By Meghan Serceki
October 11 marks the 33rd anniversary of National Coming Out Day. Each year, this is an opportunity for LGBTQ+ individuals and their allies to celebrate the courage it takes to share one’s whole, true self with the world. One of the people I would like to recognize is my friend, Magdalene Amelia. I have known her most of my life, but did not know she was a woman until she came out to herself and then, gradually, to the world within the past year.
Magdalene and I grew up together in a small town in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. While I moved at the end of middle school, she stayed and graduated high school there. There were about 700 students in her class, and out of that only one person was openly queer. In this environment, she says, “The people are so conservative that almost no one felt safe coming out. It definitely kept me in a nice little — not even walk-in closet, more like those little wardrobes built into the wall.”
She recalls early indications of her transness: looking in the mirror at age 10 and hoping that the doctors had missed something and that she would go through “girl puberty” instead, wondering if taking her mom’s birth control would cause her to develop a chest. These thoughts persisted and grew as my friends and I did a makeover on her and she saw herself presenting as femme, yet she kept them safely tucked away and written off in her own mind. She didn’t realize questioning her gender was even an option because, for her, “at the time, it really wasn’t.”
It wasn’t until moving to Los Angeles for college and living there a few years that she allowed herself to truly give credibility to her own feelings. She was done up by friends for a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and when she got home she realized how much she loved looking like that, how she didn’t want to take it off. For the first time, she allowed the thought to live in her mind, to take up room and to feel real.
When the pandemic hit, she was left alone with these thoughts and spent a lot of time discovering the aspects to who she is that she had kept hidden from everyone, including herself. The final factor was seeing a trans woman’s tweet about how much she wished she had accepted herself while in college, and deciding that she would not have the same regret. National Coming Out Day 2021 will be exactly one year and two days since she accepted that she’s trans.
Coming out to her friends, she grew increasingly comfortable being her fully authentic self. She started by telling her close friends, then slowly opened up to more people in her day-to-day life. She controlled who she expressed it to and when, easing herself into the process. When coming out to people in her own generation and in her college setting, she says “it’s kind of comically easy because I think we have less of the negative preconceived notions.”
However, when she felt it was time to tell her parents she felt a lot of fear — not because she didn’t think they’d be accepting but because she didn’t want them to be disappointed or feel like they no longer knew her. It was a long process explaining it to her parents and getting them to understand what she feels and why transitioning is important to her, but now that she has she feels she no longer has to hide herself.
Since then, she has legally changed her name, presents femme all the time, and is transitioning. Being out, she claims, “feels weird to call freeing, but I finally can interact with the world as myself.”
Coming out is always daunting, and it is never the same for any two people. There is no guidebook, but by sharing our stories we might find support in one another or similarities among us. Being open about our own experiences is one of the most important things we can do not only for ourselves but also for others. We never know who in our lives might be questioning their gender or sexuality, or even dealing with other difficult situations in general. By creating a safe space and opening that line of communication, we can build a support system for everyone and work towards a more accepting future.