a total joke, cosplay as the character’s ‘dad’, a very minor character, but one that would just about make sense if I stayed with the group. I went and purchased a skirt, blouse and cardigan combination that in hindsight made me look like I had dressed out of a far older woman’s wardrobe. I remember getting changed into the outfit in a friend’s bathroom with great difficulty, and being loaned a bra to stuff to complete the outfit. It didn’t suit me at all, but I really loved it as a totally joke outfit that was definitely not to be taken seriously.

  At that same event, during one evening in a hotel, all of the women I had travelled with were doing their makeup ready for an evening out and I once again joked that it would be oh so funny if they did my hair and makeup too, just to see how I looked. They proceeded to spend around an hour making me up; all the while I laughed about how silly and ridiculous it was.

  I also remember, in that same sort of time frame, starting an account in the online game World of Warcraft under a female name, with the expectation that if anyone realised I was assigned male at birth, I would play it all off as a big joke.

  All of these experiences were during a few years where, if asked, I would have vehemently denied being transgender. I was terrified of the implications of transition, and of a change that drastic to my own sense of self-image and identity. There were days I went to sixth form with a stuffed bra under my biking jacket, hoping it would go unnoticed under the bulk of the top layer. I continually told myself that I was attracted to women, so I wasn’t gay, and so there was no aspect of my identity I needed to examine. I didn’t quite realise that gender and sexuality could be separated, and that my interest in women didn’t preclude me from being a woman myself.

  What ultimately convinced me to come out as transgender, at age 17, was a friend from college named Jess, who had noticed the frequency of my jokes about gender and subtly recommended that I watch an anime series titled Wandering Son. The show itself is fairly short, at 12 episodes, and focuses on a pair of children who are both uncomfortable with their birth assigned gender, one assigned male at birth and one assigned female, as they help each other explore the world of transition and work out how they can be comfortable with themselves. While it was not the first time I had seen transgender people acknowledged in media, it was the first time I saw them humanised, presented as real people and made relatable to myself. They were just normal people who happened to feel at odds with their assigned at birth gender, and decided they’d be happier if they presented themselves differently to the world, were addressed by new pronouns, but just kept living their lives. It was a story that involved some sneaking around, some clashes with the world, but ultimately they were happier for acknowledging how they felt about themselves and for having experienced a different role in life. It was a tasteful and humanising story that rang so many bells for me, written in a way that sounded so familiar to all those private thoughts I had spent years internalising. I had never told anyone how I felt, and suddenly this show just understood everything I had ever left unsaid.

  I finished watching the show and just stared silently at a blank wall for several hours, crying. I spoke to the friend who recommended it to me a few days later, and she admitted that she’d had her suspicions and thought I might benefit from seeing it. I ended up that night messaging a very close friend, incredibly emotionally overwhelmed and not sure how to verbalise how I felt. I eventually spluttered out that I thought I might feel more comfortable living as a woman, and she jumped on the opportunity to offer me advice. I was incredibly lucky in hindsight; it turns out the friend I had just come out to knew a transgender man, someone assigned female at birth but living as male, and as such had some knowledge of therapists I could talk to, things I could try at home and how I could go about progressing things if those early steps proved positive.

  Over the years that followed, I experimented with gendered presentation quietly, without making any big solid announcements about myself. I experimented with using female names to refer to myself, seeing if any of them felt like they fit. I went and sheepishly bought my first outfits, totally unsure of my clothing size, by ordering online and pretending I was just picking them up for someone else. I used to stand in the bathroom of my parent’s home, completely without their knowledge, taking photos of myself in dresses, seeing what I felt like when I saw myself.

  I came out to a small group of friends around age 18, who were all surprisingly supportive. I used to leave my house presenting male, get to my friend’s house, say hello and head straight to her bathroom to change my clothes. They were really good about giving me a safe space to try out female presentation and just find out in a risk-free environment what it was like to be seen, referred to and treated as Laura. They even bought me a selection of scarves as a gift, so I could more easily hide my huge Adam’s apple. It didn’t take me long at all to work out that this was what I needed; that this was the route to relieving some of the dysphoria I had spent years struggling with. I felt I had to talk to a professional, so I took some earlier advice and started seeing a therapist who specialises in talking to people about gender dysphoria. I spent a few months attending the therapy sessions in total secret. I lied to work and told them I had a regular volunteer appointment to keep each week, so I could get the time off work. I would finish work presenting male, drive over to the counselling centre and get changed into different clothes in the bathroom before going into appointments as Laura. It took a few months of talking, but over time over time became apparent that yes, transitioning did seem like the best way forward for me, and that was going to inevitably mean letting people in all areas of my life know, which was terrifying.

