Hannah McKnight: Aftermath

Hannah McKnight: Aftermath

Hannah McKnight: Aftermath

 

This is a continuation of Coming Out.
Click here to read part 1.   |   Click here to read part 2.   |   Click here to read part 3.

The last three articles I’ve written have focused on coming out. Upon rereading them (and it took forever, I am one chatty bitch lol) I realized that despite the thousands of words I had written, there really wasn’t in them that was, well, a step by step guide on how to have The Talk.

But it’s just as well. Life does not come with an owner’s manual. Over the course of one’s life we can face countless different scenarios and situations that we have no idea how to process, let alone discuss. Life, like applying liquid eyeliner or making sure your seamed stockings are straight, is about learning. None of us are born knowing how to do these things. None of us are born with knowing how to have most conversations that a life may need to have.

Although there isn’t a “right way” to come out, there are, in my opinion, a lot of wrong ways to do so, as I wrote about in my last article. There are no words that will guarantee your wife will “let” you wear panties. You can’t “get” them to allow you to express this side of you. This is, essentially, their choice. They are allowed to have feelings and thoughts and react to this revelation.

Advice is a frightening thing to ask for, and it’s even more terrifying to give. I hesitate to give specifics on really anything when it comes to advice. If anything, I encourage people to be empathetic and try to see how your actions and feelings may cause someone else to feel. Yes, this is vague, but I think if you are preparing for a big talk, regardless of it’s about gender identity or accepting a job offer in a different part of the county, if you can be honest and gentle that’s all you can really start with.

I think it’s normal for us to want to prepare for a conversation to the point where we will, um, win. What I mean is that if you and a work colleague have different opinions on how to handle an issue at the office, you may spend some time thinking about why your opinion is the correct one and why your idea is better. You have your thoughts and perspective ready, and you try to convince your colleague that your plan is best.

I don’t think it’s unrealistic to avoid confronting something if we don’t think the outcome will go the way we want it to, or if we are not sure what the outcome will be. It’s early Saturday morning as I am writing this and an email I received at work last night is really, really going to piss off my boss. So, that’s a stressful way to begin the weekend. For the next two days I am going to let the dread of talking to him weigh on me and bracing myself for him to essentially go ballistic.

(Of course, the email isn’t the end of the world but my boss explodes whenever something doesn’t go right.)

Coming out to our significant other or really anyone holds a similar weight and dread and fear and apprehension and reluctance. It’s quite impossible to anticipate how they will react. I’ve come out to shockingly few people in my life. I say “shockingly” because I am quite prolific (not famous, mind you, there’s a difference) and I post a lot of pictures and all that. Each time I’ve had The Talk, whether it was with my siblings or someone I was dating, I never knew how they would react.

Oh, I always had high hopes and I would do my best to predict how they would react but I was never right. Some were very supportive and enthusiastic, some shut it down. Some barely blinked an eye.

Of course, someone’s reaction is likely influenced by their relationship to you. A roommate I came out to didn’t have the normal endless questions about transitioning or sexual identity that my sister did. As long as I paid my share of the rent she could care less. But that’s normal for a roommate. We were friends but we both knew that once one of us moved out the likelihood that we would ever see each other again was probably zero. But my sisters? My siblings and I are likely going to be in each other’s lives forever.

I do think how you come out is going to influence how your partner or anyone else will react, or really, what happens next. When I came out to my mom, I came out as a crossdresser. I did this because I really thought that *this* was about clothes and that was that.

She had a hard time, as I expected, trying to understand why someone would choose to wear certain clothes if they didn’t “have” to. She couldn’t understand why certain clothes make me happy. I think many cisgender people have a difficult time relating to someone feeling that the gender they were assigned at birth isn’t quite right.

But trying to see someone’s perspective or trying to understand them, all comes down to being able to relate to them. What I mean is that I think everyone has something in their wardrobe that makes them feel something. It might be a really nicely tailored suit that makes you feel confident and it’s what you choose to wear to a job interview. It might be a sports jersey that makes you feel pride for your hometown.

This side of us isn’t that much different. I think it’s safe to say that we all like to feel good, brave, confident, and attractive and it’s not shallow to say that often our appearance can have a significant impact on how we feel. How we look, and what we wear, and how our appearance makes us feel is different for everyone.

It’s not uncommon for us (us as humans, not necessarily limited to non-binary people) to have thoughts or reactions to what someone else is wearing and how their clothes would make us feel if we were wearing the same thing. For many cisgender men, the idea that another person with a penis would choose to wear a dress is baffling or humiliating to them. They might feel they would rather die than wear anything that was pink.

But for those like me? I see a dress and I imagine how beautiful I would feel were I to wear it.

(On a somewhat related note, some people think that drag queen story time or a queer character in a movie is going to influence their son into wanting to wear a dress. Please. I never needed a drag queen to inspire me to wear a dress. It was the women in my life, my family, the beautiful cisgender women on television that triggered a lifetime of longing to be beautiful.)

