Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"The closet does have a benefit. It provides safety. Which at times is important. But remember, as long as you are in there, two other things will be too. Fear and shame." -- Anthony Venn-Brown, A Life of Unlearning - a preacher's struggle with his homosexuality, church and faith

[11 October is National Coming-Out Day.]

A good Shemini Atzeret to my friends observing it today, and an especially joyous Simchat Torah to all celebrating that either today or tonight/tomorrow! (And yes, I know what I just said -- 'joyous' + 'simchat' -- is kind of redundant.)

You ever get a vision stuck in your head in that way that usually only tunes get stuck? I've got one stuck in my brain right now, of a collie or a sheltie, dancing around a herd flock of velociraptors, herding them.

(Feathered, turkey-sized, real velociraptors, not big-ass movie ones.)

Chalk this up to my having just listened to a segment on The Current about necrofauna -- attempts to revive, or create approximations of, extinct species such as the mammoth and the passenger pigeon. (They mentioned dinosaurs as something they'll probably never be able to restore. But then a brief conversation with xpioti got velociraptors stuck in my head anyhow.)

Thinking about National Coming Out Day. I don't think there's anyone in my life or even kinda near my life who doesn't know that I'm transgender. And a lot of you know that I'm kinky, and some of you may know/remember than I'm polyamorous. (Well, 'ambiamorous' -- I can actually be quite happy in a monogamous relationship or a poly one, depending on whom I'm in the relationship with and how it develops. But I identify more as poly.) I've been "out" about all of that for a long time, even if not everybody has had the last two come up in conversation with me, so it kinda feels like i don't really have anything left to come out about. But maybe I do (though I said some of this in less detail last NCOD). Because several years ago I realized my identity was shifting and I felt a strong mental pressure to start making my body change too.

While many of you met me while I identified as "intergender" (because genderqueer wasn't a label yet when I chose one), my identity is no longer in-the-middle. A lot of folks who've run into me recently have heard this because they've asked -- either because asking about pronouns is a more normal thing nowadays or because they notice changes to my body, or both -- but I'm closer to the F pole on the gender graph than I was, and looking forward to seeing whether this journey carries me all the way there.

So here's my Coming Out Day thing, which (as I mentioned) folks who talk to me one-on-one a lot or have run into me and asked questions already know, but not everybody is up to date on: I have been on HRT for about five years, my pronouns are she/her (though I won't hold a "he" against anyone until I harmonize my gender-presentation with my gender-identity), I am trying to schedule a relevant minor surgery, I'm trying to work up my nerve to shave my beard (which feels like a bigger step than growing breasts or telling people or trying to schedule an orchiectomy), and I'm trying to pick a new name. Some of this is scary, more of it is wonderful, a bunch of it is both. Even though I haven't reached my destination (or figured out for sure what my destination is), that mental pressure to act is greatly reduced since I started taking these steps, my emotions seem to work a lot better on estrogens than androgens, and a lot of "mental static" that I'd gotten used to has gone away. (As Zinnia Jones has pointed out, not all symptoms of gender dysphoria are obviously that, until treating the dysphoria makes them go away.)

I stopped using conventional labels like 'gay'/'het'/'straight' to talk about my orientation a long time ago, and started just saying "attracted to women" and leaving the label as en exercise for the listener ... but did (do) identify as "queer". First because being trans (and especially for being visibly gender-nonconforming) I was already part of the queer community, and again because even though attraction to women didn't feel gay, it didn't quite feel straight either. (Because when my gender was in-between, which was the "opposite gender"? The labels 'bi' or 'pan' would have worked if I had been bi or pan, but I wasn't and AFAICT still am not.) Amusing thing though: I've assumed that most other people mentally tagged me as het, and while HRT did not change my orientation (it can do that, but I've never found out how common or rare it is), changing my gender does mean that the label for my orientation changes.

It's been said that coming out isn't a one-time act, but something that winds up being repeated again and again when meeting new people or joining new groups -- and that goes double for bisexuals and trans people. Like coming-out, transitions are scary and liberating and sometimes difficult ... and there's more than one. Even for a textbook story of a binary gender transition there are medical, legal, and social transitions which may happen at different times and aren't instantaneous. Of those, social transition is the scariest (and generally the most important). And I've already transitioned socially from male to genderqueer years ago, but here I am in the middle (beginning, I guess) of another social transition, from genderqueer to female or mostly-female, in the middle of medical transition, and looking into options & to-do list for legal transition. And y'know? Telling people one on one has been relatively easy (has gotten easier with practice), but standing up to the world and saying, "Here I am, I am changing, this is what I am doing," is a lot harder. So I guess I had something for National Coming Out Day after all.

BTW, what do folks think of the name Eftychia (Ευτυχια, /eff-ti-KHEE-a/ where the χ is sort of between a kh sound and a gh or really-rough-'h' sound)? Still making up my mind, but that one's in the running.