National Coming Out Day

National Coming Out Day takes place on 11 October, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to interview Stephanie Fuller (She/Her), the General Manager of Switchboard on this important date.  At Kingsley Napley, we have supported Switchboard in the past year and recognise the invaluable support the charity offers to the LGBTQ+ community.

Coming out is a unique and personal experience.  Not all LGBTQ+ individuals have the safe spaces they need to be able to express their authentic selves. People today are continually misgendered[1] and fear facing discrimination for expressing their true gender identity. The LGBTQ+ community remain in the closet and often do not “come out” at work. 

At the same time, not all LGBTQ+ members should be forced to “come out”:  it is a purely individual choice guided by their environment, access to support networks and resources, among many other personal factors. The recent outing of Rebel Wilson by an Australian newspaper following its reporting of her new relationship illustrates the harms that this attitude to “coming out” can cause.

Stonewall explains how National Coming Out Day was first celebrated in 1988 on the anniversary of the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in the US. It is a day for us to acknowledge the difficulties of coming out and to remember that “it’s still not something all LGBTQ+ people can safely do.”

The inability to express one’s authentic sexual and gender identity has a significant impact on mental health, which was expressed by professional FA footballer Jake Daniels in his recent interviews with news media. To honour National Coming Out Day, we spoke with Stephanie Fuller (She/Her), General Manager of Switchboard LGBT+ helpline – a free mental health service that has been at the forefront of supporting the LGBTQ+ community in facing the issues of the day.

Switchboard has provided support and information to millions of people since their phones started ringing in 1974, the history of which is explored in the podcast The Log Books, produced by Tash Walker (She/They), Adam Zmith (He/Him) and Shivani Dave (They/Them). Each year, Switchboard handles around 18,000 conversations, demonstrating how much of a need there is for the service. The organisation is alive to the multi-faceted issues faced by the community today, having supported so many through the pandemic and into the future.

1. What significant things have you noticed following your recent Annual Report[2]?

The full impact report for Switchboard looks at 2020-21…and how all of that affected Switchboard as an organisation. [In terms of] the impact on us, not just as a service and the technicalities of how we deliver that, but the actual emotional impact on our pool of volunteers during that time. We now know so much more about our service users, the need for our service and our volunteers. We’ll be releasing a report annually which will be our state of the nation piece.

We sit in a really interesting space for our community because we are the biggest national LGBT helpline. We are handling around 18,000 conversations a year across voice, instant message and email and we don’t just cater for one letter of LGBTQ+ – we cater for everybody.

We get all sorts of conversations from all sorts of…people. It could be family members or friends that are worried about somebody, or that have questions and they just want to have someone to listen to them while they ask the questions that they feel they can’t ask somewhere else. The report tells us what’s going on for our community across the country and we’re able now to really map the reach of Switchboard. For instance, we now know that 75% of the service users come from outside of London, so we are much more national than we thought. You also see how certain things change by channel in terms of people’s preferences for emails or instant messaging; [for example] changes by age range and by subject matter will swing a preference to a particular channel.

Looking at our email traffic, a lot of that comes from outside the UK and quite a significant [number] from parts of the world where it’s not safe to be a member of our community; we are getting those sorts of emails coming from Afghanistan, Syria, and Ukraine where people are in very difficult situations. We’ve also seen more people reaching out to Switchboard for conversations around gender identity using instant message in preference to voice-based services, and the likely reason for that being that if you are trans or non-binary and you’ve used voice-based services you probably will have experienced being mis-gendered at some point, and messaging chat removes the risk of that happening.

February 2021 was also the first month ever that we held more conversations across instant messaging than we did for voice – that was probably the hardest point of the lockdown because for a lot of people home wasn’t a safe space. With instant messaging, it’s very discreet; you can just look like you’re on your phone having a WhatsApp and no-one would know any different, whereas being overheard on a voice call [is] riskier.

 

2. What does “coming out” mean to you?

I think the first thing is to say is that it’s still really challenging coming out. Sometimes it’s easy to think that everybody’s alright with everybody now and coming out is not a problem anymore. Yet, it remains one of top reasons that people call Switchboard.When we look [at our data] over the last few years, in 2020 it was the third most common conversation theme that people reached out to Switchboard for and in 2021 it was the fourth.

Coming out never stops being a reason that people feel they need to speak to Switchboard, and often when they call us it’s the first time they say out loud how they genuinely feel about themselves – that they think they may be gay or bi or trans or non-binary and actually the act of saying that out loud is a really important part of the process before you then start to explore how you’re going to navigate all the relationships that you’ve built in your life up to that point and are now going to get renegotiated. That’s a lot for one person to deal with.

 

3. What are the unique challenges you often see faced by those around the subject matter of “coming out”?

Every coming out is completely different. So much depends on the individual’s circumstances in terms of their environment, how supported they are, how much they’ve hidden that part of their identity.

These conversations can be quite straightforward, but they can also be incredibly complex. There could be someone who’s been married for 30 years that’s always known, or somebody in school and knows they want to come out but thinks actually “I’m going to wait until I go off to university and do it because my family are going to be difficult with this”.

