Can I Offer You An Egg In This Trying Time?

April 1, 2023 1:00 PM

On the memetic rhetoric of transgender coming-out comics... but a lot more readable than the subtitle makes it seem like it will be.

On July 17th, 2020, at 10:10 PM–Eastern Standard Time, mind you–a transgender friend of mine sent me a link to a webcomic, saying that it felt very relatable to her. So, since I wanted to be a good friend and try to understand her situation a little bit better, I read it… and immediately plunged into an eleven-day-long panic attack. This comic said things to me openly that I’d never said to anyone, ever. I was rung like a struck bell. And, at the end of those eleven days, when I said to my therapist, “Melissa, I don’t think I’m cis,” her response was a simple, gentle, “I don’t think you are either.”

I had never suspected I might be transgender. I had never once crossdressed. Never once knowingly wished I was a woman. And yet, here I stand before you all, trans as hell and proud of it.

I am part of what we are now beginning to recognize to be a demographic tidal wave that will, in the next five to ten years, reshape higher education as we know it. Transgender people, and especially transgender youth, are recognizing and actualizing our identities at absolutely unprecedented rates, catalyzed by a perfect storm of quarantine isolation, social media communication, and new ways of describing the trans experience. This talk sets out to examine one of these new modes and how it functions, both to foster community through shared experience, and to provide trans people who haven’t yet realized their identities with the vocabulary and the tools to effectively question their gender. As you might imagine from the session title, I am speaking, of course, of the transgender coming-out comic.

posted by aniola (16 comments total)

Really great post. Thanks, aniola!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:28 PM on April 1, 2023

I remember reading that as it came out, bcause Real Life Comics is excellent, and hoping that although it doesn't apply to me it would help others. Apparently so.
posted by PennD at 2:58 PM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

Here's the audio version.
posted by aniola at 3:24 PM on April 1, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read Mae Dean's coming-out comics too, and there's one reason why they didn't catapult me into transition just like they did to the author, Zoe Wendler: because they were just a few months too late for that. March 31, 2020 wasn't just Transgender Day of Visibility, it was the opportunity I took for my big, public, coming-out announcement as one of those millions of eggs, just like Mae Dean, who hatched during the stress of the COVID era.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:47 PM on April 1, 2023 [13 favorites]

Fantastic read, thank you.
posted by signsofrain at 6:02 PM on April 1, 2023

Another one cracked by that comic here. I was already on the edge of it, and then this was the final, inevitable smashing, and shortly after I realized I was Jen.

I came out to some other people badly which I will always regret.
posted by mephron at 6:07 PM on April 1, 2023 [7 favorites]

That Egg webcomic was featured in a FPP here around the summer of 2020. I remember it well. I read it cover to cover in one sitting. It really helped me.
posted by hypnogogue at 8:25 PM on April 1, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm reminded of a theory I read about comics a while ago. I can't remember where, but I'll do my best to summarise. It's that comics and illustrations are the best way to share an instructional series of steps. Because images are a lighter cognitive load than words, but photos and film are too specific and distract the reader with irrelevant (and easily dated) details in fashion or backgrounds. This is why airplane emergency instructions are illustrations and not photos - who cares what you're wearing, the important bit is how to put on an oxygen mask.

The Scott McCloud thing about combining text and words to convey emotional impact is mentioned in the article too. So I guess if you want to make a relatable narrative of a psychological or emotional process so that people could copy if they need to, then Epiphany and The Weight Of Them are in the perfect medium.

I have to agree with the author Zoe as well, that cisgender kids wont be put off by studying comics about experiences they're not having. We do that already when we study Maus or Persepolis in schools, why not something like the bottle one too? And comics like these have definitely helped me get rid of the stereotype fiction I was told about transgender people's lives.
posted by harriet vane at 10:06 PM on April 1, 2023 [5 favorites]

My egg had already cracked by the time Mae Dean dropped her story, but it's been remarkable to see other trans feminine folks coming out and sharing their stories. They're all different than mine, yet there's remarkable similarities. I'm particularly heartening to see other older people sharing their story of realizing they're trans. My egg only cracked in my mid-30s, about a year before the pandemic—though I'd had some inklings here and there that failed to truly resonate.
posted by SansPoint at 10:19 AM on April 2, 2023 [3 favorites]

It's so funny how each little several-year cohort (broken down further by age and gender and other demographics) had their own touchstone media.

I'm in the Nevada generation of extremely online trans women -- like, it wasn't what cracked my egg (IIRC, we weren't even saying "crack your egg" much at the time, it was still "coming out to yourself"), and I didn't even love it as a book, but that was beside the point: reading it linked you to a whole world of other trans women, to the point that getting a copy was kind of an initiation. I guess it's back in print now, and I'm very glad for that, but I don't think it will ever be Quite That Important again, because this cohort doesn't need it. There are less viscerally-self-loathing stories about what it's like to be closeted to yourself, that seem to do just as good a job of helping people recognize that that's what they're experiencing.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I guess it's like realizing that everyone thinks the best music in the world is the stuff that came out when they were about 20 years old. It's interesting to see other cohorts' Touchstone Media and think, okay, this wasn't what changed my life, or what I recommended to my friends hoping that it would change theirs. But it could have been, if I'd been older or waited longer, and I'd feel the same weird ambiguous in-hindsight-kinda problematic love for this that I do for Nevada (and those Casey Plett columns in McSweeny's, and Porpentine's games, and Zinnia Jones, and and etc...)
posted by nebulawindphone at 12:11 PM on April 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Question: in the comic, what are the words on the superego's hat? Something like Trek4all?
posted by doctornemo at 12:45 PM on April 2, 2023

Trek4Lyfe
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 1:56 PM on April 2, 2023 [1 favorite]

Her whole substack is good, if you need some more Trans Content.

I read Epiphany when it was previously discussed on Metafilter (previously), but while it brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings in me (especially around the instigating fb post), I wasn't quite ready to crack at the time. On the other hand, the phenomenon of quarantine hatching helped me feel like I had permission to reconsider some of the things I had previously believed about myself, and it certainly accelerated me toward the "Why is my feed full of trans people?" point.

Right now, I think I am looking from the opposite direction of nebulawindphone above. I wonder if I could have figured things out sooner if I'd been exposed to the right media at a younger age. Ultimately, we can't know, but the transgender time travel fantasy is certainly a thing.

So I'm not really sure where this comment is going actually, which is probably why I never made my own fpp about this article.
posted by eruonna at 3:54 PM on April 2, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you, Harvey Kilobit. It seems like a detail the comic repeated, and I couldn't figure its significance.
posted by doctornemo at 8:11 PM on April 2, 2023

What a neat, informative piece of writing! Very instructive and I'm glad to have read it.
posted by brainwane at 4:23 AM on April 3, 2023

So it's just come to my attention that Mae Dean's original series of coming-out strips was, in fact, shared here on MetaFilter back when she originally published them. And, heh, look who made the post.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:51 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]