Fear, anger and outing

By Contributing Writer on Friday, February 11, 2011 - 15:53

[Editor’s Note: This article was written by the team of ‘Gaelick’, an award-winning Irish website for LGBT news.]

We talk a lot about the politics of outing people as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Some of us believe it’s always wrong. Others, that it’s only ok if the closeted person is being a hypocrite — that it’s ok to out an anti-gay politician as gay, but not a closeted person who fights the corner anyway. Some believe that outing is the only way we can achieve the visibility we need in order to progress and get our rights.

The conversation is different with the trans community.

The nature of the trans community itself makes visibility extremely difficult. Many trans people aspire to live post-transition as though they’d never lived otherwise. That means they become invisible — exactly their goal, and totally their right. And while visibility and understanding can also increase awareness in larger society about the struggles and rights of trans people, for many trans people, standing up and being counted simply isn’t an option.

Remember we talked about butch women? I said, at the time:

A woman who spends her life presenting as other than ‘how a woman should look’ is a lightening rod for hate and violent rhetoric.

That in itself is as much about the control of women and femininity as it is about anything else. But it’s also about the fact that society in general really, really hates it when their assumptions are either incorrect, or they are unable to make an assumption. It makes people nervous and afraid. And that fear makes people angry.

Fear makes me angry too. When I saw the front page article that outed a woman as trans last week, I was terrified. Not for myself, but for people I know and love. I was afraid for the woman involved as well, although I don’t know her. My fear made me angry. I’m still angry.

They named her, published photographs and used words like TRANSSEXUAL and FELLOW in big, scary caps. At least, it probably scared the writer, Gary Meneely, who, frankly, should be struggling to live with his conscience right about now.

The woman he outed had never done anything to him. She wasn’t living a lie, or even living deep stealth. She wasn’t rude when she refused to be part of a tabloid’s ‘case study’. On the board of a trans rights organisation and known for giving talks on the subject, the ‘revelation’ hardly qualified as the ‘WORLD EXCLUSIVE’ the rag touted. But still, until this, she had control over who knew. The tabloid took all that away from her.

Perhaps this story may help us understand why so many trans people chose to erase their pasts entirely. Post-transition, a lot of people make the painful decision to cut off family and old friends. They move, and start a new life where nobody knows. They alter childhood stories and discard photographs, cards, letters, diplomas — anything containing any kind of clue about the past.

Let’s clarify some terms first. Let’s say stealth is living where your neighbors and community don’t know, but you have friends that you maintain contact with that do.

Deep stealth is when you drop all the past, rather erase it. You begin completely new, like you landed on this planet full grown, with no real past.

Since everyone has to have a past, you must make one up, but how? First rule is don’t make up anything too interesting, for if you do, people will talk about this made up past of yours. For example, if I had said that I was a Ph.D. student that dropped out of school and my parents disowned me, people would think, ‘she must be really smart, or a liar, she must have some mean parents’. You want people not to think anything.
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