hi devon, i discovered your substack recently and it's been a very enlightening and healing experience to binge read your essays, i can't put into words how much your writing has helped me. you've inspired me to have more pride in myself, so i would like to ask for some advice on how to navigate my specific situation of experiencing shame. i'm a gay trans man, but i have retreated into the closet and presented myself to others as a cis gay man for a few years. i look feminine, because i like having long hair and dressing in clothes from the women's section, and i am horrified when people try to imply that i'm a woman or female in any way for looking like this while having been CAFAB. i think i am 100% as much of a man as any cis man and there's simply no debate about it, but i don't trust the people around me, particularly other transmasculine people, to respect that.
most of the transmasc people i've had in my life so far have been openly on the more sapphic-leaning side of the spectrum. i dated my ex right before i decided to stop being out to people. he was a transmasc nonbinary person who often joked about the two of us being "lesbians" because we were both trans, and i didn't feel safe telling him that made me uncomfortable. my best friend is another transmasc nonbinary person who is sapphic, and i am especially terrified of letting him know i'm trans. the way he talks about the other trans people in his life makes me uncomfortable. he is always mentioning their AGABs and grouping all trans men in with women in a way i don't think he realises is transphobic, but i've been too afraid to mention this to him because it could lead to me outing myself to him. i'm sure he would be thrilled to know that i'm trans too, but i can't get past the horrifying sick-to-my-stomach feeling that he will never see me as a "true" man ever again if i come out to him. i'm sickened by the prospect of the people closest to me secretly viewing me as "female" and i keep having doubts about whether im strong enough to withstand the well-meaning transphobia i feel i will inevitably get from them if i tried to be open about my identity and my boundaries. i feel like lying that i'm a cis man is the only way i can get the respect i deserve, and be comfortable in my community, but i'm also sure i will never truly love myself unless i stop hiding, even if i really hate the idea of being out to people right now. i am just scared that being open necessarily means learning to be okay with my loved ones seeing me as a woman. i want to have confidence and boundaries around my identity so i can really love being a trans man, but i don't know how to get myself to that point.
You know, in times gone by, it wasn't seen as some kind of violation of self for a trans person to decide that the best option for them was to be stealth. You are a man, a fruity/feminine gay one, and right now the people in your life correctly perceive you as such.
Your being trans can be a core part of your identity that you wish for people to view your personhood through the lens of, or it can be an aspect of your backstory and how you got to become the man that you are now. (There are other options beyond these, of course, these are just two ways of conceptualizing it that come to my mind).
You cannot control how other people will react to you once they know that you are trans, and unfortunately I think your fears are not far off the mark. There is a lot of bioessentialism, transmisogyny, and anti-effiminancy within the trans community, and in my experience a lot of trans people are eager to reduce others to their gender assignment at birth then deny that is what they are doing.
If you come out as trans to your friends, you might learn things about their latent attitudes that you wish you didn't have to carry, and you might have to struggle with them a lot to get them stop saying things that reduce you to your AGAB or lump you in with women, and even then, the changes that you might see could be only superficial and designed to not offend you, but lack a deeper reconceptualization of gender that respecting you truly requires.
I used to fight these battles with both the allies and the trans people around me everyday, and though I could train a lot of people to utter the right phrases and make some of the right jokes about me (the ones that show familiarity and that they saw me as a faggot), a lot of those same people continued carrying on in a way that reduced other trans people to their AGAB all the time, and it was reflected in their politics and how they grouped me and the allowances they gave me that they didn't give others, and especially how they treated trans feminine people. Nothing that I said made it truly sink in if they didn't want to give up the power of positioning themselves as cis woman adjacent.
Personally, it bothered me deeply when trans people continued thinking and behaving this way even when they could give me some gestures of respect. I wonder if you see things like this happening among your friends, and if so how it feels. Do you see them reducing trans women to their AGAB? Are they exclusionary? Do they talk about 'female' and 'male' socialization? Do they view gay male sexuality as more predatory than sapphic sexuality? Do they disrespect the identities of trans people who are gender non-conforming, like trans butches and trans effeminate people like you who are out?
I think that ultimately you have to decide based on their conduct what you are willing to tolerate, what you have the power to confront and to change, and where it might be beneficial to locate other trans community who are more supportive of people's identities in a less essentialist way. I think that if this kind of stuff is a problem, it will be a problem regardless of whether you come out to your friends as trans or not, because clearly you are worried about them having a bad response because you've already seen them pulling that shit in the past. It sounds like their outlook on these things *already* bothers you, it is *already* unaligned with your own gender politics, and so that is a problem regardless of what you do.
I don't think it is your responsibility to politically re-educate everyone in your circle into being more transfeminist, nor is that really possible to "do" to someone who isn't already embarking on that course for themselves, and I think you can make the choices that will cause you the minimum amount of angst. Part of me suspects that the best course of action could be some combination of remaining stealth with the friends for whom that makes it possible to continue a friendship, pushing against the bioessentialism of the trans friends who seem like they could be moved a little bit on the issue and are open to being less shitty, and then also finding yourself more trans friends outside of this circle, including probably some trans feminine people and trans women who care about these issues and, at least in my experience, are a little more likely to get it and to have experienced some of the feelings you are experiencing.
I hope you find what works for you. If any of my suggestions here really rankle you (for example, if the idea of remaining stealth feels imprisoning or itchy), that's really useful information about what you actually would want to do. But I don't think that on principle not being out about being trans is itself dishonest, a sign that you are ashamed of yourself, or anything like that. Sometimes it just means you have accurately gauged what is best for your situation.