How come it takes till their 30s sometimes for someone to know their LGBT?
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I work for a health center that provides gender-affirming services and identity support programs. Stigma goes leaps and bounds to suppress people identifying and expressing their true selves, and often times when it seems like people are “learning” about that side of themselves later in life, it’s more a matter of them finding the support and courage to begin expressing what they have felt for most of the time they’ve been alive.
Other times, people grow to question the beliefs they’ve been programmed with in upbringing, and changes in thoughts/beliefs/judgements often preclude changes in feelings and behaviors, so exploration is more likely to occur.
Denial resulting from a society judgemental of anything gay, probably. Out of the LGBT people I know, the one who accepted the conclusion the latest was in the most homophobic environment (Eastern Europe).
That’s not really accurate, it would be fairer to say that a lot of LGBT people simply chose not to come out of the closet till later in life for a variety of reasons.
A family member of mine didn’t come out until his 40s because his parents were hardcore catholic and didn’t even believe that gay people existed. The fact he was gay came out by accident and to his surprise everyone in the immediate family just shrugged it off and were happy that he came out of the closet, while his parents were in their 80s at the time and chose to essentially ignore the fact with selective memory. But if he had come out decades earlier he admits he probably would have ended up in some form of conversion therapy.
Lots of people who are gay realize they are attracted to the same sex or both sexes from puberty. Whether or not they chose to act on that is up to them.
Social stigma against being gay is very real. Coming out at a younger age to someone is a risk, because if they don’t reciprocate or worse out you as being gay it can make your life very difficult both in school and with your family.
Being gay is much more accepted today that it was even 20 years ago, but depending on your background coming out the closet can be no big deal or even welcome, while on the other extreme your family might disown you.
Social pressure is immense and many wait until later in life to date same sex people because of the pressure from family or society to be ‘normal’, or they don’t want to be picked on, harassed, looked down on, or disowned. Sometimes they just want a hetero family because having their own children is important to them.
Sometimes it takes being in a hetero relationship for them to realize it doesn’t make them happy, or they aren’t attracted to that person the way they thought.
For Transgendered people they usually realize it at young age as well but the idea of transitioning is either beyond their means, or foreign to them.
It’s only in recent history that being able to transition is even a possibility and social stigma against it is far far worse than against gay people. Transgendered people suffer from tons of harassment and hate, and many chose not to come out simply to avoid that.
It’s not as common as it used to be. I came out in the early 90’s, and I can’t tell you how many older gay men I met who were married with children. They were trying to do what their family wanted. They thought being gay was just something they had to deal with and if they got married and had kids, that would ‘fix’ them, they’d magically become straight. This isn’t exaggeration.
Society is a lot more forgiving (sometimes) these days. We can get married now, though I wouldn’t count out having my marriage annulled by the government if the Supreme Court has their way. If someone is coming out at age 30 today, I will assume they are from a smaller town, with religious families, and they try to hide their sexuality behind a marriage or a girlfriend/boyfriend (or they’re the B in LGBT and can hide in plain sight, and not tell anyone).
If I were to take every signal that I could have recognised over the years and out them into one bundle, you would wonder how I could ever have not known.
But I had an existing lens that I was cis het, and every one of those signals was viewed in isolation through that lens. Because they were isolated, every difference could be absorbed into that self-understanding.
It’s taken a long time.
I’m not speaking for anyone else here, but that’s my experience.
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