Too Queer to be Straight, Too Straight to be Queer?

Passing offers the privilege of immense safety. But what does passing take from transgender people?

I’ve sat with this feeling for over a decade now. Am I not queer enough? Queer as in the big umbrella term. Queer as in not straight.

In 2016, I had the honor of holding a session at the Philly Trans Wellness Conference. The title was the Gender Cube: Creating a Box to Think Outside of It. I had created this elaborate gendering system that relied on X,Y,Z axes. Long story short, I was excited to be there and even more excited to get feedback on the box.

My session went BEAUTIFULLY. It was standing room only. I had active participation in the conversation. It felt good.

Then I walked around the conference, as I had done the year before and the one before that. I didn’t feel an overwhelming sense of belonging that I had hoped for as I wandered the halls filled with other trans folks. But I’m a shy guy. Maybe next year.

A few years later, I was at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) conference with an organization I was working for. As I was introduced to trans person after trans person, I began to realize that they couldn’t see I was one of them. Finally, I spoke up and tried to make a casual reference about my own transness. Awkward. I saw the person’s brain take a minute to process. “Oh, wow! I had no idea!”

Fast forward 10 years, and I’m at a Trans Day of Visibility gathering where I had been asked to be one of the keynote speakers. I was again excited to mingle among a room full of trans people. I stuck out like a sore thumb because I passed.

My talk was about how visibility offers possibilities to so many others. After a history of public speaking, I could tell the crowd did not know what to do with me. “Is this a cisgender, gay man telling us about visibility? What’s happening?”

I left and felt so alone that I cried in the car.

Many of the little things that we use to identify other trans folks in public, I don’t have. I’m tall (love me a short king tho!), I have these big features, and I can finally grow some fullish facial hair. I find myself just as invisible (if not more) in queer and trans spaces than I do in straight spaces.

Don’t get me wrong, passing has ENORMOUS privilege. I can move through most spaces (except extremely rural ones) and be relatively safe. This is something so many trans people will never feel. I’m humbled by and am very aware of this.

But there is something so desperately lonely about standing among people who have suffered as you’ve suffered, but they can’t even see you.

So, I tried for a while to be a part of the ‘straight world.’ I had a wife, a kid, a dog, and a house with mulch neatly placed around the bushes.

I’d talk about the house and the kid, or what I did for work.

But I’d end up saying something that required a deeper lens on gender or sexuality, and the simplicity of the conversation would fade. The uncomfortable reality that my straight counterpart and I were living in different worlds would spill into the conversation. A world where I didn’t get to go to prom with the person I loved because that would’ve ruined my entire life. A world where my former wife was initially denied being added to my health insurance because we were a same-sex couple. A world where my family emotionally abandoned me.

That the life I lived revealed the dirty cracks in the system that they don’t want to see.

In those moments, I long for the simple understanding of a shared lived experience.

Sometimes, I wonder why I’m so blazingly trans on the internet. It’s because I get that community I can’t get offline through conversations with other trans people. The online trans community sees me as one of them because I can present it front and center - in my “about me”, my handle, my post.

I can fully be seen in my multitudes instead of my passing.