Our Bodies, Ourselves (21 page)

The primary risk factor for breast cancer is age; other risks include family history, increase in body mass, and not having given birth. Despite the presumption that the latter two factors may put lesbians at higher risk for breast cancer, there is no randomized controlled study that shows an increased risk of breast cancer in lesbian women, and more research is needed.
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Coming out is the process of accepting and affirming our sexual orientation or gender identity and deciding how open we will be about it. Before we come out to others, we usually come out to ourselves by acknowledging that we are attracted to people of the same sex, or that we don't identify with gender traits considered appropriate for our sex and/or the sex we were assigned at birth.

Because we grow up in a culture that assumes everyone is heterosexual and that gender always matches sex, becoming aware of and accepting our identity is often a gradual process. Coming out can happen at any age or stage in life. One woman who fought her sexual orientation says:

Coming out of the closet as a lesbian was the hardest thing I ever did. I tried everything to “avoid” being gay. I tried to stay away from women I was attracted to, but finally, after many years, I began to feel much more comfortable with the idea.

Another woman says she couldn't come out until she'd actually had a woman lover, “which was an annoying chicken-egg thing in that not being out made it hard to meet women.”

A twenty-nine-year-old woman remembers a similar dynamic that slowed her down:

Part of the reason my girlfriend and I took so long to connect sexually was that when we first met, she thought I was straight. I didn't know how to correct her. As a teenager, when I developed intense crushes on girls and women I knew, I wondered whether I was a lesbian, but discarded that idea because I also had feelings for boys. I
thought about identifying as bi but was at a loss about how to back up assertions of that identity with “proof,” since I didn't have any experience with either men or women. When I found myself falling for her I felt tremendous anxiety not about how I felt, but about how I could prove to her, without any previous experience with women, that I was sexually interested. I also questioned my own inner certainty that she was who I desired, and that my desire was sexual in nature—a self-doubt I don't think I would have had if the person I was drawn to had been a guy. I don't think I would have thought to myself, “Oh my god, what if I find out I'm just not into guys??”

Some of us come out to ourselves more than once. We may come out as lesbian or bisexual, for example, then later as transgender or transsexual, or vice versa.

The process of questioning our sexual orientation or gender identity can be extremely challenging, but accepting ourselves for who we are is often a relief. After attempting suicide more than once, this woman made a decision:

At the age of forty-five I declared myself female and, in a sane and sober state, worked on matching my body, soul, and spirit into one complete female. It took me five years. Today my body is mine…. My birth certificate reads “female.”

Letting other people know about our gender identity or sexual orientation can be challenging and life-changing. Each of us must decide individually how much we want to share with our family, friends, and acquaintances.

It took me until I was twenty-seven to decide that I am a lesbian and very proud of it. The coming-out process meant that I gained friends and lost friends. Family made choices to continue their relationships with me or not. Either way, I grew as a woman who loved women. I'm now forty years young and am enjoying being with the woman of my dreams. I cannot fathom what took me so long.

Some of us come out in relative ease and feel our families' embrace:

I'd only realized that there were female-to-males out there about two months before. (All my life, I figured that a lot of girls wanted to be boys, and that male-to-females had so much attention, because who would want to give up being male?) But that day my mother was cooking sauce. We're one of those Italian families, I guess, and I offer to stir …Hypnotically, stirring, I start talking, and the next thing I know, I've told her. She wasn't thrilled, and almost four years later, she's still not, but she's my strongest ally in my family. She's just a great mom.

Others find that even liberal family members have trouble accepting the changes:

My dad …was big into civil rights in the 1960s (as a white male), marched in Chicago and Washington, etc. But he's had a lot of trouble being okay with my being trans and queer, even though he pretends he doesn't because (I assume)
it doesn't fit with his worldview of himself as an educated, liberal activist.

One woman warns of feeling pressured to come out:

“More people coming out will relieve the stigma” is something I see a lot. But coming out is dangerous and not possible for a lot of people because of society. For people who can come out and be open, that is great, and I do agree that it helps to diminish stigma, but the burden for fixing problematic social attitudes should not be on the victims of those attitudes!

