National Coming Out Day 2019

October 11 is National Coming Out Day – an opportunity for us to reflect on the diversity of experience and effect of LGBTQ+ people coming out (or not) in everyday life.

For some, coming out is a precise moment in time. For others, coming out is an elongated story: something that happens in a variety of ways and is embodied in the way we move through the world. There are those who choose not to come out, those who do not feel safe to come out, and those who are not sure that they should.

‘Coming out’ is as diverse as the LGBTQ+ community itself and for us, #NationalComingOutDay is about acknowledging that each experience forms part of our shared history, present and future. We have been looking at some research to expand our knowledge about what coming out means in a variety of contexts, including regional Australia.

The Private Lives 2 report, published in 2012, indicated that up to 20% of LGBTQ+ people live outside of a metropolitan city. The Pride in Action Network Committee recognises that regional campuses are places where specific LGBTIQA+ inclusion strategies and engagement need to be facilitated. So, this National Coming Out Day, we will be sending LGBTIQA+ inclusion packs, which include pronouns badges, rainbow lanyards, our ‘How to be a good LGBTIQA+ Ally’ brochure and other resources to our contacts at Burnley, Creswick, Dookie, Shepparton and Werribee.

If you are from a non-Parkville work or study site and would like to receive one of these packs, send us an email at pride-network@unimelb.edu.au. You can also help rainbow-wash any campus by printing your own NCOD poster! Download here.

Read more on the diverse experience of coming out:

Coming out in regional Victoria and overcoming homophobia and secrecy for LGBT people, The Age
The whiteness of ‘coming out’: culture and identity in the disclosure narrative, Archer Magazine

The Diversity Council of Australia and RMIT partnered to deliver the Out at Work Report, From Prejudice to Pride, which highlights some important considerations for the importance of LGBTQ+ inclusion in the workplace. This study found LGBTQ+ employees who were not out at work were 45% less likely to be satisfied with their job.
A 2018 study by Hughes, Coming Out in STEM, found that LGBQ students were between 7 and 10% less likely to be retained in a STEM degree than heterosexual students.
The Kirby Institute last month published their findings from Australia’s first Trans and Gender Diverse Sexual Health Survey, which showed for survey participants ‘the realisation that their gender was different to what had been presumed for them happened at an average age of 14.1 years[…] And it took an average of eight years from this realisation to when they started to tell other people about their gender identity and an average of two years more to start living as their affirmed gender’ (p.6).
The Employers Guide to Intersex Inclusion published by Pride in Diversity in partnership with OII: Organisation Intersex International states ‘expectations that intersex people should come out and join an LGBTI community are often based on misconceptions about intersex as a trans or gender identity, or a non-binary gender identity’ (p.16), which reminds us that ‘coming out’ may have its own, little or no meaning for intersex people.