Coming out to dad

Dad,

In my life as a gay man, I believe I only ever really come out in an explicit
manner once.  I was in high school, in my first week of classes, and our
counselors came around to our homeroom class to hold some getting-to-know-you
exercise.  This consisted of a lot of bored kids and one "excited" counselor
asking us a series of yes or no questions and having us move to one side of the
room for 'yes' and the other for 'no'.  Being in a progressive town, I didn't
expect to be the only kid to answer the question "Will you get married when you
grow up?" with no, but sure enough, I was.  I was feeling brave, so, when I was
questioned about my response in front of the class, mumbled, "gay marriage is
illegal, and I'm gay."

All of the other times I had to come out to family or friends, it was something
assumed, or something hinted at.  When I came out to my mom, I did so by leaving
a book about gay teens and their stories on her stack of books to read.  Coming
out at work at my first job out of college was a matter of being "the one hired
by the gay manager", and coming out at my second job was a matter of my
relationship with James being included in a portfolio piece - a
data-visualization résumé about my life. When I *officially* came out to you, I
did so by inviting you to my wedding to James.  Prior to that, although I assume
it was common knowledge, it was unspoken.

Needless to say, I'm not all that good at coming out.

Running away was a turning point for me - for both of us, really.  I think that
we have always been guarded in our communication with each other.  During that
time in my life, I felt under intense distress that I couldn't express to you.
Not only did I not have the words, it didn't fit in with what I perceived to be
our mode of communication.  I felt stuck, drained, and worthless, and the only
path forward to me at the time was escape.

After that incident, however, I shut down even more.  I didn't feel that talking
through emotions, feelings, and identity with you was appropriate or allowed.
This was something based off of my perceptions, which were that there are
appropriate conversations to have, and that not all conversations fit into this
category.  I think - I hope - that my perceptions growing up were wrong.  I know
that my running away caused a lot of pain, and that's something that I still
feel bad about, just as I know that only coming out to you through a wedding
invite was not my classiest move, and I feel bad about that as well.

It has been my goal with my friends and partners to have relationships based on
the ability to share the emotions and problems that are part and parcel to being
a living human being.  Over the last few years, I've worked to open up to my mom
as well, letting deliberate honesty take the place of obfuscation and lying
through omission about the things that are tough to talk about.  I think that I
owe that to you as well, as my dad.  I want to make up for all the lost
conversations that we've never had.  We've made good buddies over the last few
decades, and I think it's important that we also make good family.

So what's this about?

I've been having troubles fitting within a masculine role for as long as I can
remember.  Early on, this was shown through a disregard for the boyish aspects
of childhood: a lack of interest in sports, a fascination with reading the same
books Marika (I apologize if I've misspelled her name, I believe that's the
first time I've ever written it myself), and a need to keep out of the cliques
of other boys in my early school years, except for the crowd of misfits I wound
up palling around with, with whom I still keep in touch.

Moving to college, of course, provided all sorts of opportunities to explore.
Although I spent time hanging out in the LGBT student services office and
fiddled around with all sorts of different relationships, I still maintained
this repressed attitude toward gender.  There is a tendency among gay men to be
incredibly misogynistic, and I experienced no shortage of that until I managed
to quit that group, about the time I switched into a major that I felt fit me
much better.  Working in the music department taught me a lot about how gender
roles are cemented within western culture, and in particular, I remember a
discussion in which a young woman who had accepted a male part in an operetta
was taught how to walk like a man.

Somewhere around then, I understood what feminism was all about.  I realized how
everything from wages down to the ways in which we walk are coded toward gender,
and I hated it.  I didn't fit this masculine role into which I was born, and
there was little to nothing I could do about it.

Gayle Rubin describes gender as the aggregation of "chromosomal sex, hormonal
exposure, internal reproductive organs, external genitalia and psychological
identifications." Needless to say, there's a lot bound up in the topic, and a
whole lot of it made me feel awful.  I spent most of 2012 doing my level best to
reject gender in its entirety.  I denied my masculinity as I strived for
neutrality and, while I gained quite a bit of insight, I gained little ground in
terms of tackling my own problems with my identity.

It's only recently that I've decided to come at this problem of identity and
personal friction in an explicit and deliberate fashion.  There are things in my
life that make me feel bad - just as there are for everyone - and I've found
that it's my job, more than anyone else's, to fix the things in my life that
cause me pain.  Identity, after all, is that which we feel about ourselves when
under duress.

What this boils down to, really, is that I'm more than just uncomfortable in a
masculine role, it causes me intense psychological distress, and so I'm working
to fix that.

