Coming Out Letter (digital)

I was originally gonna just copy-paste the letter into here but I wound up writing individual letters rather than a blanket one, so I guess I will copy-paste the original, longer, more clinical letter in here as-is. At the end, I'll have a link to another page that is just responses to common misleading talking points I hear thrown around, in case you haven't heard anything to the contrary. That page will have a lot of links to other resources that you may browse at your discretion. However, if my coming out is enough for you, you don't have to bother with all that. I mostly put that there in case I get some people trying to argue with me, which I am not going to put up with. If you feel the need to argue, go and read that page instead.

Letter

I’ve been thinking about how best to write this for a long time. Sometimes I thought I’d never write it, but it’s important to me in nurturing my relationships with friends and family that I’m my honest self with them. I hope you can read this in good faith and understand me better. Please read it with an open mind and in good faith and acknowledge the vulnerability and trust that goes into it. I am trying not to make any assumptions about those reading this, so please try not to make any about me.

I am a transgender woman. I have known since 2019 and started telling my closest friends around then, but I did not really start transitioning until last year. On July 27th 2024 I started feminizing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) and have been on it almost a year as of writing. This wasn’t a quick or easy decision - obviously, as I’d been thinking about it for almost five years. But even prior to then I felt something was wrong and simply didn’t have the language or support system to put a finger on it or do something about it.

Doing this in a letter is kind of the coward’s way out, but I’m afraid I’m a much better writer than I am a speaker. Admittedly the clinical way I have structured and written this is kind of an emotional cop-out, but it’s a lot more words than I could comfortably say in a phone call, and I can be more sure I haven’t misspoken. Since this is kind of one-sided, I’m going to rhetorically pose myself a few questions that I feel like are common when someone comes out like this and answer them.

I’m always happy to answer further questions as long as I feel they are being asked out of curiosity and not to lead me to a conclusion. I will also include some resources that might help your understanding (above in the references section)

First,

"How long have you known?"

Based on some old journal entries of mine, I started to question my gender around age fifteen. There were a lot of early signs I remember from around then, but I think the earliest strong feeling I can recall was Halloween of 2014 when I dressed up as a video game character, who was a girl. At the time I probably just thought that I looked cool, but it was exciting and freeing. That year was when it really started to weigh heavy on my mind.

By the time I was eighteen I was pretty sure, but I was scared - of judgement, of my health, of change - and I did everything I could to suppress it, to be “normal", to find some way around it. I did okay for three years, but when I was twenty-two I really started to feel like I couldn't keep fooling myself. I kept saying, “I've woken up every day before this one as a boy/man, what's one more day tomorrow?” And in the short term, that was true. You can handle just about anything for a day. But seeing a whole life stretching out in front of you, a life of acting, feeling mismatched or out of place - it begins to suffocate a person.

I sought gender-affirming care in 2022. I sadly was not able to get the support I needed at that time. I tried again to suppress it, thinking it just wasn't meant to be, thinking I could compromise. But this time it wouldn't go away. I did everything I could to live as myself within the limitations I had, and I made progress. My friends in Salt Lake were so supportive and understanding and I can never thank them enough for that. For a time I thought that would be enough, for just my close friends to really know that part of me, but it wasn't. I remember something my dad said to me when I was a teenager and starting to deal with depression; I had expressed an interest in trying antidepressants but I was worried about the side-effects. He said that that was a reasonable fear, but that if it ever got bad enough that I didn’t care about the side effects, it was worth trying. I eventually did go on antidepressants, but I wasn’t on them for very long, because that wasn’t the root cause of the issue. After trying everything else, it got bad enough to be worth trying.

Finally on July 27th 2024 I started Hormone Replacement Therapy. This is the process of adjusting the levels of sex hormones - chiefly estrogen and testosterone - in your body. I won’t get into all the changes ‘cause it gets a bit personal, but It's been really interesting learning firsthand that everyone, born male or female, has encoded genetic traits for traits of the "opposite sex" that it just ignores unless something tells it not to. Hormone Replacement Therapy is just telling your body to use those other instructions. It’ll be a year in July, and there hasn’t been a second since where I didn’t feel like I made the right choice. Which, if you know me well, is a rare occurrence.

“How did you know?”

