Whether it’s the fear of those not accepting you or the fear of being the victim of a hate crime, coming out’s by far one of the most difficult things a queer person can go through. On the flip side, what about those who want to use the empowering act of coming out for sinister reasons?
Witnessing the population boom of people coming out, especially young people, has been astounding. On one hand, it's amazing that more people are finally able to be their authentic selves given the massive decline experienced during events like the AIDS epidemic, but on the other, one can’t but wonder how much of that’s genuine.
As a community, we must know when draw a line between caution & invalidation. Again, the act of coming out takes a lot of courage & most of the time, it's far from perfect, so naturally, we do take it seriously. However, we also need to understand that there are certain individuals who make a mockery of such huge life moments for the sake of attention-seeking, which can result in a lot harm due to how they give ammo to queerphobes who see being queer as a choice. There are also cases where whenever we hear about predators who happen to have a queer identity in the news, the queer community would always be at the centre of an ongoing culture war.
One of the biggest controversies to ever come from this is the case of Jessica Yaniv, a notorious predator who also happens to be trans. Sadly, the Yaniv situation’s far from being the first major case of predators who cause immense harm to the trans community as well as queer society as a whole. While it’s definitely important thing for the trans community to disassociate from & condemn said people, the weaponisation and generalisations from transphobes has made said important discussion especially toxic.
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