JJ V. wrote in with a method and an open question.
"I was 16 when I came out as bi ( 17 and pan now) and what I did to come out was I put it as my facebook status to see how people would take it. I was afraid of rejection and my family hating me but turns out it has gotten better since I came out. I still have no idea how to come out as gender-fluid to them though and that is the one I fear but maybe I can do the same trick with it and possibly get the same results. My life has gotten so much better since I came out!"
"To see how people would take it"
That phrase is the method, and it is smarter than it looks.
A status update is not an announcement, it is a test. Nobody is standing in front of you waiting for a reaction. You are not trapped in a car or a kitchen watching a face change. You post, you put the phone down, and the responses arrive one at a time, from people who have each had a moment to decide how to behave. If it goes badly you find out at a distance, which is not nothing when the thing you are afraid of is a room turning on you.
JJ was explicit about the fear: "I was afraid of rejection and my family hating me." The test was designed around it.
The second coming out nobody plans for
Then there is the part that makes this story worth publishing.
"I still have no idea how to come out as gender-fluid to them though and that is the one I fear."
Almost everything written about coming out treats it as a single event with a before and an after. For a lot of people it is a sequence. Bi at sixteen, pan at seventeen, and a separate conversation about gender still ahead, to the same people, who have already been asked once to update their understanding and may feel they have done their part.
That is genuinely harder than the first one, for a reason worth saying out loud: the first time, you are giving people new information. The second time, some of them hear it as a correction to information they have already accepted, and a few will treat it as evidence the first one was not settled either. It is not. Working out a second thing about yourself does not retroactively make the first thing a phase.
"But maybe I can do the same trick with it and possibly get the same results."
Reasonable. It worked once, he built it himself, and he knows his own audience better than any advice column does.
If you are somewhere in the middle of this
Our coming out stories page is filling up with accounts like JJ's 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
