Along With Pain, The Joy of Stealth

Reflections on how the internet has changed the nature of coming out as trans, and why trans people have the right to figure themselves out on our own terms.
A person in a snowglobe looking out to a rainbow.
Tallulah Fontaine

 

Ahead of the publication of her debut memoir, Fairest (out today from Viking Books), them.'s founding executive editor Meredith Talusan shares the below essay about the joys and perils of passing as cisgender, and how the internet has changed the nature of coming out.

I transitioned in 2002, a time when social media was still in its infancy, before the details of our lives weren’t routinely plastered onto walls or timelines for all the world to see. Back then, it was still possible to transition in your 20s in a city like Boston, then have the choice to escape your former life and adopt a new one, or going stealth, as it has come to be known to many in the trans community, a term that has come to be used more rarely because it’s a lot harder to do conveniently now. It’s a word that connotes weaponry and deception, as though one were a missile or a spy.

Looking back now, the feasibility of going stealth feels to me like the biggest difference between what it was like to transition in 2002 versus 2020, even though I used to think of the period of my life when I didn’t disclose being trans to the world as only hardship, only pain. Yet despite how much living stealth weighed on me psychologically, I now recognize that the seven-year period when I didn’t have to talk about being trans was crucial to my being able to live a more peaceful life, and prioritize parts of myself other than my gender.

Not that I embraced stealth voluntarily. Despite the general expectation in 2002 that trans women who can pass for cisgender would end up going stealth, I fully intended to be out after surgery that summer, right before I moved to San Francisco from Boston to start the visual arts MFA program at the California College of the Arts. Being trans was a crucial part of my art practice, whether in photographs that queried my relationship to my new womanhood or a performance piece where I knitted a full-length gown and unraveled it stitch by stitch as I danced around a victrola.

I was supposed to be questioning what was real and what was artificial when it came to our ideas of femininity, but I was also showing off a body that could no longer be identified as belonging to a man. That piece was my way of telling the world to get over it, that there was nothing to see here, that the blond waif with the penis was gone. My body was now within the acceptable parameters of people’s expectations, my breasts and hips sufficiently developed, my face adequately soft.

Yet ironically, passing as cis when you’re publicly disclosed makes you an even greater subject of gossip and wonder. When you’re visibly trans, you deal with a host of problems far worse than what I experienced, but you do know who your enemies are because you can see the animosity in their faces. It’s also easier to know your friends are truly yours, because they wouldn’t hang out with you otherwise, and don’t care about being around you even if the world judges them for socializing with trans people.

When you’re out and you pass, you just never know when you’ll find out that your oldest friend won’t let you sleep over at her apartment when you visit because it makes her roommate uncomfortable, or that there are times when you wouldn’t be invited to girls’ night out even when all the other girls are, or that a guy friend you thought was cool would take another friend of his aside and “warn” him about you after the friend hits on you at a party where you’re just minding your own business. For me, being out and passing entailed constant betrayals large and small, reminders that so many people in your life accept or even love you, but only so far, because they don’t care for you as much as they care about being cisgender and protecting others of their kind, that their regard for you is conditioned on you looking and acting cis.

It might seem unintuitive that my reaction to these experiences was to go stealth when I moved to New York in 2005. It was unintuitive to me; I thought of what I was doing at the time just as being more private about my past. But I didn’t expect how much those friends who knew me from before would take my cues and not talk about who I had been, and by the time I moved a few hours upstate in Ithaca for grad school at Cornell a year later, the shroud over my transition had been fully draped.

The image that comes to mind when I think of that period from fall 2006 to spring 2014 is of a snow globe, maybe in part because it snows in Ithaca eight months out of the year. I was aware that the reality I’d constructed for myself — of being an ordinary, cisgender woman in grad school — was in the end just an illusion, but that didn’t matter as long as I stayed within the confines of that globe, as long as the actual, painful reality around that artificial utopia didn’t intrude. And with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to accept that this was exactly what I wanted for a while, to be encased in glass so that a world that was unkind and violent toward trans people couldn’t destroy me.

 

Not many trans people have the option to go stealth, especially now that the minute details of our lives are liable to reach so many more people through the internet and social media. Were I transitioning now, I would have to disclose to thousands of people online, rather than just send an email to fifty people at work and a few dozen friends. I would need to decide whether to delete the digital traces of my past, the hundreds of photos, dozens of videos, and thousands of posts that refer to my gender, as well as cut ties with numerous people I’ve only interacted with online.

Maybe this isn’t as necessary as it used to be, as more and more of the public have come to accept and even embrace trans people. But at least once a month, I come across stories of betrayal among trans folks I follow online, whether cis women accusing trans women of acting out of male privilege, trans women complaining that male acquaintances assume they’re always looking for sex, or a trans friend who’s told that she has an obligation to disclose her identity to anyone who flirts with her.

It may not be practical or desirable for trans folks today to go stealth, but I do think it’s important to take breaks from the judgment of the world, especially early in one’s transition. This would mean taking time off from social media, surrounding yourself with a carefully-vetted group of friends, only going to virtual and real-life spaces where you feel safe. It may even mean living in a different place, for those who have the means and just for a little while, so you can try out being a different gender in an environment that doesn’t bear too many reminders of the past. The long term effects of being stealth may not be worth the temporary relief it brings, but it’s possible to gain the benefits of greater privacy and contemplation without hiding your past from everyone.

Because the longer I stayed stealth, the harder it became to be honest about my past with anyone, even with new friends I’d grown to trust and love who didn’t know I was trans. I also found it so hard not to speak up for the trans community, and to stay away from other trans people during that period of my life. It was as if a volcano had formed in the middle of my snow globe, one whose magma was made up of the pent-up lies and shame from hiding my trans identity, threatening to erupt and destroy the carefully constructed world I had built for myself.

The eventual eruption, when I began writing on trans issues in the spring of 2014, didn’t turn out to be as harmful as I expected at first. But less than a year later, my graduate school co-op and its residents who I’d lived with peacefully until I outed myself, chose to protect a harasser who lived in my dorm over me, and tried to illegally evict me when I protested. It did not surprise me that something like this would happen, but I did not expect that so many friends would be at my side, that the person who is now my spouse would move to Ithaca in the dead of winter to support me. I did not expect the world to listen to what I have to say to the degree that it has, for BuzzFeed News to hire me as its first trans staff writer, and this very publication as its founding executive editor, and for me to have the chance to tell my story in a book-length memoir.

The power of my voice to impact the world for trans people is one I’ve come to cherish, and that power would not exist if I weren’t out and proud to be trans. But I also know that much of my fuel comes from those years when I was able to take stock of my life without the world’s intrusion. I hope for a world where no trans person should feel the need to hide who they are. But in that world, I also hope that trans people allow themselves the opportunity to spend parts of their lives away from public scrutiny, not because they’re ashamed, but because no one should feel any obligation to reveal painful details about their past, and everyone has the right to figure themselves out on their own terms.


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