  I told my mother I thought I might be trans in a lengthy and overly apologetic email, which she didn’t quite know how to respond to. From her perspective, my transition had popped up out of nowhere, with no prior warning signs. She was convinced I had been brainwashed into transitioning, and agreed to meet my counsellor for a joint meeting with me, primarily to meet the person she felt had brainwashed her child into transitioning. My mother describes her first meeting with me presenting as Laura as very difficult for her, due in no small part to her inability to see me as anything but her very traditionally masculine son in a dress. For a while she knew but did not talk to my father, which she found very difficult. She told me years later
that she went through a period of mourning, feeling like her child had died, and that she was left with a stranger she did not know. It put a lot of strain on her, and on our relationship as parent and child. Why the assumption I was brainwashed? Because of autism infantilisation.

  Before we talk more about my journey coming out as transgender, we have to rewind a little bit to something else that went on at around the same point in my life: my diagnosis of Asperger’s. By the time my mother attended that appointment and met me as Laura for the first time, I had already been diagnosed with Asperger’s, which was part of the reason she was so worried about me. She was not aware of any statistical link between autism and gender dysphoria, and in her eyes I was a vulnerable young person with an autism spectrum condition who was being manipulated into transition because I was easily swayed, or lacking in ability to assess my feelings on the matter properly for myself. This is depressingly common: an adult’s assumption that having an autism spectrum condition means you’re incapable of proper self-understanding, or that you’re susceptible to being manipulated into believing things about yourself that you did not previously. You’re not trusted as being of sound mind to make choices about your own life, out of fear you’ve been manipulated.

  Speaking to my mother years later, now she has somewhat settled down and got used to me going by Laura and female pronouns, she told me that her biggest fear, and the primary reason she agreed to attend that first joint session together, was that, as a youth with Asperger’s, my therapist was influencing me into believing that I was trans. She feared it was some kind of brainwashing that my gullible mind could not resist the allure of, rather than believing my own account of what I was experiencing.

  I also faced this same issue with doctors when trying to access medical support through the NHS. I would have general practitioners, mental health doctors and gender specialists alike raise an eyebrow when I acknowledged my Asperger’s diagnosis, and then proceed to take plenty of extra time asking me lengthy questions about how my autism symptoms manifested, to ensure I was of sound enough mind to make permanent choices about my body. Apart from the obvious infantilisation of people with conditions like Asperger’s on display there, I always just explained it as being like the decision to get a tattoo. I am an adult, over the age of 18, who has been deemed sober and mentally sound, and as such I have every right to permanently inject colours into my skin that may never go away. Why should I not be trusted to take slow-acting meds that are somewhat easier to reverse? Still, the fact I had to fight to be believed that I was mentally sound enough to make that choice says a lot about misunderstandings about autism spectrum conditions, but highlights that to assert that transition is unique in the permanent nature of its change to the body is completely inaccurate.

  So, let’s tell the story of my Asperger’s diagnosis. When I was around 16 to 17 my mother began to notice me exhibiting a number of unusual behaviours and encouraged me to seek an appointment with the youth mental health service for counselling. She wasn’t pushing for me to attend specifically because of suspicions of an autism spectrum condition; that idea didn’t come up until my counsellor brought it up quite some way into our sessions. My mother just knew there was something odd, different, unusual and strange about some of my behaviours. My unusual behaviours were starting to be a problem, and beginning to inconvenience her life as much as mine. Initially, sessions focused more generally on my life, my oddities, stress and unusual methods of stress management. I talked about family issues, I talked about school and eventually I started to talk about feeling overwhelmed by changes to routine. My counsellor recognised that I was engaging in stimming when stressed in sessions, something I at the time didn’t know existed, and she recommended I seek an assessment for Asperger’s. I brought the suggestion up to my mother, who after reading up on the condition, quickly got on board with the idea, as it seemed to explain a lot of the odd quirks I had spent most of my life exhibiting. I went through the assessment, and was diagnosed with Asperger’s a week before I turned 18. The result of this was that I was diagnosed and then with no further support, I was dropped from my counsellor and left to understand the diagnosis myself. I had become too old for the youth mental health service, so I was instantly dropped from support.

