I came out to my brother while on vacation in FL. Of all my siblings, I’ve had the best relationship with him.
I was scared out of my senses just thinking about it. It wasn’t easy.
My younger brother is and always has been a ‘bad-ass’; an old school conservative fightin’ American male. I’m 6’3”/ 215lb and an athlete. He’s smaller but I wouldn’t want to have to fight him. Three yrs ago at age 55 he knocked a guy out with 2 punches on the street; something he’s been doing for a long time. Tough and takes no shit.
Letting him know held a risk of a bad, even violent reaction. If he reacted, “I should just kick your ass right now.”, I would not be surprised.
The first thing he picked up on was my pierced ears. He hadn’t seen me in about 2 yrs. He asked what THAT’S all about.
Yesterday morning over coffee he initiated a discussion about transgenders. “Hey I saw on your FB page a reply of support you sent some transgender Marine.” OMG. I thought I’d adequately sanitized my social network. So began a few sentence discussion on TG.
My brother was predictable in his response. TG was a mental illness. That these “guys” were just messed up men. That the govt shouldn’t let TGs serve in the military, nor provide “free sex change operations.” I’m certain you’ve heard the same anti-TG lines before. I was disappointed, perhaps offended, at it but didn’t blurt out anything that might give me away.
Later I was walking around with no shoes. He spied my painted toenails. I tried to “explain it away” as a way to cover ugly toenail fungus. He bought it for a while, I think.
I spent the day pondering whether to come out to him. It bothered me that I failed to stand up and challenge his assertions. I knew better. I didn’t want to ruin the weekend. I passed on the opportunity to inform him about the realities of transgender peoples. But I would.
I built up to it. Late in the day I asked him to go down to the local sports bar for a drink.
Our first drinks were about half finished and we’d chatted for a while. I sprung my confession.
I told him that for most of my adult life I thought I was possibly gay, but it wasn’t really “that”. I said, “ This is going to be tough for you to believe, but I am a crossdresser. I wear women’s clothing.”
He gave me a laser-beam of a surprised stare. Disbelief, but it made what he saw of me make a little more sense..
He looked up to me, as little brothers do. I was the “family star”, being a career military man and pilot. I’d played college sports. According to him, I was the least likely human being EVER to come out as a crossdresser.
We talked. We talked about (of course) recently famous TG’s like Jenner and Beck. We talked about how this came to be, the motivations, and as best I could explain the “why”. We drank. I tried to explain that transgenderism is REAL; that the people who experience it are honest, not faking it for a fad. We discussed non-binary gender. We discussed it all. It’s difficult for muggles to wrap their brain around how a man could feel like and believe themselves to be female. For the CD or TG, it’s second nature but hard to convey.
It went well. My brother understood. He appreciated the brute honesty and that I respected him enough to not continue The Lie. He still loved me regardless and always would.
Coming Out removes the load and stress of pretending and hiding. Such a total relief to not carry it inside. There will be more questions. We are brothers. No doubt we will continue to talk about it and all the questions that naturally come with it.
