“We all come out of the closet twice…at least twice,” is a running joke among trans women.
This was certainly true for me, as my first trip out of the closet I intended to live life as a gay boy instead of a trans girl, even though I already knew on some level I wasn’t a boy and that I most certainly liked girls. I was knowingly trading out my small closet for a slightly bigger one. Gay men were becoming increasingly accepted and loved; surely being an extremely feminine man would be close enough to being the woman I actually was? At least then I wouldn’t be in the weirdo category of “my girlfriend is a man” that I saw on Jerry Springer. Or the men in dresses I was intended to point and laugh at. Or the pathetic creatures wheeled around on news specials and movies I was expected to pity before congratulating myself for being so open minded, never someone I was intended to actually identify with. And the most damning were the perverted men who got off by wearing women’s clothes and pretending to be something they weren’t.