176 Quotes About Coming-out

Sometimes coming out isn't about us. It's not fair that we have to carry the emotional burden of sharing our secret and making sure the person we're coming out to is okay, but we make concessions for the people we care about. Besides, I may have run the scenarios for this conversation but my mom had been running scenarios about my entire life since the day she had learned she was pregnant with me.

What were they going to say when I brought home my first boyfriend? Would I even be able to, or would we keep talking about weather and the Red Sox, pretending nothing had changed?

This is our big chance to see what people think of us. The real us. We have to show em there's nothing to be afraid of. If we don't get over our fears, they never will.

When I decided I was a boy, I realized that if I wanted to pass, I'd have to learn to walk differently, talk differently, dress differently, basically act differently than I did as a girl. But why did we need to act at all?

I guess I'd just been thinking about it for so long that I forgot changing your gender was not even a question for most people. They just took for granted being a boy or a girl. I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be so sure of yourself.

I was surprised at how much general fear and anxiety lurked inside me these days. I'd never been a fearful person, never even understood phobias like fear of heights of water or snakes or any of those things. And while I knew that my coming out as a transgender person was going to throw certain people for a loop, I somehow hadn't realized how much it would throw me.

You know,” I said, “I think the thing that scared me most about admitting that I’m, you know, gay or whatever isn’t so much that people would taunt me by saying ‘Oh, James likes other boys,’ but that they would say stuff like, ‘Oh, turns out James isn’t a boy after all.’ You know?

It was actually Nadine who'd insisted that I come with her, telling me that I wasn't social enough, that real life was not lived in books, that there was nothing wrong with a little lightness, a little carefree partying. She was right. Maybe if I'd listened to her a lot earlier, I wouldn't have missed out on my youth.

Once I came out and told her I was gay, everything she thought about me changed. In her eyes, I was no longer the daughter she knew, or the daughter she raised, or the daughter she loved.