There are many speakers all over the country this week speaking about various topics surrounding coming out. Debra Davis, the executive director at the Gender Education Center in Maple Grove, Minn, spoke at the University of Wisconsin last night about coming out as transgender.

In a society plagued with negative accounts of “coming out of the closet,” Davis carried a surprisingly positive tone. Over the course of an hour and a half, Davis shared general definitions and information about what it means to be a transgender, told personal stories and ended with an interactive question and answer session.

“Even though we are celebrating National Coming Out Week, the vast majority of us are hugely closeted, and you aren’t going to see us,” Davis said. “We think that 1 to 5 percent of the population might be transgender, but there’s really no way to know since most of us are closeted.”

Davis went on to discuss the difficulty she had by leading two separate lives before she came out. She said she came out in 1998 after deciding that she was not going to hide who she was anymore. Of course there were fears about coming out in the workplace, especially since she worked with children. She said she was worried she was going to get fired, since until then there had only been three or four other transgender teachers that had come out, and they were fired immediately.

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