Self-Discovery and a Just God
In a 2017 Q&A session with BYU students, then-apostle Elder Ballard said the following about queer members of the church: "We need to listen to and understand what our LGBT brothers and sisters are feeling and experiencing. Certainly we must do better than we have done in the past so that all members feel they have a spiritual home where their brothers and sisters love them and where they have a place to worship and serve the Lord."
I want to untangle some of those things that I've felt and experienced as part of my transition process. I hope that it will speak to someone out there, whoever they may be or whatever their sexuality or gender identity.
I have now been in transition for almost three years. Do I regret it? Not at all. Not in the least. For the first time in my life, I am able to look in the mirror and see myself, not a body or face that feels alien to me. I am finally able to feel at home and comfortable in my own skin—in skin that truly, actually does feel like my own, for the first time. Has it fixed everything? No, of course not. I still need to buy that gym membership I've been putting off for months. I still need work on my vocal exercises to develop a voice that doesn't feel so timid, so easily shaken by nerves. But it made my problems feel worth fixing. It helped me not only appreciate my body, but take joy in it—a kind of joy that is, as far as I can tell, exactly the kind of happiness that Mormon cosmology supposes we're supposed to have as part of being born on earth and becoming embodied souls.
It's difficult to overstate this. For as long as I can remember being old enough to worry about self-image and self-esteem, I struggled intensely with it. I never felt quite right in my own body, never felt happy with who I was. When I turned 18, one of my high school friends gave me a birthday card that read "Congrats on becoming a real person." They meant that in jest, but the truth is that I continued not feeling like a "real person" for a very long time after that. I can remember conversation after conversation with close friends, who I leaned on more like amateur, unpaid therapists, as I constantly wrestled with the bitterness of self-loathing and the terror of never knowing if I would feel worthy of anything.
When I realized internally that I was experiencing gender dysphoria—when it finally dawned on me that what I longed and yearned for was to be different, in a gendered way, than who I was—it was, quite literally, like opening curtains to let a beaming light into a dark room. And as intimidating as starting transition was—not to mention how difficult and socially, politically fraught it is in Donald Trump's gender-obsessed America—I knew almost immediately that it wasn't a fluke. It wasn't a fad. It wasn't a fleeting fantasy. I finally understood who I really was and wanted to be, and I reached out and made her real.
What does this have to do with the Church? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but for all Ballard's aspirational words, I don't think this is a story the Church is very interested in hearing. I know what the Church's teachings on transition are; I taught them to others myself, almost ten years ago. And, as I have been reminded by numerous friends, acquaintances, and family members since coming out, what I am doing is tantamount to mental illness. I have been deceived by the adversary; captured by the cunning wiles of Satan; trapped in a false delusion. Eventually the devil will surely come to collect.
To that, to my cisgender or heterosexual family and friends, I can only say: take Elder Ballard's advice and really listen to the experiences of people like me before drawing your conclusions. Really internalize what it would be like to live a colorless, gray, foggy life where you can't stand to ever look in a mirror, where your every waking moment feels like a stranger is piloting a body that doesn't really belong to you. I've been a Mormon for my entire life; I know what it's like to have to confess a bad habit or to feel like you can't shake the temptation to indulge in sin you know is harming you. I know what being captured by the adversary's flaxen cords feels like, because there were times in my life where I believed with my whole heart that I was struggling in vain against them. I remember the all-consuming guilt and shame of a teenage porn habit, terrified of what might happen to me if my friends or family found out. I remember the self-loathing, the certainty that I would never again be worthy to set foot in a temple or serve a full-time proselytizing mission. I remember the internal anguish as my mission application was delayed, and delayed, and delayed again, by leaders who made me feel like I would never be spiritually worthy to go, whether that was their intention or not.
To say that my transition should bear resemblance to that darkness, to furtive self-loathing, shame, guilt—it's an insult. It is willfully deaf to all that I can and will say about the joy of self-actualization, of self-discovery, of having a body and a selfhood that feels authentically like me in a way my pre-transition self never did. And it brings me no joy that the Church seems either unable or unwilling to come up with alternative explanations beyond halfhearted condemnation. That the best it can do is shrug and assure everybody these mysteries will all work out in the end, but some people have simply been foreordained to be made to suffer here and now, to eke out colorless lives burdened by self-hatred and silent suffering. The Church seems unwilling or unable to consider that LGBTQ+ individuals may just be a part of the infinitely diverse tapestry of human experience, and yet is also unable to offer any theological answers as to why we exist regardless, except to associate us with Luciferian "gender confusion." In the face of my own lived experience, the same experience which the Church ostensibly is seeking to understand, that seems to me an awfully small peg on which to hang one's hat. With no answers for why people are born gay or trans, no real advice to us except to hang on for dear life with gritted teeth and white knuckles, no clarity of thought or purpose for our lived experience in the next life—how can we possibly blame any LGBTQ individual who wants to find fulfillment in the life they presently have now, instead of deferring all hope of companionship and self-actualization to an unseen, hoped-for future?
I agree with the Church that it will all work out in the end. But where God has been silent in giving the Church answers to whys and wherefores, I choose to have hope. Hope that God wants all of us to have joy in our bodies, in our selfhoods, in our relationships with those we love, in the here and now. Hope that my journey of self-discovery and actualization will be happy not only now but in whatever comes after. It seems to me a very small, parochial, and unimaginative God who would not understand that dream.
If I'm wrong for that, and bound for hell—well, I'll just have to follow Joseph Smith's advice, turn the devils out of doors, and make a heaven of it.