Dakota J. gave us a date, which almost nobody does. February 26th, 2019. She remembers it because both halves of it happened inside the same day.
"I came out publicly February 26th, 2019, a few close friends and family knew but the rest of the world didn't know. I posted my true identity and the way I felt on my facebook story, I got so many of my friend text me and say they were so happy for me and it made me feel great, then I got a message for a person on my friend's list telling me I was a disease. It took me from the top of the day to the bottom.
I'd been hiding who I was for years, hiding from my community (I live in a predominantly Mormon/LDS community). I'd gone out in public a few times with a friend and once alone. It wasn't that bad when I looked decent. But then May 2019 came. I was looking forward to a GSA - LGBTQ+ prom in my area and I felt great the day of, but as I walked through the door and into the ballroom, I heard a group of gossip b** off to my right say in a very mocking tone 'Oh my god, look at that girl, she's a guy!!' (followed by a few insults I wasn't meant to hear). I've since gotten over that but it's that terrible feeling surrounded by insecurities that stopped me from starting my new school year as a young lady."
One day is not one feeling
The thing most coming-out advice gets wrong is the arithmetic. It treats the day as a single event with a single outcome: it went well, or it went badly. Dakota's February 26th went both, within hours, and the bad part won the day even though it was outnumbered many times over.
That is not weakness and it is not a failure of perspective. It is how the nervous system handles threat. Dozens of people saying "I'm happy for you" is pleasant information. One person saying "you are a disease" is data about safety, and the brain files those two in completely different drawers. If you come out and the kind messages do not cancel out the cruel one, nothing is wrong with you. The maths was never going to work that way.
And then it happened at the prom
The second scene is the one worth sitting with, because the venue was supposed to be the safe one. A GSA prom is the room where you are meant to be able to walk in without doing the calculation, and she did the calculation anyway, because a group off to the right made her.
Notice what it cost. Not the evening. The school year. "It's that terrible feeling surrounded by insecurities that stopped me from starting my new school year as a young lady." A few sentences she was not supposed to overhear took months off the clock. That is the actual mechanism of harassment, and it is why "just ignore them" is such useless advice: the damage is not the insult, it is the months.
She also wrote "I've since gotten over that," and she wrote it herself, so it stands. Both things are true at once.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this
Our coming out stories page is filling up with accounts like Dakota's from across the community, and it exists because reading someone else's version is the thing that makes your own feel survivable.
If you need to talk to somebody trained for it rather than to us, Trans Lifeline is a peer support line staffed by trans people for trans people, and the Trevor Project runs free, confidential support for LGBTQ+ young people twenty-four hours a day.
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
