What #MeToo and #ComingOut Still Have Not Told You...

Most ideas that we now call critical frameworks did not emerge from academic ivory towers. They were born out of urgency—out of injustice, erasure, and the pain of staying silent for too long. These frameworks were never meant to gather dust in books on Theory. They were meant to live, breathe, stretch, and transform in the hands of those who need them most.

And that is exactly what this blog post is about. It is a radical and long overdue attempt to revisit two hashtags that shook the world: #MeToo and #ComingOut. Both have become cultural shorthands. But are we using them to their fullest potential—or are we stuck in versions too narrow for the complexities of real life?

Concepts Are Meant to Evolve

Take the word queer. Once hurled as an insult, it was reclaimed by those it was meant to hurt. Today, it offers refuge, not ridicule—a term fluid enough to hold identities that do not fit into fixed binaries.

Think of intersectionality. First coined within the Black feminist movement, it was a clarion call to recognize how race, class, and gender intersect to compound injustice. Today, its reach has grown—to include caste, language, religion, region, disability, and more.

Words—when traded by communities, not just scholars—change shape. They take on new meanings, new contexts, new lives.

So why should hashtags be any different?

Rethinking What It Means to #ComeOut

Take #ComingOut—long associated with LGBTQI+ people publicly sharing their identities. It is a powerful act, a declaration that says: “This is who I am, even if it makes you uncomfortable.”

But what if we expanded this idea?

What if coming out also meant revealing hidden traumas? Speaking truths that patriarchy, casteism, ableism, or elitism trained us to suppress?

Imagine a woman ‘coming out’ as:

• A survivor of emotional abuse at work.

• Someone denied tenure for not being ‘likeable’ enough.

• A single mother navigating academic exclusion.

• A Dalit woman standing against silence in ‘progressive’ spaces.

Each act of speaking—when the cost of doing so is institutional backlash, professional risk, or social alienation —is ‘coming out’ in its own way. Perhaps not about gender and sexuality, but about truth.

The Trouble With Trimming #MeToo

#MeToo will always be remembered for its role in taking down powerful sexual predators. Its viral moment came when Alyssa Milano tweeted it in 2017, and the world followed. It did lead to some long-overdue reckonings in Hollywood, politics, media, and academia.

Rewind to 2006. That is when Tarana Burke, a Black activist and survivor of sexual violence, first used ‘Me Too’ on MySpace—not for virality, but for healing. It was meant to create space for young girls of color to name their pain without shame.

When you hear #MeToo, what do you think of?

• Sexual violence?

• Male predators?

• Corporate cover-ups?

All true. All necessary. But all too narrow.

Violence is not always physical assault. Sometimes, it looks like:

• A promotion withheld because a woman was ‘too assertive.’

• A woman boss who mimics patriarchy while performing feminism.

• A workplace that celebrates diversity on paper, but silences dissent in practice.

These forms of aggression do not leave bruises, but they leave women exhausted, disillusioned, and afraid to speak up.

So let us ask the uncomfortable question: Can #MeToo expand to  accommodate these too?

 Let us Recode the Hashtags

Here is where we get creative. Let us reinvent the hashtags we have inherited:

 Expand #ComingOut to:

• Women coming out of  the ‘ideal-woman’ conditioning

• Women coming out of normative body regimes

• Women coming out of caste shame

• Women coming out of institutional violence

• Women coming out as angry, complex, non-compliant

Expand #MeToo to:

• #CareerMeToo – for women’s exclusion at work

• #AcademicMeToo – for gatekeeping and silencing of women in academic institutions

• #CulturalMeToo – for  women erased from literary, film, or art spaces

• #PoliticalMeToo – for women party workers invisibilized by male leaders

• #DomesticMeToo – for women’s unpaid labour and emotional exhaustion

Let us not confine these hashtags to headlines. Let us hand them over to those whose truths are still waiting to be told.

Why Don’t The Above Versions Go Viral?

Here is the hard truth: Sex sells. Pain performs. Algorithms curate.

Stories of sexual violence and queerness trend because they incite voyeurism. They offer spectacle. They titillate. They draw traffic.

But slow violence? The misogynist office culture? The caste-based exclusion in faculty meetings? The cruel silence of family after you speak up?

These do not trend. They do not bring in clicks. So they disappear.

Unless we name them.

It is Time to Reconceptualise 

Let us use hashtags not to follow a trend, but to build new terrains.

Let us dare to say:

• Not all #MeToo stories end in a courtroom.

• Not all #ComingOut moments are about queerness.

• Some of the deepest scars are invisible.

• Some of the bravest truths are quiet.

• And some hashtags are still waiting for the right voices to make them whole

Before We Close

If you have ever felt like your story did not ‘fit’ the narrative of #MeToo or #ComingOut, maybe the problem is not with your story—it is the limits we have placed on the language.

So let us expand the frame. Stretch the definitions. Redefine the hashtags.

Not just for virality, but for visibility. Not just for views, but for voice.

Because in the end, the right to name one’s pain is the first act of resistance.