Coming out as trans and queer

TRANSCRIPT

Yeah, so, I kind of, er, I came to my queerness through a, like, a very politicised... in a very politicised way, like, it was through meeting those people in Bradford and learning about housing co-ops, um, which is, for me, and I think for a lot of people, at least these specific housing co-ops, are very... like, an explicitly political way of organising housing, um, and, through there, through like those things I started to meet trans people and queer people, um, and for a while I was like ‘Oh how interesting, how intellectually interesting’, which I hear is common among, er, among us folk, er, and then, as I like made more friends and began to feel comfortable with … that there were people like me you know, um, because prior to that I didn’t - you know I knew one gay person who was super closeted [laughs] and that was it and I wasn’t about to, like I couldn’t even look at those bits of myself, um.

So I started to kind of open up in that way and that like very slowly got the wheels turning of like ‘oh, oh I think I’m, I mean I’m definitely not straight, ohh I’m also trans riight ok’ [laughs] Ohh! Um, yeah I, like, as far as like common narratives about transness go, I came out quite late in that I was around 18 or so, um, and when I first kind of came out to myself and close people around me, and then, since then there’s been various kind of milestones in terms of physical transition that like when I first came out I was like ‘I don’t wanna do any physical transition stuff’ and then a few years later I was like ‘oh, oh no, we need some surgery’ and you know, um, but I often wonder how much later it would have been if my, if my life had gone differently, um, in my teenage years, cos I think, yeah, coming - and I guess as well, um, kind of parallel to that, is, coming at it from such a politicised point of view, there was already, um, less shame, I mean still a significant amount of like shame and all of that, but I didn’t, I was already in an environment where, as far as other people were concerned anyway [laughs] it was fine, um, and I think that would have been harder if I weren’t in those kind of environments.