Love answering ”why are you transgender?” with “God told me to” because it’s funny and it confuses everyone except for me. And God. Because he told me to.
People see being queer as being fundamentally divorced from the concept of religion so if I tell people that my faith is interconnected with my journey to coming out as trans and played a big role in it they don’t really believe me. So saying “God told me to” is funnier than telling the whole story.
The day I came out to my dad and brother as trans was a Sunday and during the holding hands part after communion I looked up at the stained glass on the ceiling in the church and got this overwhelming sickening terrifying feeling that I’d been in the closet too long.
You normally think of spiritual experiences as happy but I felt sick in that moment deep in my chest because I knew I had to do it now. I’d been hiding too long. And you might read that moment differently than I did but to me that was my sign. And I was terrified the whole time but I did come out to my family that day. It was like pulling a thorn out. Painful but absolutely necessary.
Sometimes a sign from God is comforting and other times it’s Him telling you to do your homework. And that’s also a part of faith.
I’m not asking all of you to believe the same things I do. I don’t do that. Evangelizing isn’t one of my gifts or something I’m interested in. But I would ask you to make space for stories that don’t fit your idea of how being trans is supposed to work. Whether they involve religion or not.
There’s no one universal experience we all have and I feel like sometimes other trans people just assume that I’ve been burned by religion the exact same way they have. I haven’t been. In fact, religion and my faith community has often been there for me when secular society hasn’t been. And that too is a transgender experience. Not a universal trans experience, but my trans experience for sure.