Were I to come out to anyone else going forward, I would come out as transgender. Even before I realized it, who I am, and has always been, is more than just about the clothes. This is about my identity and how I feel. Of course, coming out as transgender also requires another conversation about how being transgender doesn’t necessarily mean transitioning. So not only am I going to (likely) turn their world inside-out by telling them that their son/brother/buddy wears “girl clothes”, I am also educating them on the nuance of gender terminology.

Coming out is exhausting.

I do think that if I had come out to my mom and siblings as transgender instead of as a crossdresser, the conversation would have been very different and I think our relationship would have changed in a different way. Maybe the conversation would have resulted in an outcome closer to what I had hoped.

Maybe not. Again, it’s impossible to predict. Empathy is crucial when it comes to coming out or with any life changing or relationship changing conversation, but the whole point in being empathetic is anticipating how something will make someone feel. However, when you accept that you really have no idea how someone will react to this revelation it makes being empathetic challenging.

Afterall, when we can predict something, we can prepare for it.

You may not know how your partner will react to “I wear panties”, but you can anticipate how they may react to revealing something about you that they likely never suspected or expected.

Essentially coming out to someone will likely challenge everything they thought they knew about you and will look at you in a new light. These aren’t always or necessarily bad things, but it will probably change the relationship.

And not always in a bad way, keep in mind. I came out to my wife when we were dating, but as a crossdresser. After we married, my gender identity evolved, or to put it in a more accurate way, I confronted my feelings and accepted them in a new way.

Of course, this made things in our relationship challenging in a lot of ways. We were both adjusting and I made a lot of mistakes and was very much self-centered. I was oblivious in a lot of ways to how my wife felt. I won’t get into it here, but therapy and getting sober and the passage of time helped me tremendously.

But accepting my gender identity made me happy. I felt calm, I felt like I had found a piece of myself that was missing. I was honest with myself and it helped me be honest with my wife. I was more vulnerable and open about not only my gender identity but with everything I felt and thought. I learned how to communicate.

Don’t take the wrong thing from my experience. Crossdressing/gender identity didn’t make our relationship better. It was communication and feeling at peace and being sober that did that. I suppose crossdressing led to that, but if I didn’t evolve as a person as well as a spouse, crossdressing wouldn’t have made anything better.

It’s not unlike how crossdressing itself usually doesn’t impact a relationship in a negative way, but it’s what usually comes with crossdressing that hurts a relationship. What I mean is that whether or not your partner knows about this side of you, there’s a possibility that there’s still some dishonesty or downplaying your feelings or selfishness that one’s crossdressing is causing. I get a lot of emails from women who don’t care if their husband wears lingerie during intimate moments, but the frustration and sadness can come with feeling that their husband is making sexy time all about themselves and neglecting what they need. Oftentimes they feel that sex is just an excuse to crossdress instead of mutual pleasure or expressing their love. It’s not his lingerie that is ruining sex, it’s his neglecting his wife’s feelings and needs or being oblivious or uncaring about his wife’s feelings and needs.

Again, it’s behavior that matters. And for some of us our crossdressing is directly influencing our decisions… consciously or not.

One more anecdote: my wife doesn’t mind when I buy a new pair of stilettos, but she would absolutely mind if I spent money on stilettos that was meant to pay next month’s mortgage. It’s not about the shoes themselves, it’s about my decision to make a foolish and selfish financial decision that impacts her.

There’s one final element I want to address about coming out. And this is going to sting. Sorry. As I mentioned, I think it’s important to be empathetic to our partners when we come out. I think it’s important that we accept that they will have feelings about our feelings. Although we have been who we are for our entire lives and we’ve had years and years to reflect on this and understand this as much as we can, our partners haven’t had that experience. They will not likely be on the same wavelength and the same level of understanding about this that we have for a long, long time.

If ever.

My wife doesn’t understand why I like what I like, and I don’t either, but she accepts that this is who I am and this makes me happy.

Listen. When I’ve come out to people I was the same person that I was before I even opened my mouth to say “I have something to tell you”. Again, we’ve lived with this side of ourselves. We grew up with this side of ourselves. We are used to this side of ourselves. But the reality is that whomever we come out to will likely see us differently. A new side of us they haven’t seen before. And they need to process it.

But the sting is that our partners are not obligated to accept this side of us.

It may not be something they can live with.

It may be something that they can’t get past.

Whether or not this is fair is another story. They may not like this side of us, they may be confused by this side of us, but at the very least they will acknowledge this side of us. Your partner will have their feelings and will react. It’s possible these things can change over time. There’s nothing you can do or say to “get” your partner to accept this side of you. You can’t convince them.

If anything, you may be able to earn their trust over time.

And I think that’s a topic for another time.

Love, Hannah

 

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