Like, I’m trans and have kept it hidden most of my career. It’s always been hard on me, because I have to carefully curate my image because if I don’t I opened myself to discrimination if people could tell.
I started a new job during the pandemic and went full-on “fuck it” mode and I couldn’t be happier. Joined the LGBT ERG and helped organize some of the younger trans people at my company into pushing for expanded healthcare benefits (I don’t need them personally, but they will). I don’t think I would have found the energy to do any of this if I was also worried about how I was being perceived by others — all that energy would have gone into creating an illusion that’s acceptable to the people who do my reviews and sign my paychecks.
The positive reason for this, is that it allows potentially extreme variants and dialects to co-exist while letting everyone still communicate clearly with others (by code-switching to whatever's considered standard). The down-side is that it often exists alongside negative stereotypes about those who can't, or choose not to, code-switch to SAE (but, of course, refusing to becomes its own counter-signal for very high status—Fussell, for instance, observes that adhering to SAE is a middle-class and up tendency, but not among "old money" or his "top-out-of-sight" rich, since they don't need, at any point in their life, to give a damn whether some employer or other gate-keeper judges them worthy or intelligent or whatever).
For trans people, just existing without conflict or judgement from others is a constant struggle between society's normative expectations and the desire to express who you really are.