My name is Manisha Antani. I work in CCAR Retail Risk Analytics, and I’m really excited to be here today.
For me, my coming out story is more of an exploration of self than the first and specific moment of saying it out loud to friends or family. Both my sexual orientation and gender identities have always been a moving target throughout my life. Today, and for the last several years, I identify as a pansexual, gender non-conforming woman. By the way, pansexual is an orientation that may not be very well understood. It means that I am attracted to people who fall into any or all gender identities. If you are looking for which letter in LGBTQIA+ to attach it is, then I suppose it belongs to "bisexual", meaning attracted to two or more genders. Because pansexual, gender non-conforming woman is an awful lot of words, I pretty frequently just say “I am queer.” I like that word because it marries together all the dimensions of my gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
I don’t really have a story of identify that starts out with "I always knew I was different." I grew up having crushes on boys in grade and middle school, and had a vague idea that maybe I would like women someday. Since I hadn't really had that experience by the time I was 17-18, I figured that vague idea might be purely hypothetical. Growing up, I didn't have a lot of exposure to anyone who wasn't cisgender and straight, at least, not anyone who was out. As an adolescent, the identity dimensions I grappled with were more about gender identify and presentation rather than my sexual orientation. As an adult, I look back and wish I had access to words like "queer", "genderfluid", and "gender nonconforming" when I was 15, but the best my community could come up with was "tomboy;” that never felt like the right word to describe me, but as a rough and tumble kid, I rolled with it.
When I went away to college, I had a lot more access to words, people, experiences, and identities, and everything started to shift for me. I had my first crush on a woman in the theatre company named Jane* and I was completely enamored with her ability to build sets for the theatre company, her hair style, and her voice. I started to toy with labels like "heteroflexible" or "straight-ish”, but even then, I never worried that much about what label I should pick. It seemed to me that suddenly the people who were worried about my label were the people who saw something they thought I didn’t see --- my crush on Jane.* Mostly, they were bystanders and not my family and friends.
There is a lot of time in between college and six years ago, but that’s about when I started to identify, loudly, as something other than straight. I still didn't have the right label, but one thing I was certain about is that I'm not straight. To that end, I never really came out, because the label aside, I was never really in. I shared all the varying dimensions of my identity with my people as I learned them about myself. I was pretty matter of fact about it, kinda like saying “I like that new restaurant up the street." My family and friends never asked any follow up questions indicating confusion; it seems that they didn't think I was "in" either.
What has been surprising to me is that although I never had to "come out" to family and friends, as I have become more comfortable being myself, I find myself "coming out" to strangers or acquaintances all the time. Everyone wants to know which box to put me in, and since several aspects of my identify are pretty fluid, people have a hard time reconciling what they think they know versus what is real for me. One additional complexity is that I've recently become a single parent by choice. My son is 5 months old. I have had several people who I see in the community stop to talk to me about my new family, and they are utterly perplexed about how I have a child now. One particularly interesting experience happened about a month ago. There is a man at a local coffee shop who I see around often, but we don’t really know each other. He started a discussion with me by saying "I've seen you with the baby, and I know you're gay so I'm wondering how you had him." I was rattled by his assertion of a label that doesn’t fit. It was so much for me to unpack that I decided I simply wasn’t going to spend much time on a conversation with him. Experiences like that jolt me into remembering that our culture is extremely binary; unfortunately, for those of us who fall into a category defined by fluidity, our erasure is a real thing.
One really important part of my life, however, was my move to Barclays about 3 years ago. At my previous company, my identity was ever changing as I was learning about myself, and I think many of the people I worked with there still have a view about my identity that, while not inaccurate, is incomplete. However, when I moved to Barclays, I went as a pansexual, gender non-conforming woman. I never had to explain who I am, because this version of me is the only version people there have ever known. The ability to come into the company as myself has been instrumental in my ability to grow, consistently and confidently, for both my professional and personal life. I am thankful to Barclays and the Spectrum team for allowing and expecting me to be nothing more or less than myself.
