So who am I and why should you care about what I have to say? Well, the former is a very complicated question. And perhaps that’s why I think you may find some benefit in reading what I have to say. That anyone at all may find encouragement, support, love, or even have their preconceptions challenged by my story is why I felt the need to add my story to the endless list of other blogs out there.
To start, I’ll give a bird’s eye view of who I am. I am a Christian. I am a transgender woman. I am a wife. I am a parent. I am a soldier-turned-pacifist. In order to understand all that, though, I’ll just tell you my story. There’s really no other way, as these things are all so intertwined, so here goes nothing…
In 1979, in the east Texas town of Tyler, my parents and two older brothers welcomed a baby into the world. Unfortunately, my family and the doctors were all mistaken as to the gender of this new addition, but we’ll get into that a little later. I spent much of my childhood moving around. It comes with the territory when your dad is a professional pilot. I was born into a Christian family. That faith, or more accurately at the time, that religiosity was an anchor as we bounced around the country. If the church doors were open, we were there. But I was raised on a very conflicted view of God. I remember hearing about how loving Jesus was, but even moreso I heard how angry and vengeful God was. It was as if the two were competing forces. This was the norm for the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church cult in which I was held captive. During those early formative years, I never realized just how abusive the IFBC world was. It wasn’t just physical abuse. It was even worse, as it was emotional and spiritual abuse. These are all hallmarks of religious fundamentalism. Life, to be honest, just sucked. Every adult seemed angry, and every step was measured so as to not draw the wrath of said adults. Where church should have been a refuge, it was more a prison. It was an abusive dynamic that has, to this day, left my brothers and I in awe at the fact that we didn’t reject faith altogether. Questions were not to be asked…ever. Authority is to never be challenged, and if you know me, you know how well I handled that.
It was in this world that I grew up. It was a world of fear, oppression, and hypocrisy. It was a world of abuse. It was about the age of 6 that I started to realize I was different. Of course, this was the mid-1980’s at the height of the AIDS crisis (which, of course, I was taught was simply God’s punishment on the “gays”). I knew something was different, but I didn’t know how to put words to what I was feeling. All I knew was that I must have been an “unsaved” pervert who, if I died at any moment, God would gleefully toss me in a lake of fire to burn forever. I remember the church school we attended in Louisville where, during chapel one day, we were told that when the lights were turned off, we were to scream at the top of our lungs. As a young teen, I remember a sense of excitement. In a world where we were to be seen, but not heard, we were about to be heard. It felt as if there were a buzz radiating through the student body. As the excitement grew, the room went black. We all screamed. We saw an oasis of fun in a desert of fear. 15-20 seconds later the lights came on, the chapel teacher went to the pulpit, and then said something I’ve never forgotten to this day: “Now take those screams, and add in the worst imaginable pain, fire, and suffering for all of eternity. Now who wants to pray to be saved?” Hands shot up across the room. That oasis of fun was a mirage. We were unknowingly drawn deeper into the barren desert of fundamentalism.
It was in that world that I began to question my entire identity. Why was I having these urges? Why did I want to claw my skin off? Why am I like this? Why would God make me like this? I begged God for the same things every night. First, "save me!" I knew, according to the preachers I grew up listening to, I couldn’t want to be a girl and go to heaven. It took me decades to realize that I never wanted to be a girl. I was a girl and simply didn’t know it at the time. Second, since I heard of all these supernatural miracles every week as I sat fearfully in a church pew, surely God could miraculously make me wake up the next morning as a girl. "Please!" - I’d cry out, over and over - "just make this one miracle happen. I'll never ask for anything again!" Then the sun would rise and I’d come to the harsh realization that the miracle would never come. And finally, "God, if you aren’t going to make this miracle happen, please just kill me." There would be no shame for my family if their “son” dies in his sleep, but I couldn’t bear the shame I’d cause them if their friends found out what their “son” really was. "Just please, God, make this pain end."
I spent so many years fighting what I thought was an “enemy” without even being able to name the “enemy”. I spent so many years having no safe space in which I could seek guidance or comfort. No person to confide in. But even if I did have that safe space, again I had no idea that words like transgender, gender dysphoria, gender identity, and so many other terms that have become commonplace in society today even existed. Feeling trapped, with no allies, and without the vocabulary to even wrestle with it in my own mind, I did what so many young people did in my situation. I overcompensated. In the trans female community, the term I most often hear to describe this phenomenon is “Flight to Hyper-Masculinity”. Subconsciously, the only way I felt that I could defeat this, or at least keep it concealed from others, was to prove how much of a “man” I was. So, in a manner modeled by so many American men throughout our history, I found comfort in violence. Part 2 Part 3 Part 4