Date uploaded: 2019-10-11 22:48:50

Archive date: Sat, 25 Dec 2021 01:39:53 GMT

For the last several years, I’ve felt a deep need and a deep contraction about coming out on #nationalcomingoutday🌈 I felt like I didn’t have a right to participate. As a white cis gendered woman, married to a man, I move through our white supremacist patriarchal world with total privilege, and that privilege has made me ashamed. But that privilege also erases me. It makes my gender identity and sexuality a default assumption, and it requires me to come out over and over again. But this year has been different. Our world is so different. I was raised to believe that homosexuality was a sin and as a queer child, I spouted garbage lines like “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” It took years for me to accept who I am, and even longer to embrace who I am. I am so fortunate to be surrounded by loved ones who also embrace and celebrate who I am. I’ve posted a lot in the last year without saying anything directly, so here goes: I’m a queer woman. For a long time I identified as bisexual, but now that I have the language and the understanding, pansexual feels more authentic (and who wouldn’t want to be associated with Pan? 🐐). I’m mostly femme presenting, though not particularly femme identifying, and my gender expression is increasingly fluid. I expect all of these labels will be fluid, as we keep finding new ways to be and new language to describe ourselves. I hope this world can change, because I know from experience that people can change. We are who we are, but we do not have to be what we have learned. “There are more things in heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Using my very favorite photo of me, in a most important moment). (As always, hateful comments will be deleted and the user will be blocked.)