Mark

Maybe the most common metaphor I hear for the processes of coming out or transitioning is metamorphosis, which I think is a good comparison to make! Unfortunately people almost exclusively allude to butterflies metamorphosing¹, which I think is wrong-headed², and is frankly cheating³ for several reasons:

1. It's hidden. There is not a physical chrysalistic closet you, a human, get to shut yourself inside while you figure your deal out, and there can't be because your social self is also something you need to figure out. Every part of the process that is not interior to you plays out in mortifyingly public view.
2. They get time off. Some pupae stay in there for two full weeks! I am at once deeply envious and resigned to the fact that I have basically tried to do this several times and learned that spending weeks in isolation is not actually a good idea.
3. They emerge as mature adults. Butterflies don't mature any further. They don't grow or change, really. A lot of them don't eat in their adult lives. Some aren't even physically capable of eating.
4. They emerge in a form way more acceptable in society's eyes. There is a dream of the self as beautiful work of natural art, light and graceful, through symmetry and through shimmering color compelling the admiration and love we are not granted for being simply our human selves. This is a good way to get eaten by a bird.

"So you're saying there's rhetorical danger in comparing matters of human gender and sexuality to quirks of ontogeny in species that aren't even amniotes?" NO. wrong. I am saying that we need to start comparing ourselves to AMPHIBIANS, whose GROSS METAMORPHIC PROCESSES play out FOR ALL TO SEE while they're still swimming around EATING ARTHROPODS and turning into WEIRD SMALL GUYS who a bunch of the time look WAY DIFFERENT from MATURE ADULTS the frog fans were AHEAD OF THE CURVE

ALSO MAYBE WE SHOULD CONSIDER DEFENSIVE EYESPOTS

1. I am remembering here a professional development seminar held for all of the teachers at a high school which just the previous year had an incident of homophobia so galling that students staged a protest and it received coverage in newspapers across the state. Not the best place I have been employed.

2. Tremendous visual novel Butterfly Soup notwithstanding.

3. The presenter for that professional development course was actually really good. If you're reading this, I am sorry for saying that you cheated.