On July 17th, 2020, at 10:10 PM¨CEastern Standard Time, mind you¨Ca 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.