This one is always kind of hard to explain. Day-to-day it was hard to put a finger on. I could enumerate the times in my life that I feel fit into this puzzle, but I don’t want this to be too long. I guess the first time I really knew was probably late 2018, when I started therapy for the first time. My first therapist was non-binary - someone who doesn’t identify as a man or a woman. They didn’t push anything onto me or try to convince me of anything, they simply asked me questions about myself. But really, just meeting them was the spark. It didn’t really occur to me that I had any other options than to feel like I was put together wrong forever before I started meeting people who had felt the same way and had decided to live truthfully and as themselves. After that, it was bits and pieces falling into place, talking to my friends and them hearing me, trying out new ways of dressing and being, and it all feeling like it was rolling rocks off a pile on my chest that I hadn’t been aware was there before.

"What changed?"

Well, it wasn't a snap-decision. Like I said, two years prior to starting HRT I had sought treatment and wasn't able to get it. I'd talked to friends, therapists, doctors about what to do. The straw that broke the camel's back was something my therapist (different one) one day asked me. I had been identifying as non-binary since 2019, kind of as a compromise since I didn’t feel transitioning was feasible for me. She asked me my feelings about this and we got into it, and she asked me a very simple question.

"Are you content with that?"

I couldn’t tell her that I was. I would lie awake at night and hope that my life had been a dream, and I would wake up and be a woman who'd maybe eaten too much before bed and had a nightmare. I’d wake up in the morning and squeeze my eyes shut and try to imagine my body and my life being different, and every time when I opened my eyes I was disappointed to find that everything was the same. These are not feelings that a cisgender person - someone whose identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth - has.

Hormone Replacement Therapy has eased or eliminated a lot of these feelings. There are still things about my body that make me uncomfortable or make me feel ugly or different. Some of them are mutable, many of them aren't. Something that brings me solace in that is that people come in all shapes and sizes. There is no one way for a woman to look or be. There are cisgender women with broad shoulders, with facial hair, who are taller than most, etc.. just like there are shorter men, men who struggle to grow facial hair, men who don't look like the paragon of masculinity, men with more breast tissue than others. Looking different doesn't invalidate their identity, and that holds true for me as well.

"What does this mean for me?"

Well, for starters I use "she/her" pronouns instead of "he/him". I’ll include a resource as to what that means in case it is necessary. This is the big one really. Hearing people use he/him, or "-son" words, or "boy" or "man" or what have you, makes me feel like I've eaten a bunch of rocks. This was something I tolerated for a long time to appease others, but it’s come to a point where none of the people in my day-to-day life refer to me with those terms.

As for my name. I really tried to like "Cooper" for a long time after coming to this realization. It's a good name, and I like it conceptually, and it’s not explicitly gendered per se. But I found that so much of the part I used to play was tied up in that name, and I haven’t been able to untangle them. I used other names for a while as kind of a compromise, some of them just nicknames and others names I used in my public life as well. After much deliberation I’ve landed on “Elizabeth,” or “Liz” or whatever other truncation floats your boat. If people are normal, I might keep “Cooper” as a middle name, or maybe like a hyphenated last name? I don’t know yet, I just think it’s worth keeping around possibly in some form. The name-change process is tedious and a little expensive, so that might be up the river.

I want to emphasize: The important stuff isn’t any different. I’m not killing some person you know and emerging a completely different person. I still love playing cards with y’all at family gatherings, I love time with my parents and my sisters and my friends, I love reading and hiking and tea. This isn’t a completely new identity I’ve hidden from you, it is just a vulnerable fragile thing that I needed a deeper well of community support to feel safe inhabiting fully - especially lately, as toxic rhetoric around trans people becomes more and more commonplace. I hope this letter feels not like a confession to a lie I’ve been telling you but a sign of trust that I am extending.

Arguments

I'm aware that some might struggle with this ideologically. I’m not deaf to the inflammatory rhetoric around trans people that certain powerful political figures are using to ignite their constituency with the tried-and-true “us vs them” tactic. If you have earnest, well-meaning questions, I would be more than happy to answer them. I won't, however, argue with you. Well, I might - force of habit - but I'm going to try not to. No one but myself has any domain over my identity, and I do not believe I possess the rhetorical gift to change hearts that do not want to be changed. That said, I’m also aware that as a result of those in power having a vested interest in keeping people uneducated about their outgroups. If you want to read about my thoughts about those talking points and my responses to them with sources included, follow the link:

Arguments and refutations

If you don't feel the need to do that, thanks for reading <3

Sincerely,

Liz