It’s one thing to be proud of having been a pioneer; it’s quite another to dismiss people who didn’t take that road.

Late comings-out are hardly unusual in the gay male world either, something I’m more intimately familiar with being a gay man.

In fact, P&P is currently serializing Laurence Best 's memoir of NOT coming out in the 1970s. Well, I mean it’s really much more than that. It’s a memoir of his slow road to self-understanding and his eventual coming out into a fulfilling life as an openly gay man.

Nobody accuses Larry of being a poser because he married a woman and raised a family. And while I don’t pretend to understand all the ins and outs of trans identity, I’ve seen some of this gatekeeping stuff in action, and I don’t understand why later-transitioning trans folks should be held in any less respect than later-transitioning gay folks.