On Saturday, March 28, I was sitting in my church following the most recent “No Kings” rally casually talking with some other members about gender and sexuality. All the members at the table were female, all members of the LGBTQ+ community. One of the women, a woman who has been particularly instrumental in, and supportive of, my journey from male-to-female, commented on how open I am about being transgender. I responded that how, after keeping the secret of my true hidden gender concealed for so long, I just didn’t want to keep this secret any more. Today, all my cards are out on the table — at least as far as my gender identity is concerned.
The reason I don’t want to keep secrets, is that my parents always greatly discouraged me from lying, encouraging me to tell the truth. Now, keeping my gender identity a secret was not outright lying, but it certainly didn’t feel very good to have to hide something so big, something that back then I wasn’t 100% sure of, and something that, where I to come out, I could create huge shock waves in my family. I came out at 41 after I had put all the pieces together. I was married by then, and unsurprisingly, my coming out created plenty of shock waves.
My truth IS what I am currently living even if a small group of people in my life don’t like it. Secondly, and I’ve written this before, I am so open about being transgender because I want to educate others and I want others to feel like they know me. I want them to know what life has been like for me as a transgender woman, through my own words. The biggest thing I want people to know is that transgender people are pretty much the same as anyone else — and certainly not to be feared. Knowing me doesn’t turn someone else transgender!
Considering how I feel about who I am, and the pride I feel being able to say that I am a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I feel outraged that the Supreme Court ruled on Transgender Day of Visibility, eight justices to one, to throw out bans on the horrid and destructive practice of conversion therapy. For those of you unfamiliar with the practice, in a nutshell, it tries to “fix” children and adults, by forcing them via various dubious and dangerous methods to reject their identification as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and so forth. The goal is to make them abandon their own legitimate feelings of who they are as people, replacing it with something deemed acceptable in an engineered conservative world, and more often than not, hypocritical conservative Christian world. The goal is to make these individuals conform to rigid heterosexual and binary gender roles, roles traditionally aligning with their sex at birth.
There are so many problems with this widely discredited practice; it is abusive and takes away a person’s autonomy to be the person that they were created to be. In my case, as a transgender woman, I had several people in my world that were not very happy about my decision to transition to female and live as the person I knew myself to be. Luckily, no one stopped me, and by-and-large, most of the small handful of friends who were unhappy about my decision to transition to female have adapted and recognized it as a positive thing for me. By contrast, if I had been forced into conversion therapy, I don’t know what my fate would have been. Drug use, depression, homelessness, and suicide are common among people who have gone through conversion therapy.
When I was a kid, I thought everything was so simple, boys liked girls and girls liked boys and there were only boys and girls — that was that. At about age six or seven, I started wondering, as a boy, why I wanted to be a girl. It was all very perplexing. Many years later, I know the reason why I felt that way — and I now know my feelings are legitimate.
It took a lot to get to the place I am now, living openly and proudly as a transgender woman. I know very well that anyone who has the courage to come out, is indeed brave, rather strong, and if like me, desperate, desperate to live as the person they know they are inside, whether they fit in the LGBTQ+ community. What makes all this so difficult, of course, is that it is not easy to go against our narrow societal norms. These folks who do come out should be celebrated and supported for who they are, not changed into something and someone they’re not.
Mariel E. Addis is a native of Florence. She left the area for 16 years but returned in 2013.