Another has delayed telling her parents:

I am now a freshman in college and still haven't come out to my parents. A couple of years ago, my father asked me if I was a lesbian. With much hesitation, I answered, “No,” because I was scared …He said, “Good, because I don't want a fucking faggot for a kid.” This statement tore me apart and has delayed my decision to come out to my parents. Most everyone who knows me (including my siblings) knows my orientation. I am currently waiting to tell my parents, for fear that they will kick me out or stop paying for my college.

© Elizabeth P. Kamphausen

Some transsexuals have no choice but to come out, because the physical changes are often quite visible. The public nature of the coming-out process can be enormously difficult. The geographer Petra Doan says of her first day back on the job after gender affirmation surgery.

As I entered the building I felt I was entering the eye of a hurricane, at the calm center of a turbulent storm of gendered expectations. As I walked down the hall I could hear conversation in front of me suddenly stop as all eyes turned to look at the latest “freak show.” As I passed each office there was a moment of eerie quiet, followed by an uproar as the occupants began commenting on my appearance. Some people just stared, a few others told me how brave I was, and one person told me that I looked “just like a woman.” Another gave me a taste of what it means to be objectified by telling me proudly that I was his very first transsexual.
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The experience of living as a lesbian/same gender loving woman varies greatly based on class, gender, race, religion, (dis)ability, and other aspects of our lives. Women of color, for example, are more often judged or rejected by their home communities and at the same time often experience racial discrimination within queer communities.

I was the only openly queer African-American person at my college. When I came out sophomore year, my black friends were supportive yet oftentimes more reserved around me. Many were very religious, and very socially conservative. Others had never met a queer person before. There was always something unspoken between us—Was I still as black as they were? Was my white girlfriend a sign that I had betrayed my race, black men, my friends? Who were these new white queer people that I was now spending time with? Many of my black friends became my closest allies as they learned and grew with me. Those who didn't I lost touch with quickly. But my race will never be separated from my sexual orientation, and vice versa.

The African-American poet and activist Pat Parker wrote in
Movement in Black
about her dream of a society that would embrace her multiple identities:

If I could take all my parts with me when I go somewhere, and not have to say to one of
them, “No, you stay home tonight, you won't be welcome, because I'm going to an all-white party where I can be gay, but not Black.” Or “I'm going to a Black poetry reading, and half of the poets are antihomosexual,” or thousands of situations where something of what I am cannot come with me. The day all the different parts of me can come along, we would have what I would call a revolution.
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Many women of color find ways to live openly in both worlds and draw support from an increasing number of queer communities of color.

Some people think that queer and trans are Western concepts and that femme equals looking like Barbie, but that's not how I see it all, as a South Asian queer femme woman. My models for my gender are my grandmother and great-aunties who organized for independence from Britain and [for] labour and women's rights—in short skirts and bobbed hair—in Sri Lanka and Malaysia in the twenties…. When I hold my hot-pink “Desi divas against war and racism” sign at the antiwar rally, I am continuing that tradition.

Lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people with disabilities face additional challenges, including homophobia or transphobia within the disability community. Events organized by able-bodied communities are often not fully accessible or not sensitive to everyone's needs.

I think if I was just queer it might be easy for me to say, well, we just need to end discrimination against queer people, and we just need straight people to see that we are just like them. Whereas, because I'm queer and I have a disability, it's like all of a sudden I'm like, Ya know what? We have this whole bullshit idea of normal that really doesn't apply to anybody…. Nobody really fits into that anyway and I especially don't and there is no way I'm going to even if discrimination against queer people ends.
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Fat women face size discrimination within both queer and straight communities. People may assume that we're queer because we can't find a man, or that we're asexual.

I am a white, college-educated, twenty-five-year-old queer nonbinary trans person with disabilities living in Northern California. I'm also fat, an advocate for size acceptance. It really is frustrating how much perceptions of our bodies play into our perceptions about worthiness for relationships. I've definitely experienced that “I'm so lucky to be with someone who isn't repulsed by me” feeling, and I've also had that exploited; people have used me, secure in the knowledge that I won't protest because I am afraid of the consequences. And, for the most part, I like my body! I am just aware that the social constructs which surround it make other people think that it is less than acceptable.