For all that I’ve been during my undergrad career, being completely honest about myself hasn’t been one of them.
Yet when I entered grad school—and by extension, the wider world of academia—I found that there was a more pressing demand for authenticity. There were consistent prompts to be open about your identity: to establish your positionality in relation to research, to equity issues, and to peers in order to make discussions on personal experiences much richer.
Although it sounded simple, the actual act of defining myself felt like dislodging a skeleton from my closet. There’s something so uniquely tricky about being non-binary, or in general, queer. It’s an identifier that lends itself well to invisibility. It’s not as consistently present through daily perceptions as race. So, it often goes unacknowledged, and its absence from programming does little to help bring it into the spotlight. How do you do it then—how do you accept academia’s demand to be truthful about who you are when there’s no good way to gauge what the reaction will be? Silence doesn’t yield any evidence that is explicitly positive or negative.
To me, coming out has never been an act so much as it has been a question. It’s a willingness to ask: Do you still care about me? Or did you always believe that, in some way, that I was a bit too odd? But it’s also a question that’s only posed after hours of careful listening, picking up on subtle cues to ensure that even if it’s a rejection, then there’s still a safe way to retreat.
As uncomfortable as the demand for the authentic self initially was, I found that it reignited an old, personal grievance—It’s tiring wearing a face that isn’t your own.
I figured out my gender identity back in high school, still then an awkward child parading my way into adulthood. Despite my youth though, I was aware of how queerness was perceived. I wasn’t ignorant to my classmates’ comments about how being transgender was synonymous with being delusional. I didn’t miss how one of my teachers expressed disdain about changing pronouns. So, I fixed myself into a person that I had long outgrown. It became habitual to leave a part of me behind when it came to schooling.
There hadn’t been a reason for academics and my personal identity to converge as clearly in my life until now. After the first few weeks, I came to the realization that admitting that I was queer may be a demand from academia, though perhaps it was also something that I needed. It was a challenge to both be firm in who I was, but to also be prepared to carve out a space for myself in grad school despite the lack of signs that I’d be welcome.
So, I started my journey by seeking out community through a queer book club. It was as low-stakes a beginning as it could be, and though the words felt foreign on my tongue, it was a relief getting them out.
“I’m non-binary,” I said in my first introduction.
Maybe it was the knowledge that there were other queer people—people going through the same turmoil that I was—but slowly, it got easier to let my identity bleed into my academic life. I spoke of queer theory whenever it was possible, and by the end of the semester, I even decided that I would overhaul my current research topic to focus on it, further cementing that link to academia. There was something reassuring about knowing that there was a group that would accept me in grad school if no one else did.
During one of my last classes, we were tasked with sharing a positionality statement as part of a wider project. When it came to my turn, despite my shaking, I managed to admit it. It was fueled by nearly a decade’s worth of exhaustion.
“Here’s my re-introduction, I’m queer.”
And it was unmistakably honest.