  My mother took to the diagnosis like a duck to water; she very quickly noted that many of my long held behavioural quirks now made sense, and was quick to help me find support groups and materials to learn how to better cope.

  My stepfather on the other hand was a lot more wary of my diagnosis. He’s considerably older than my mother, and was born in a generation where mental health support was far less widely recognised as legitimate. As a result, he had some scepticism in the early months after my diagnosis. He was also considerably less open than my mother to LGBT topics, hence my having not come out to him as trans yet. The result of this is a story about how my autism symptoms, as well as my hidden trans status, both exploded in a very angry and emotional argument one day after dinner.

  The fight when I came out to Dad

  In the months after getting diagnosed with Asperger’s, my life had begun to change considerably. On the one hand, putting a name to my condition allowed me to research coping mechanisms and discover formally that stimming was a thing that existed. As a result of knowing my odd tics were a recognised thing, and something that genuinely served a purpose in helping me manage my symptoms, I began to stim more visibly, no longer forcing the same level of secrecy on actions designed to help me stay calm and concentrated.

  However, at the same time, I was hiding a pretty big secret with regards to my trans status. I could see knowing I was trans and worrying about me transitioning, but not being able to share that with anyone around her was putting a toll on my mother, which was distressing for me to see. I was trying to live two simultaneous lives by this point: my social life with friends as Laura, but my home and work lives under a male name and pronouns. I would have to hide specifics of where I had been, I couldn’t invite friends to my house and any time I left the house I had to smuggle out clothing hoping nobody would ask what I was carrying so secretively. I couldn’t share any pictures of the time I spent with my friends. I couldn’t show my family the creative projects I was working on, as they were under the name Laura. As a result of this exhausting double life I was trying to live, I found my anxiety was considerably worse, and I ended up experiencing even more trouble keeping myself emotionally in check. This was paired with me moving to sixth form, where there was even less routine and structure than GCSE education, and in spite of better understanding of my condition and coping mechanisms, my visible autism traits were becoming at times more obvious and extreme.

  One night I was trying to help wash up after dinner but was struggling due to some oversensitivity to the smells involved, and I asked to be excused. My stepdad said no, I had to stay and help, which I tried to do, taking breaks during the process to stim. Dad did not respond well to this. He started shouting about how I had really been playing up my autism symptoms since I received a diagnosis, and was clearly just acting up for attention, and to get out of doing things I didn’t want to do. I didn’t respond. I just spent a few seconds hugging myself and rocking, then tried to get back to the chore at hand. He kept getting louder, telling me I needed to just stop doing the stimming and stop acting like autism was a real issue in my life, telling me the need to stim was something I had invented for my own convenience. I continued to become more anxious, trying to stim to deal with the noise and the allegations and the smells. He continued to insist I was stimming just to get him to stop telling me truths I didn’t want to hear.

  I felt trapped, cornered and overwhelmed, a feeling that grew to a full meltdown, where I took myself to one side and started hitting at my own head. I felt like my head was full of static, it was in my eyes and ears and brain and mouth and it was overwhelming me, like a swarm of angry bees or an untuned TV, and I just didn’t know how else to get myself back into a focused state. H
itting myself was very loud sensory information, which I knew when to expect. I could focus on the hitting and get through the static and back to the room. It’s not healthy, but it’s what I did.

  This encouraged Dad to just shout louder about how I was making everything up. Mum chimed in, stating that I was dealing with more than just the autism, and if he only knew he might have some empathy. Dad started shouting that if there was something else in my life, I should explain it now.

  And that’s how I came out as trans to my dad. I was in mid-autism meltdown, hitting my head, crying and overwhelmed, and I sort of scream shouted at him that I felt uncomfortable in my body and wanted to live as female. Things calmed down a little from there. There were reassurances. I was given some space to breathe in silence until I felt better. I gave a little explanation and then went to bed. It wasn’t ideal, but it was out in the open at least.