I've found ways to soothe this friction, however, and, as I mentioned, I'm
deliberately pursuing these fronts.  I can do little things, like dress in a
less masculine fashion, walk with less swagger, and, to get down to the point,
change my name away from something so decidedly masculine.  I'm working on
changing my name from Matthew Joseph Scott to Madison Jesse Scott-Clary. It's a
way to mitigate this distress, and it's working well from my point of view.  I'm
finally being proactive about self-actualization rather than waiting for it to
come from the outside, and it's doing me wonders.

I waffle quite a bit on whether or not to adopt the label transgender for
myself, but in a lot of ways, it really fits.  'Transgender' is an umbrella term
that encompasses most all of gender variance in the human population, and
literally just means not identifying with the culturally defined gender roles or
categories of male or female as it pertains to one's sex assigned at birth.

Going back to Rubin's definition of gender, it is my psychological
identification that is not in line with my biological sex.  I don't really feel
"more like a woman than a man", so much as I feel decidedly ungendered.  Gender
itself is non-binary - there isn't simply an either-or, or a line between two
extremes, but a whole realm of experience that exists, unique to each person as
an individual.

As far as definitions go, this makes me more "genderqueer" or "genderfluid",
rather than simply "transgender".  However, given my tendency to shy away from
masculinity, I think it is safe to say that, although I will aways be a
man-shape (there's no changing my height, natch), I will be a lot less
masculine, and thus to all appearances by society at large more feminine, than I
have been in the past.  So while transgender works, I generally describe myself
as agender or genderqueer, and use gender-neutral pronouns such as
"they/them/theirs" to refer to myself.

Big picture, what does this mean?

I've already brought up the name change, and as yet, that's one in a set of very
small changes that make up my attempts to alleviate this particular type of
distress.  It's these little things - changing my name, growing my hair out,
carefully choosing the clothing that I purchase - that I've adopted so far as
deliberate attempts to make myself feel better

I am, however, still me.  There is nothing above the surface level that is
changing.  This has always been me, and will always be me, and there's certainly
no changing that.  Little things such as changing my name are ways in which I
can better align that sense of self with the ways in which the world perceives
me.

These changes allow me to live in a way that makes me content.  I've been
searching for a long time for the supposed happiness that comes with being a
grown-up, and, like most everyone, decided it's bogus.  However, there really is
something to be said for realizing oneself in a way that provides the utmost
self-fulfillment that oneself can provide.  What it comes down to is that I feel
good here.  I feel better than I have in a long, long time, and I think that my
actions speak for themselves: this is who I am.

What does this mean for you?

Dad, I really appreciate all that you've done for me.  I owe so much more to you
than I could ever put into words.  So much of the things we did while I was
growing up proved formative to who I am today, and there's no expressing the
gratitude that I feel for that.  You've given me so much that there's no amount
I could give back to repay that.

I understand that the changes that I am making for myself, now that I'm nearing
30, vary in size from minuscule to enormous.  I understand that I am changing
some pretty integral parts of myself, some of which you had a say in yourself,
such as my name.

What it comes down to is that I'm writing to seek your acceptance.  It needn't
be immediate (I'm telling you this in a letter for a reason, take all the time
you need in responding), and it needn't necessarily be wholehearted.  However,
this is the path that I'm heading down, dad, and I'm determined to do so.
There's years and years and years of thought and emotion bound up inside of
these steps I'm taking, and I want you to be aware of them, and, if it's alright
by you, for you to be a part of them.

I know that our communication over the years has been rough in places, but lets
have this be the opening to a conversation between us about each of us.  I hope
to hear back from you soon.

I wish you all the best in work and in life.

Always yours,

Madison Scott-Clary

Some resources:

[0] A good explanation of neutrois/agender/genderqueer:

> Take everything that you associate with masculinity and put it into a
> metaphorical yard. Then do the same thing with everything feminine, putting
> all of that into an adjacent yard. Then, build a low stone wall (not a fence)
> between them, and put atop this wall everything that you can associate with
> both genders. Then, imagine that I walked down that wall, picked up a lot of
> the attributes from that center place, and then the parts from both of the
> yards that most appealed to me.

[1] A good set of pages on the subject of transgender issues and gender variance
as a whole: http://transwhat.org/

[2] A well-written video on non-binary gender, sexuality, and presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibAGYQtk3r4

[3] A friend, who is going through similar changes in their life, wrote a really
good analogy on binaries and identities:
https://medium.com/@indilatrani/early-birds-and-night-owls-afc59712b0b8