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“I was thinking to myself, I can't wait to tell them. They're going to be so excited!” Or maybe the patient didn't say excited—maybe they used a different word. I can't exactly remember because my mind got stuck on them/they're. It took a moment before I realized the patient was referring to me. They referenced me not as her/she but them/they. My preferred pronouns. I was moved, for a moment, out of the shared space of the session, out of the patient's experience and into my own. Something caught in my throat, my eyes watered just a fraction, and my heart skipped a beat. I felt fear; I felt gratitude. I slowly settled back into attunement with my patient, and though they remained on the screen, many miles away, I felt closer to them than before.
When I see patients, my “name tag” on virtual platforms includes my pronouns in parentheses: (they/she), out in the open, for all patients to see. And yet, how strange to be seen. Something feels uncomfortable about it that makes me believe it's imperative.
I started in private practice for the first time last summer, August 2020. My first job post-postdoc, post-license, midpandemic. I decided to be out in my bio on the group practice website, stating for all to see that I am a queer clinician who loves working with the queer community. It took me hours to write. I went so far as to submit a draft with no mention of my identity whatsoever, only to retract it immediately. As I typed, backspaced, typed, backspaced, the task began to feel like a reenactment. How badly I want, have always wanted, to be fully seen in that regard, and how often I have defensively moved away. A part of me holds great shame about that, and it's hard to write. As much as I've wanted to be “out and proud,” more of my life has looked like “out and ambivalent.”