Telling stories; telling transgender coming out stories from the UK and Portugal

Telling transgender and gender-diverse stories is an increasingly common process. The stories that are told are situated reflections of individual lives. Nonetheless, these stories tell us something about the world we live in, since they are, simultaneously, conditioned by and an expression of the social, cultural and historical contexts that surrounds them. Drawing upon 58 transcribed in-depth interviews with transgender and gender-diverse people in Portugal and the UK, in this paper, I focus on the dynamics and complexity of coming out stories and their relation with specific spaces such as the 'private' spaces of the family, the 'virtual' and 'face-to-face' spaces of transgender and gender-diverse communities and the 'institutional' spaces of work and school within these individuals' lifecourse. I will consider these transgender and gender-diverse people's social positionings, specifically in terms of age and national contexts in order to understand how their stories are shaped by several interconnected and mutually inter-influencing factors that condition their experiences and fields of possibilities. I will argue that coming out processes are strongly interrelated with located social times and spaces and the significant, symbolic and generalized others that occupy them.