Ally/Axel's Coming Out Story

Ally/Axel was eighteen and living in New York City when they sent this in. It is the longest story we have, it covers nine years, and it is the clearest account we have been sent of a thing that almost never gets described: coming out more than once, to the same people, as the words catch up.

"When I was younger, I guess 9, I started to get confused a lot, and never understood why. I had a lot of crushes growing up (just as any other person). Not only did I crush on boys...I crushed on girls too."

Nine, with no word for it

The confusion came years before any of the vocabulary did, which is the part worth holding onto.

At nine there was nothing to come out as, because there was no name available for what was happening. A kid in that position cannot look anything up if they do not know what they are looking up, and in a lot of households there is nobody to ask without the asking itself becoming the disclosure. So the feeling arrives, and then a long stretch of years arrives after it in which the only available explanation is that something is wrong with you.

"I started to get confused a lot, and never understood why." That is a nine-year old doing research with no sources.

"At first I was very confused and felt like it was wrong of me to do, but when middle school came around, that changed. 7th grade was probably a year I felt comfortable to come out, but at first it was as a bisexual. I've dated both boys and girls and felt happy that I had the acceptance from my mother."

Coming out as one thing, then as another

"At first it was as a bisexual."

Ally/Axel came out in seventh grade, was accepted by their mother, dated people, and was telling the truth the entire time. Then more accurate words showed up and they used those instead.

This is the single most useful thing in the story, because the fear of it keeps people quiet for years. The worry goes: what if I say this and then it turns out to be something slightly different, and everybody decides the first version was made up? It happens constantly and it is not a retraction. You described yourself with the best word you had. Getting a better one later is what learning looks like, not a confession that the earlier one was a lie.

If you are the person being told a second time: the correct response is the same as the first time. Nobody needs to relitigate the earlier conversation.

"I still felt confused at some points. I would feel like I'm just existing: It felt like I had no gender due to the fact that I dressed/acted like both male and female. I fell in love with the name Axel from an old art piece I created, so I decided that would be my 'guy' name. That made me feel more at ease but something still felt like it was missing."

The name arrived before the word did

Axel came out of an old art piece, before there was any term attached to it.

That is the order it goes in more often than the tidy version admits. First something practical that makes the day easier, a name, a haircut, a way of dressing, and only afterwards the language that explains why it helped. Ally/Axel had a working solution and an unsolved question at the same time, and they say so: "that made me feel more at ease but something still felt like it was missing."

Two names is also not a halfway house. It is a stable arrangement that plenty of people keep for good, and one of the commenters on the original version of this article said reading it was what made them consider it.

"In 9th grade of high school, I had a crush with a really nice girl. When I was getting to know her better, she told me that she was actually a transgender female. Regardless, that only made me more attracted to her, and maybe a few months later, I learned a few of the LGBTQ+ terms. When I did it helped me find who I am, I'm happy with it. I'm proud to say (or be) a nonbinary pansexual."

Two corrections, both of them ours

When we first published this story, readers wrote in about two things. They were right about both, and in both cases the problem was in our framing rather than in anything Ally/Axel said. So, plainly:

Bisexual people are attracted to trans people. Learning the word pansexual did not upgrade Ally/Axel out of an identity that excluded their crush, and nothing in what they wrote says it did. The idea that bisexual means cisgender-only is a myth that has cost bisexual people a great deal, and our earlier version of this article leaned on it by treating one label as a more finished form of the other. They are two different words for two different things, and neither is a stage of the other.

Not everybody has crushes. "I had a lot of crushes growing up (just as any other person)" is Ally/Axel's line, describing their own childhood, and we are not going to edit a member's own words. But a reader was right that "just as any other person" leaves somebody out. Aromantic and asexual people exist, plenty of them spend years assuming the absence means something is broken, and Amber's story on this same page is exactly that experience.

What it cost, and what they got

Nine years, from the confusion at nine to "I'm proud to say (or be) a nonbinary pansexual" at eighteen. Not one conversation. A long sequence of them, each with better information than the last, most of them with a mother who kept saying yes.

The version of this that gets told publicly is usually a single dramatic evening. Ally/Axel's is the more common shape and the more useful one to have read beforehand: slow, revised, occasionally embarrassing, and completely worth it.

If you are somewhere in the middle of this

Our coming out stories page is filling up with accounts like this one from across the community, and it exists because reading someone else's version is the thing that makes your own feel survivable.

And if you have a story of your own, we would like to read it. There is a form at the bottom of the stories page. You choose whether your name appears on it.

If a flag is not safe where you are, a pin or a ring carries the same thing more quietly, and you can read what each of the flag designs actually means on our flag meanings page. All sales benefit LGBTQ+ charities.

Last updated: September 30, 2026