What Does It Actually Mean to Queer Your Way?

Queer Your Way is the name of a coaching program I built for queer and trans people. But when I chose that name, I wasn’t just picking something catchy. It carries two meanings, and I want both of them to be true for the people who go through it.

The First Meaning: Being Queer, Your Way

For a long time, I thought there was a right way to be gay, and later, a right way to be trans. A script other people seemed to already know. Come out a certain way. Transition a certain way, if you transition at all. React to family a certain way. Show up in community a certain way.

It took me almost 20 years to understand that none of that was actually true. I came out at 25, spent years believing I’d been “healed” from being gay, remarried, had more kids, and didn’t fully understand I was transgender until I was in my late 30s. My path did not look like anyone else’s path, and for a long time I thought that meant I was doing it wrong.

I wasn’t doing it wrong. I was doing it my way, because there was never only one way to do this.

Queer Your Way, in this first sense, means exactly that: you get to be queer or trans on your own terms. Not on the timeline other people expect. Not in the shape other people are comfortable with. Not according to some unwritten rulebook about what being trans or being queer is supposed to look like. Your way is a legitimate way.

The Second Meaning: Queering Your Way of Life

Here’s where the name is more than just someone’s label.

You don’t have to be queer to queer your life.

To “queer” something, at its root, means to step outside the norm, to refuse the default just because it’s the default. You can do that with your sexuality or your gender. You can also do that with how you build your career, your family, your relationships, your definition of a good life. Queering your way means questioning the scripts you were handed, the ones about what success is supposed to look like, what a family is supposed to look like, what a “normal” life is supposed to look like, and choosing something that’s actually yours instead.

I see this constantly in my coaching work. Someone doesn’t have to be queer to be living a life that was built entirely out of other people’s expectations. Straight, cisgender people carry the same weight of “shoulds” that I carried for years. The person who’s stayed in the safe career because it’s what their family wanted. The person who’s structured their whole life around a version of a “good life” they never actually chose. That person can queer their way too, in the sense of stepping outside the norm and building something that’s actually theirs.

Why Both Meanings Matter to Me

I built this program specifically for queer and trans people, because that’s who I am, and because that’s whose research shaped every module in it: the family strain, the isolation, the exhausting work of managing visibility. That part of the name isn’t going anywhere.

But I also want the name to hold space for the second meaning, because the deeper work underneath all of this, questioning what you were handed, separating what’s actually yours from what was never yours to carry, choosing visibility and connection on your own terms, isn’t only relevant to people who share my label. It’s relevant to anyone who’s tired of living by a script they didn’t write.

Queer Your Way. Be queer, your way. Or queer your way of living, whatever that means for you.

Either way, the invitation is the same: stop living by someone else’s rulebook, and start building something that’s actually yours.