Does anyone have advice on coming out to family?
So, my birthday is in early February and I want to have my chosen name on my cake- which means I have to come out sometime in the next few months to my extended family as trans.
I’m out to most of my friends and to my parents, though my parents don’t respect it at all and only a couple of my friends do.
I’ve decided that I’m going to come out via email to my entire family en masse on National Coming Out Day (Oct 11) because while my original plan was to come out to each person individually in person, it’s become very clear that I don’t have the courage for that.
I don’t really know how most of my family will react. Some people will undoubtedly be unaccepting, and some people will most likely accept me, but the vast majority of the people I’ll be contacting are wild cards. They’re liberal, but they’re baby boomers and sometimes make transphobic jokes.
Added complication is what I’ll be coming out as. My identity is odd, and it’s gotten a lot more complicated recently. I was never someone who spent a long time figuring things out. I figured out that I was trans at 13 and spent a couple months figuring out the specifics, and it never changed from there. Up until fairly recently I would have told you that I was non-binary genderfluid, or I would have told you I was non-binary. Basically, fluid in between slightly femme of agender and almost to “man” on the gender spectrum. I’ve spent the vast majority of my time feeling agender or transmasculine. However, I’ve spent the last few months spending at least 95% of my time feeling transmasculine. I haven’t changed my pronouns back from they/he to they/them all summer. That is highly abnormal for me- up until this period of time, my gender had pretty rapid fluidity. I never spent more than a couple days feeling the same way about my gender, and usually only feeling the same way for a couple hours at a time.
So, I don’t know what to tell people when I come out about my gender. Because I’ve been recently considering that maybe it has stabilized. And I also don’t know what to tell people about my pronouns. Which is a problem, because I can’t delay this while I figure it out. So if anyone has any advice on how to deal with coming out to your extended family via letter, and my specific situation, it would be greatly appreciated.