There are so many different ways that “coming out” shows up but, I suppose, what they all have in common is that fear of “how will it go?” and “what’s going to change as a result of this news?” because something will. It may change for the better, hopefully it does, but there will be change. Maybe, common to all coming out, is that it never stops.

When you come out to your family and your social circle…but then you move job or town or house – and you meet the new neighbours or work colleagues – all those conversations restart again. If you look at the coming out through the lens of trans and non-binary people, in some respects it’s more complex because coming out probably elicits a series of quite unwanted questions; in some cases, about your history, when and how, and all those sorts of things that actually people aren’t entitled to that information without friendships being formed. It’s an incredibly complex space summed up by [the] two words “coming out”.

 

4. How can we help support our colleagues and friends who may be facing these kinds of challenges?

It’s really important to just listen to what they’ve said and, if they’re looking for more information, I would honestly recommend contacting Switchboard.You might expect me to say that, but one of the things that Switchboard does well is take conversations on a variety of topics and, whilst we don’t direct people, we are able to…present to them with some ideas that might be useful for them so that they can then take that information [as] they see fit, as we have an internal Wikipedia which is like [an] ultimate directory of LGBTQIA+ organisations, groups and networks across the UK. So, I would certainly recommend [signposting] to us but I think the first thing is…to listen, to let them know that you’re a safe space for them to have that conversation.

5. What resources would you recommend to those keen to find out more about the experiences of those around “coming out”? Do you have any book recommendations?

Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue. It is absolutely fantastic and – speaking personally – there are so many things in it that I just sat there nodding, [thinking], “yeah, that’s completely true, that’s my own experience”.I felt like Shon wrote the book I wish I had the words to write.

We’ve just received a book through from one of our patrons, Lewis Hancox – Welcome to St Hell: My trans teen misadventure. [An old] novel I really enjoy is Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. I never get bored of reading that book. But, at the moment, I don’t think you can trump Shon’s book.

Outside of books, if people haven’t seen either Disclosure on Netflix or Pose, I’d recommend either of those. Pose is about the New York ball scene in the 80s. The thing I love about Pose is…it [shows] the humanity of people… it’s just beautiful. In most TV [shows] and films where there is representation of trans people they are pretty much always either going to be one of two things generally speaking: a sex worker or a murder victim (or both), and you will know nothing about the content of that character other than they die and they’re disposable within the kind of context of the story. Pose is very powerful, but also, it’s tough at times.

6. How can we make our workplaces safer spaces for those to express their authentic gender identity?

Somebody asked me a while back about the real value of employee networks within a business. I think it’s massively valuable. It’s not just what it says about the people that are in the network, but also what it says about the organisation – that this is an organisation which fosters and encourages people to bring their authentic self to work. That will affect not just the people that are already in that network but maybe other people that are in your organisation now that might have children who going to come out at some point. I think the existence of [a network] is really important.

Another small thing, which is such an easy win, would be pronouns in email signatures. They say a great deal – everybody that contacts somebody from within your organisation will get to see that this organisation understands that the world is a diverse place and wants to make sure that there’s room for everybody. It’s a small thing that says a lot and doesn’t really cost anybody anything. Pronouns are also really useful because not everyone has an anglicised name, so sometimes it just makes it really easy to understand a bit more about the person you’re communicating with.

Of course, I think it’s about having policies in place to support employees, whether that’s around equal parental leave for same sex parents or whether it’s around time-off for employees going through gender reassignment for instance. Policies around that really say this organisation really cares about its employees – the organisation is prepared to make sure that it values everybody equally so that it can be a really great place to work and a successful business as well.

 

7. What is a common myth about “coming out” that you would like to dispel?

That [“coming out” is one event] – it’s an ongoing challenge and it never stops. Some of the things that we see in terms of calls to Switchboard that I’ve started to reflect on quite a bit recently is calls from older people. So much about being “out” is about being comfortable and feeling that you’re in a safe space…most of us need to feel that before they feel comfortable about sharing because we instinctively know that not [everywhere] is safe for us.

We’ve started to see more calls from older people experiencing isolation and I think that comes from the fact that we have a LGBTQ+ community that’s now out in the open for the first time and [they are] also [coming into contact with] the health care system in later life. We’re starting to see people calling that are moving into sheltered housing and things like that [who are] going back into the closet because it doesn’t feel like a safe space. That almost entirely proves that coming out never stops because they’ve walked into an environment where, after all these years of everything feeling like “I can be me”, [they’ve] now found themselves in a place again where that’s not the case. [Personally], I’ve not been out everywhere I’ve worked because I’ve not always felt like I was in a place that was necessarily safe for me or supportive. There’s a lot of data that shows an awful lot of people feel the same way.

Somebody I spoke to recently framed “coming out” as [having] decided to try and take more control of it and so they prefer to call it “letting in”. They decide who they will let in. Really, that’s what “coming out” is for the individual – it’s about letting people into your life. You need to feel comfortable around those people before you choose to do that. Most of us would like to have the choice rather than have the situation put upon us.

Switchboard plays an important part in helping create that space: [that person] decided to let us in at that moment because they felt they can trust us…there will be no judgement…and it’s absolutely confidential. We provide that [safe] space for so many people.

 

Kingsley Napley is proud to support our LGBTQ+ colleagues through the LGBTQ+ and Allies Network.