It is incredibly easy for me to pass as a white, cisgender, heterosexual man. Other than being white, I’m none of those other things, but the only way to get anyone to see me as anything other than that is to actively force them to acknowledge my self-described identity. One of the reasons I’m not out at work, beyond the things that some of my coworkers have done or said that make me believe they might not be the most accepting people, is that I’m just not sure I’ve got the energy to constantly correct people. When I came out to my friends, the ones I’m still friends with didn’t take much work to correct. Most of them were in the practice of using pronouns other than he/she in their daily lives and while some of them slipped up (and some still do), they catch and correct themselves most of the time. As far as I can tell, none of my coworkers practice using a wider-range of pronouns and none of them self-correct themselves. One of my ex-coworkers (for whatever reason, probably my years of isolation within the company, default to thinking of the people on my team as my coworkers and everyone else as fellow employees) who transferred off my team back in early 2021 uses they/them pronouns like I do and I constantly have to correct my coworkers when they come up in conversation. I do not expect that my coworkers would be any better when it comes to me and my pronouns, especially because I look exactly like your average Midwestern Cis-Hetero White Guy.

During a recent therapy appointment, my therapist and I talked about the fact that people assume I’m something based on my appearance and the way that this is helpful to me because people will automatically grant me a degree of privilege that most non white-and-male-passing people can’t get no matter how otherwise privileged they are. Being able to pass through life with that degree of granted privilege is useful enough that I’m not entirely convinced that what I think is (usually) contentment with my masculine presentation is not actually me choosing the easy path through life. After all, if I don’t do anything to change my appearance or presentation, I won’t have to face discrimination as actively as other people who don’t look like me do. Which could be a good thing since it will allow me to use that privilege as a shield for other people, something I’m already inclined to do, without running the risk of being seen as a sympathizer (which, to be clear, can get someone in just as much trouble as being a visible member of the group being discriminated against, but it usually doesn’t go that poorly for white masculine folks). Which could also just be me playing into the unhealth Guardian Complex I’ve got, where I feel obligated to protect or otherwise be of service to other people no matter what it costs me. After all, since I lived most of my life in denial of my feelings about my gender and sexual identity, it would be pretty easy to go right back to that. I mean, I’m still not even three years into believing that the way I feel about anything at all, let alone my internal life and sense of self, matters beyond how it might be of service to other people. It would be so easy.

Unfortunately, neither my therapist nor I have any answers beyond acknowledging how useful it might be to maintain the “white cishet male” identity in the present political and social climate which seems to be turning against not just most minorities, but against queer and trans people especially, some of whom are people I care for just as much if not more than I care for myself (which is a much more significant statement today than it would have been even two years ago). There’s a degree of undeniable utility there, in being able to just brush aside questions that most people wouldn’t be able to dodge. White Male Privilege is a powerful thing and it could be a powerful tool wielded on behalf of those without it. It would just mean lying to the world about who I am, how I feel about myself, and how I’ve chosen to identify. Because it would, actually, be different if I went back to claiming the identity I was assigned at birth. This time, I’d be actively choosing it for myself rather than just ignoring fact that there was anything to choose. I’d be repressing myself instead of being repressed by my upbringing and society at large. This time, it would hurt worse and I’d have no one to blame for that decision but myself.

This is not a crisis. This is not some awful mystery I have to solve to feel comfortable within my identity and sense of self. It’s just on my mind all the time these days. It’s something I think about more than almost anything else other than “storytelling” as a broad topic covering writing, tabletop games, and narratives in media. I do not think I’d ever really entirely return to the identity I was assigned at birth. I might correct people less than I currently do, but I’d never assume that mantle again. I just think about it a lot, as I casually think about a lot of other things, such as where it is legal for my assigned female at birth friends to get abortions, what the asylum laws of various countries are, how the United States’ political landscape is increasingly dangerous for my friends and loved ones, how to protect those same people from the ramifications of what I might do to help them, and how the end of the world might not be some grand, horrible disaster but the quiet destruction of a whole lot of lives and the worlds they contain. None of that consumes my every waking thought, but it’s difficult to deny that avoiding those thoughts feels dangerously naive these days. I might not be doing anything about it other than encouraging my friends to download some useful chat applications with a greater track record of security than the ones we’re currently using, but I’m definitely thinking about it.

I wish this month could be a joyous occasion for me. I wish I could step out into the world with some sense of pride in my identity and the people I love. I wish I wasn’t a traumatized survivor who knows just how easy it is for things to turn bad at a moment’s notice. What I am is but the end result of every moment of my past and all I can do is try to make my peace with who I am and what I feel I need to do to feel content and safe. I might not feel much pride, but at least I’m accepting of myself. That doesn’t seem like much after these three years of active and nearly constant work, but it’s a long way from the bland, empty, and unquestioned bubble I kept around my identity before then. I’ll take the progress I’ve made and try to be patient with myself as I battle what feels like simple pragmatism and is probably potentially blinding fear, but it’s a lot to hold in my mind all at once. Hopefully some time to myself, a bit of time with my loved ones at the end of the month, and some more reflection when I’ve finally got the energy for more than just my day job will help me work through whatever pessimistic part of my mind spawned this constantly present and entirely unsolvable train of thought.