Out 100% now! Came out to my last two cousins on my list
I think my ‘coming out’ story is now complete. As far as I can tell, I am now out to all of my living relatives, and to all old friends who I am still in meaningful contact with. And the last two family members to find out I have transitioned - a pair of first cousins - are now fully accepting and supportive of my new life. Yay! In the entire coming out process, the only person I ‘lost’ was a brother in law who hated me to begin with.
These two two female first cousins are the daughters of my dad’s only brother. The older one, ‘T’, was just a year or so older than myself, with her little sister, ‘C’, being a year or two younger. I liked them both, but we did not see much of each other growing up, because they and their parents lived in Southern California, while my parents, my little sister and I lived at the northern edge of Oregon. We would see each other occasionally on Summer vacation trips or holiday visits, but usually the physical distance of a thousand miles between our families kept us from interacting all that much. It was often several years between face to face contacts.
It didn’t get any better as we grew up and became adults. Both girls married and moved even further away, as did I. Aside from an occasional ‘Christmas newsletter’, we did not have much contact. At one point, the younger sister, ‘C’, divorced, and later spent several years living with a lesbian partner. Her older sister was apparently okay with that, but we had no real reason to discuss our daily lives. Younger sister later broke up with her lesbian Partner, but they remained friends, and that cousin eventually married a man again. But I was so deep in the closet myself the whole time that I never came out to either cousin. With one clearly being openly bisexual, and the other having no open problems with her sister being queer, I was pretty sure, as I started to come out to friends and family, that both would be okay with my own coming out. But my contact info for both of them was so outdated that I had no way to inform them. I mostly heard about their lives through my little sister, who remained in occasional contact with the two cousins.
My little sister’s husband rejected me when he first heard I was crossdressing, and he gives my sister a lot of grief over me being queer at all. So as a result, my sister did not want me posting to my old FB account any open statements about me transitioning. Sister accepts me, but her hubby would give her an even worse time if he knew I fully transitioned. After I transitioned, I created an entirely new FB account for my new female life, and I ceased updating or even looking at my old male FB account. So that route of contact - posting anything to my old FB account - was also useless for contacting my distant, out of contact cousins.
The bottom line here is that while I liked those cousins, and they liked me, they remained firmly at the bottom of the priority list for people to come out to, as I transitioned. I had no reason not to tell them, yet no incentive to reach out and contact them. Since I first started coming out to friends and family eight years or so ago, I would see an occasional Christmas card from the older cousin, but I usually lost the envelope and return address before I could get around to writing a ‘coming out letter’ to send them.
As I said, however, my little sister - who accepts and supports my having transitioned, but is still struggling to understand my changes - still occasionally talked to both cousins. And she had my permission to tell anyone we both knew who had not yet heard of my transition, as the opportunity arose. Well, last Friday my little sis was on the phone with cousin ‘C’, and the topic of me came up. My little sis filled that cousin in. And that cousin immediately sent my Ceera account a FB friend request.
It has been so long, and we were so out of contact, that for a few days I just sat on the friend request. I did not recognize the woman in the profile photos (had not seen a photo of that cousin for several decades), nor did I know her newly remarried surname, and her given name is a fairly common one. Without accepting the request, her privacy settings did not allow me to see what friends we might have in common. The posts to her FB account that I could see showed no apparent connections with me or my family. And there had been no personal messages from the cousin, explaining her request for contact. So it looked like a random friend request from an out of area stranger. Then a text message from my sister, this Monday, informed me she had talked to cousin ‘C’ about me, and what her new surname was. I quickly accepted the cousin’s friend request.
Within minutes I was in a deep and meaningful two hour long text chat with cousin ‘C’. Her first text message was one of love and support, including a complement on how beautiful I am now! So I filled her in on the whole arc of events leading to my transition, and asked her to pass all of it on to her big sister. She literally called her big sis on the phone and read our text chat to her as it took place. And big sis, cousin ‘T’, quickly also sent a supportive friend request and first message. So I had a great, hour long text chat with her, as well!
I am so happy to finally be ‘out’ 100% to all my active friends and family. As of today, the only people who have not been told of my transition are a handful of high school, Navy or college friends, none of whom have been in any closer contact than those two cousins for the last three decades or more. Yay!
