"Why?"

19 Jan, 2026

There's a whole host of questions you're likely to be barraged with once you come out from well-intentioned, curious, and (let's face it) often ignorant cis friends and family members. These range from the fairly anodyne to the invasive to the outright offensive. When did you know? Are you getting The Surgery? What's your "real" name?

I recently reconnected with a friend of mine whom I served with on my LDS mission, and she was, as so many people often are, curious about why I had chosen to transition—especially since we both live in the influence of a high-control, demanding religious tradition that explicitly proscribes transition of any kind. In the course of our conversation, she asked me some questions about my religious faith, such as it is. She asked about my current relationship to the church—something that I expect to develop at length in other posts which are not this one. And most importantly for the purposes of this post, she eventually asked me: what does this all mean to you? What does it mean to be transgender? Why be female?

I can't speak for any other trans or gender-diverse individuals, and certainly can't speak for all trans Mormons, let alone all trans women. What I set out to explain to her in my response—included down below shortly—is simply my own understanding of my own experiences, desires, and attitudes, especially as they had crystalized by the time I came out in June of 2023. Not all trans people and not all trans women feel the way that I did. I didn't come out until I was 28 years old, and to hear my family tell it, there were no signs that would have alerted them to the possibility until the day the dam suddenly burst. Not all trans experiences are like mine. Some do adhere to popular stereotypes in the cisgender imagination, of a sense of "being born in the wrong body" or "always knowing" from a young age. Congresswoman Sarah McBride is only one such example, from her own description; I have some trans friends who would say the same.

Again, that has not been my experience. I didn't know from puberty, or even before puberty, that my body felt wrong to me. I didn't, as some religiously inclined trans people do, pray to God every night to fix me. For much of my life I didn't really have any sense that my discomfort with my identity was gendered at all.

"Why be trans" is, in one sense, not an easy question to answer. Confronting those feelings, and in particular deciding to transition, means signing up to be one of the most popular and reviled scapegoats in the conservative imagination. More than even "the atheists" or "the communists" of forty or fifty years ago, trans individuals represent a collective paranoia and psychosis in right-wing politics everywhere. Living as a trans woman means being mocked, derided, and demonized by people who are primed by a constant firehose of Fox News disinformation to view you as a hulking, leering brute lurking around the corner of every women's bathroom, waiting for a moment to deflower some helpless innocent maiden. These people will sneer at you, refuse to use your own name, or scream at you, a total stranger, in public, because the sight of you brings to mind delusional Fox News fantasies of grooming gangs and wanton sex abusers. All this while they protect a sitting Republican president who has quite literally publicly boasted about walking into women's changing rooms to ogle undressed women. It is a complete inversion of reality on every level. And these are the people with control of the federal government and a stranglehold on a not insignificant number of red states.

In the context of the Mormon/LDS tradition, the outlook isn't much better. While the church officially and explicitly says that it takes no position on the causes of gender dysphoria or feelings of gendered incongruence, and that people like me should be treated with sensitivity and compassion, the popular Mormon culture heavily tilts conservative—especially in America and perhaps even more especially here in Utah. The practical upshot of this is that the median Mormon is very likely MAGA even where it leads them to disagree with the church on social issues (see also: immigration and vaccines), and thus is very likely to disregard all that woke, liberal sissy talk of sensitivity or compassion, in favor of sneering or screaming at you that you're a delusional, child-grooming deviant freak. One of my primary care doctors, when I came out to him and broached the possibility of hormone therapy as something I was curious about, responded by going on an anti-trans tirade that hit just about every vile bigoted trope in the book, including such deranged, obviously false tropes as "they can't reproduce, so they recruit." He ended our visit by bearing testimony to me that he and I and God all knew who I was truly meant to be—and it wasn't someone who would benefit from HRT.

That's not even getting into the question of my own religious involvement at church, the "membership restrictions" imposed as a punishment for transition, or the consequent wrestle of faith that involves for any queer person of faith. It should be clear with these examples that the deck is pretty well stacked against transition in a number of ways.

But enough of all that for now. Going back to my friend's question: why be female? What does that mean to me? And why pursue that even in the face of such oppressive opposition? Capturing that question in all of its facets would be a virtually impossible task for even the ablest writer, but after a great deal of thought, this is how I described my experience to her:

The simplest way I can think of explaining it is to answer "Why?" with "Because that's who I am." Because it feels like me. It feels congruent with my sense of who I perceive myself to be. Some trans people I know are all-in on the belief that they feel gender dysphoria because they were a different gender in the premortal life, but were assigned a different body in this one, and that they'll have their proper body in the resurrection. I don't have an answer to that for myself, and ultimately I'm not worried about finding one.

What I do know is that I've spent my entire life feeling uncomfortable with who I am, uncomfortable in my own skin, always uncomfortable with something or many somethings about myself, but never quite knowing what it was. For a very long time, I've often looked at women, with all the things we associate with femaleness—women's traits, women's clothing, women's sociality, women's bodies—with a strange mixture of feelings I had never really been able to put a name to. Admiration? Jealousy? Erotic desire? Those were all part of it, but they seemed to mix and run together to create a sense of yearning that I didn't understand. It was only in the last few years as I met more trans people and listened to their experiences that I understood—at first slowly and gradually, and then suddenly and all at once—that the reason I felt such a yearning was because "being female" was what I wanted to be. I wanted to be perceived that way by others, to perceive myself that way, to have the traits and characteristics that we associate with femininity. That realization was much like drawing back the curtain to suddenly let a flood of light into a dark room.

Does that point to a real, underlying phenomenon in some eternal sense, or is it just a mental illness or some kind of temporary mortal affliction? I don't know for myself, and I don't think having an answer on that matters to me. I think God understands my experience and will judge me more mercifully and fairly and justly than anyone else ever could.

There's much I could say about the religious angle to this—much to say about how I came to believe that my own experience was worth trusting, even if it meant making choices that would lead to the church imposing significant membership penalties as a matter of policy—and I plan to explore those ideas and more in future posts on this blog. But for the moment—while I expect this blog to have a tiny readership comprised primarily of curious friends and family—it seems most important to say simply that I made the choices I did because I want the same thing every other person does: the freedom to be myself. I want to live authentically and freely in congruence with my own internal, personal, innate sense of the person I am and who I wish to be.

As strange as it may be to imagine, as a cis person, what the trans experience could possibly be like—and as surely as I have failed to capture the roiling, all-consuming gravity of gender dysphoria—it doesn't take incredible imagination to understand the human desire to be free, authentic, and to know and be known by others in all our inexplicable complexity. That is why, despite it all—despite religious persecution, despite politically expedient bigotry, despite ignorant, incurious hatred—I am Corinna.