IDENTITY AND SITUATION ARE DIFFERENT

Upon taking a course called Coming Out, I found myself reading the course blurb with a fair bit of apprehension. As a queer student, I already feel rather dissected by media, academia, psychology, and society. I went through a fair amount of self-dissection in order to come to terms with who I am: did I really want to go through that again in a public setting with grades on the line?

In the end, I needed the credits and I felt comfortable enough in myself to give it a try. I’ve been through a lot of crap, and a lot of people giving me crap: one course isn’t going to leave me confused again. On the other hand: I’m 27. There’s a lot of younger students in this class. And that’s where this essay is formed, because while I feel like I’m on solid footing, I know other people aren’t, and that leads to concern.

You see, I’m queer. I’m not shy about stating it, but I’m also not the sort to bring it up. I like being known as a scientist, or as a writer, or a knitter, or many of the other things that I have accomplished, rather than the simple fact that I am something. It’s like people defining me on the shape of my thumb: I did nothing to earn queerness. It’s part of me.

Being queer definitely has impacted my life, in some not-good ways, and in some good ways, but it can’t be cured. It’s not something treatable, it’s not something that was done to me. It’s not based on legality or politics. This is how I define identity in this essay: identity is immutable. It’s not going to change. You can try to suppress identity, but it’s not going to leave, just lurk under the surface. No amount of conversion camp is going to make it change, it just might make it hide. I wasn’t ‘queered’, either: it wasn’t done to me, it just is, has been, will be.

On the other side is situation. These are things I’ve experienced or have lived through. They’re there, and they’re real, and often impact my life greatly, but I wasn’t born with them, and they are based on external structures, like politics, or can be influenced by external means, like medication. In my case, I was sexually abused, and I have PTSD. Both of these are situations, in that one was done to me and the other is treatable[1].

Other situations include my chronic illness, and growing up poor, in a broken home. All of these were done to me, were addressable, and are influenced by external forces. For someone else, situation might include their immigration status, or addiction. Race would be an identity, while immigration status would be a situation. Sometimes they intersect like this: I’m queer – an identity – and have been abused for it – a situation.

And now, as Monty Python put it, something entirely different.

Coming out, as a phrase, was used in the context of a young woman entering society. Women would be very much sheltered until their education and age were considered to be sufficient for entering proper, polite society. Jane Austen, for example, has a scene in Pride and Prejudice in which Lady Catherine is dismayed that all the Bennet sisters are out at once; surely they should come out in sequence as they marry and the family can afford to make proper connections for them each in turn! (Grace)[2]

This phrasing was then adopted by queer men (Babraw)[3]; to come out was to actually come in – an entry into queer society. In this case, coming out was a celebration of community while also being a statement of identity.

Now, language is mutable, and coming out changed over the years. I’m a fan of fluid language: I will never understand the mentality that words must stay the same. In this case, coming out came to mean stating one’s identity, and as such changed from an idea revolving around community to an idea revolving around one person: the person coming out. I admit I’m a little sorry to see the community implications be lost to the phrase, but the LGBTQIA+ community has shown itself to be enduring regardless of the language used to describe it[4].

 However, I don’t like using coming out to describe things other than identity, and I am about to explain why.

 As I’ve previously stated, I battle a mental illness – PTSD. I also have dealt with sexual assault and being born under the poverty line. All of these are situations.

The thing about situations, especially ones which are bad, and especially ones that deal with mental health, is that they mess with one’s head. Depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction: all of them work really hard to make one feel like one is defined by them, that there’s no coming out of the hole one is in, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

In fact, when attempting to encourage other friends to get help for mental illness (including addiction), one of the biggest struggles I come across is just convincing them that they will exist when the illness is treated. Mental illness works to convince the sufferer that the illness is their personality. Neil Hilborn put it this way: “I'd still be me without it but I'd be so boring.” (Hilborn)[5]  

When we place coming out about identity in the same space as coming out about situations, we run the risk of mistaking situations with identity. This puts sexual orientation and gender identity on the same level as mental illness, which is a stigma the queer community has been trying to rid ourselves of for years. My Human Diseases textbook was only one edition back, but it still had Frigidity as a listed disease. The newer version still has Frigidity, but at least it has a portion that states that if a person identifies as asexual, it may be assumed that their lack of interest in sex is not considered an affliction or disease.

Often the first step to addressing a situation is to accept that it has happened and then refuse it access to defining one’s identity. Some situations can’t be fixed. My history of sexual abuse isn’t going to go away. But it’s also not something I was born with, and it doesn’t have to be carried throughout my entire life as though I were now identified by my pain. My PTSD is a syndrome, a disease, one which I can manage with therapy and self-care and medication. I have accepted I have it: now I treat it and refuse it control over who I am.

To allow a situation to become an identity often leads to accepting a situation as unchangeable. Identity never changes. I accept that the plight of the undocumented is a situation. I refuse to make it an identity: to do so would be to assume that America cannot change the issue. In the same way, I refuse to accept mental illnesses (including addiction), traumas like abuse, and other situations like poverty or broken homes as identities. They can be addressed, treated, prevented, changed. In fact, we owe it to society to work to change them.

However, if you try to change my identity? You can try. You can try to pry the queer off me with a crowbar. I’ve been threatened with corrective rape before, but I can tell you what it would do: absolutely nothing. I’m here. I’m queer. Nothing’s going to change that, and what’s more? Nothing should. Identity is made to be accepted, not addressed, not changed, not fought[6]. It is deeper than our DNA.

This is my issue with using coming out to address both sexuality and sexual abuse, or mental illness and gender, in the same class. If you’d named the course Dealing with Stigma: an Exploration into Facing Society’s Expectations, or some such title, you’d have done perfectly well. A person explaining their sexuality to disbelieving parents does have a lot in common with a person explaining that they need therapy to parents who don’t believe in ‘big pharma’. There’s an overlap in experience, and I don’t deny that in the least. However, I very firmly believe that using coming out to describe that experience disservices both those who are dealing with situations and those who are revealing identity: in the case of the LGBTQIA+ community, it puts our identities in the same, ‘curable’, ‘treatable’ space as diseases, and in the case of those struggling with situations, it places those situations in an unchallengeable space that should be reserved for identities.

Everyone has situations and identities. They overlap, they intertwine, identity leading prejudice leading to situation: race has racism leading to poverty, queerness has phobias leading to abuse. There’s a lot to be said for those who have to deal with the stigmas, assumptions, and prejudice from both identities and situations, but they shouldn’t be equalised. We deserve better than to make our situations part of our inherent being, and we deserve to hold our identities unquestioned.