MATSUDA Eisuke
ICU undergraduate student
[The article below is the same as the article that appears in the nineteenth issue of the CGS Newsletter.]
On Tuesday, June 7, 2016, Ryoko Kobayashi, who heads the Tokyo branch of the non-profit organization LGBT Families and Friends Association, gave a guest lecture as part of ICU's R-Weeks (May 31- June 11, 2016). We asked Eisuke Matsuda, the event coordinator and moderator, to share his thoughts on the lecture, which was titled,"Wel-coming Out!! How Family and Friends Can Help."
I organized a lecture on the theme of "coming out to family," as part of this year's R-Weeks at ICU. The speaker I invited was Ryoko Kobayashi, who has a transgender (FtM) son herself and works with a group that supports LGBT people and their families and friends. The reason why I chose the title "Wel-coming Out" was that I wanted to get people to think about how they could approach coming out in a more welcoming manner, with open arms, including those who are hesitating to come out, as well as those who are unsure about how to respond to someone else's coming out.
I was moved to tears as I listened to Ms. Kobayashi's own personal story and those of others she'd met through her organization. One person was told they were unstable and forced to go to a psychiatrist, another was grounded and made to change schools, and another was treated as though they were dead. Some were told by their parents, "I should've had an abortion," or "Just die, I'm begging you." Hearing such struggles for survival, it hit me that I'd treated the idea of coming out much too casually, supposing that it would eventually work out somehow.
Coming out does not necessarily always result in a positive outcome. Ms. Kobayashi, therefore, said that she always asks someone who is thinking about it, "Do you usually find it easy to communicate with the person/people you're planning to come out to?" It's a question that should be considered with care. For example, coming out has resulted in financial difficulties for some university students who didn't have a good relationship with their parents in the first place. Their parents withdrew their financial support, which had a huge impact on the students' daily lives and future aspirations. For many parents as well, their child's coming out has resulted in a sense of social alienation and isolation for which they blame themselves and their child. relationship based on mutual respect. Actually, someone very dear to me is currently agonizing over whether to tell their parents about their sexual orientation. It makes me so sad to see this person I admire so much in deep agony over the fact that they can't communicate what they want. So organizing this lecture was one of my ways to support this person, even if it may only be with a view toward coming out some day in the future when they are ready.
What I realized from the lecture, however, is that sometimes coming out may not be the best option, for unfortunately in the society we live in today it would just make life too difficult. Even so, I don't want to actually say outright, "It's best not to do it now." I would rather just suggest that they think about the relationships in their life. To others, I would like to suggest that they can make a big difference by simply showing they are open about these issues by, for instance, mentioning an event like this in their daily conversation. Coming out is not something that only certain people need to think about. It's something that affects every one of us. My goal in organizing this event was to provide an opportunity for the university as a whole to consider these issues. In the spirit of the following quotation from the mother of a lesbian daughter, which Ms. Kobayashi read at the end of the lecture, I hope that one day we will all learn to accept others for who they are:
... My daughter is like one of those four leaf clovers; her sexual orientation just happens to be different from mine. She is someone I treasure and want to protect. A four leaf clover is not unnatural, just unusual and different from the rest. I would have never considered removing one of the leaves so it would appear to be a three leaf clover.
PFLAG, Our Daughters and Sons (Washington, DC: PFLAG, 1995), 8, http://pflagupstatesc.org/forms/daughters_sons.pdf