Being Silenced by Stealth

I made a decision a while back to distance myself from me being transgender.  I moved to a new city where no people knew my past, and since then have largely remained silent.  The only people I told my secret to were in the LGBT community and mostly transgender people at that.  And I thought living stealth was what I wanted, but it really handicaps speaking out on any transgender issue.  Not least because of the fear of outing myself.

Don’t get me wrong, I think that everyone can speak out on trans issues regardless of whether they are cisgender, genderqueer, transgender, or any other identity, stealth or otherwise.  And I really think that allies and stealth trans people can make a positive difference in changing society’s attitudes and tackling transphobia.  But without trans people actually giving their experiences directly and having a degree of visibility, progress will surely be slow.  And if society doesn’t visibly see trans people, then it makes it harder to convince people that we are "normal" instead of whatever caricature a person believes.

And in the past I’ve attempted to give my experiences of being transgender, while avoiding attributing them to myself (along the lines of "I have a trans friend  who…").  But all I’ve found is that this often results in me being dismissed as "not knowing what I’m talking about", particularly if it doesn’t fit a trans stereotype.

Certainly I don’t think it is a duty of trans people to educate, advocate, nor out ourselves in the process, and hope nothing I’ve written above is misinterpreted as such.  It’s absolutely a personal decision, and there obviously are personal costs to it.

But for me personally, I’ve come to the decision that I don’t want to be silenced by my desire to remain stealth.  I haven’t quite figured out what that means yet, and am not quite sure the balance I want between being stealth and out.  But I am now willing to out myself in at least some situations (not just online), if it helps educate, advocate or tackle transphobia.