Unmoored
When I had come to grips with the reality that I was trans, but I hadn't yet decided what I was going to do about it, I was gripped with fear. Uncertainty. Anxiety. I wrote to my parents, in one of many pained, uncertain letters, that I was deeply afraid of making the wrong decision and ending up a stranger to the kingdom of God. For what felt like the first time in my life, I knew who I was, and who I wanted to be, and at the same time, it seemed like I would have to give up religious community and conviction if I ever wanted to self-actualize. Or, alternatively, I could keep my community and my beliefs, but at the cost of spending the rest of my life suffocating, unable to really know myself or be truly known by anyone around me.
I agonized over that decision for months. I read my scriptures, I went to the temple, I listened to general conference talks. There was nothing to speak to the deep and irreconcilable split between my sense of identity and my faith. It seemed as though God's prophets and apostles had never considered a situation like mine, or if they had, they weren't going to discuss such a thing openly. Even what few resources I could find on being transgender in the church were vague and noncommittal, gesturing in the direction of "sensitivity and compassion" and urging me to turn to God, but unable or unwilling to provide any real answers.
Among the calls for compassion and charity there were, of course, attacks on gender confusion. On one hand, resource pages specifically for people like me spoke of God's grace, understanding, and compassion. On the other, a litany of conference talks, BYU speeches, and prophetic declarations issued dire warnings about the sanctity of the family and the wickedness of "erasing" man and woman. Those made me feel horrible. The blame didn't seem fair. I wasn't trying to attack the family. I didn't choose to have the feelings that I did.
So I didn't know what to do. I valued (and still value) my connection to God. I valued, and still value, my belief in what we might call the core doctrines of the gospel, of faith and hope and charity, of universal love for God and for mankind, of the hope that good will ultimately prevail over evil. I still value the Mormon ambition of creating what one of my BYU professors called a "beloved community," a social space where everyone's hearts are knit together as one in the same kind of communal, joyous, indwelling love that defines God. I didn't want to be alienated from those hopes and dreams, to be unmoored from my religious roots, to be rejected solely because I had come to understand myself in a way the church did not. It didn't seem fair that people who had never met me and did not know my experience were so confident that I was a dupe, or even a willing agent, of Satan himself.
On loopholes
At that time, the LDS church handbook still contained an exception to its prohibition on hormone replacement therapy. Citing the danger of suicidal ideation, it allowed that some individuals might be permitted to undergo hormone therapy under the care of a medical professional and remain in good standing, provided such individuals were not also attempting to socially or surgically transition. Razor-thin though the edge was, it seemed for a time that there might be a way to balance two seemingly impossible paths forward...at least briefly.
Now, of course there's no one correct way to transition. There's no universal one-size-fits-all transgender experience. But I feel confident in saying that this policy was, however well-intentioned, doomed to fail, because it's not a livable experience for a trans person. You can't just take HRT as though it's an antidepressant and opt out of the accompanying physical and physiological changes that make up transition. A trans woman on HRT will inevitably experience breast growth and reduced fertility. A trans man on HRT will grow facial hair and his voice will deepen. There's no way to avoid blurring the lines between the church's sacred, immutable, impermeable boundary of binary sex while taking HRT. If anything, being permitted to hormonally transition but strictly prohibited from doing anything else would likely only make the dysphoria worse. My mother, well-meaning but naive, asked me at one point why I couldn't simply dress as a woman and leave it at that. Why not perform a kind of womanhood while not identifying as one, while still openly and frankly describing myself as a man? The idea seemed monstrous. What closeted trans woman wants to explain to male peers that she is a man, that he identifies as a man, that she sounds and looks like a man even as he rejects all the social markers of masculinity? What trans man wants to continue attending women's meetings at church in a dress even as his voice and body and facial hair continue to masculinize and make him the odd one out among the sisters?
The church seems to have realized that it was trying to thread an impossible needle. The exception intended to address suicidality has since been deleted from the handbook. On one hand, this seems to be a more pragmatic position with respect to the church's doctrines. On the other, I think it implies some pretty bleak things about trans-related suicidality: either the church doesn't believe that closeted trans people really, actually experience dramatically increased risk of suicidality, or it does—it's just that they're actually better off dying of suicide (and, presumably, being "fixed" by a perfect God) than treating that risk by disfiguring their precious God-given body. Both of these options are, in my view, morally horrific.
What do I want to say about this? Looking back, it isn't that I left the church. It's not that I no longer believe, it's not that I hate the church for believing what it does. None of those things are true. It's that the church couldn't explain anything about my experience. The church doesn't explain anything about my experience. And, loath as I am to say it out of respect for my orthodox, believing friends and family who are "all in" on the gospel, the church doesn't seem to think that it even needs to explain anything about this experience. It seems content instead to vociferously and repeatedly condemn it without really examining it. Even as it calls for sensitivity and compassion, it's happy to lean into only slightly softer and more faux-affable versions of right-wing narratives about "gender confusion" or "attacks on the family" as flimsy proxy explanations for trans people. When pressed for proper answers, it frankly admits that it actually has no position on where people like me do come from, which seems to imply that it also should have no position on what happens to people like me after death. But none of that claimed epistemic humility makes it past a couple of individual specialized resource pages on the church's website. You won't find the church advocating for the use of proper pronouns in the name of sensitivity and compassion. Nor will you hear church leaders urging social restraint in the shadow of theological uncertainty or metaphysical unknowns. The cause may be a mystery, but, in the church's eyes, the solutions are anything but. In fact, God obligates them to speak about and to treat people like me with the kind of hostility and suspicion you would reserve for a murderer or a child abuser. What good do a few out-of-the-way digital platitudes about compassion do, in the face of institutional policy which treats people like me as more of a danger to the faith and its members than sex offenders and predators?
No, the church is content to shut me out of its beloved community and, without having real answers or explanations of its own, invent a narrative of whole cloth that I made a capricious, shortsighted, selfish choice to self-mutilate. Without listening to my experience, the church has already decided that I must have already made my mind up. I, the feebleminded sinner, have simply allowed myself to be seduced, out of a desire for sin, profound mental illness, or both. But which one of us is the one undertaking the work of introspection, reflection, and consideration, and which one of us is reflexively, uncritically pointing to beliefs which cannot be questioned?
On empathy
In my last blog post I talked about the happiness I've felt in being myself, in feeling like my spirit and body both align, in how that union expresses someone who feels like me. I wrote about how the church isn't really interested in this kind of experience. It doesn't find it compelling, it doesn't find it enlivening or happy or joyful—it doesn't even want to admit that it's legitimate. I have been told, numerous times by numerous people in numerous ways, it's all a lie. I've been deceived by Satan's flaxen cords, recruited by evil, miserable activists into a false, empty, nonsensical doctrine that doesn't mean anything and will ultimately make me eternally miserable. At every turn, there's an impulse to treat the whole thing as capricious and arbitrary, as a kind of shortsighted, selfish demand, like a toddler throwing a fit because the candy is all gone. There's no willingness to reckon with the actual reality of trans experience—no empathy for those who describe having considered, let alone attempted, suicide; no consideration of what it's like to live one's entire life in the closet; no introspection at seeing the fruits of transition as it produces people able to live happier, healthier, productive lives. The whole of trans experience is simply dismissed out of hand as categorically, teleologically wrong, and its victims wretched objects of pity and paternalistic disappointment. This is your cross to bear, they say. You just have to live with it. God is testing you. You will be sorry forever one day if you succumb now.
On disability and illness
There are two things I want to say about this. One is the comparison to disability, to other individuals who also don't have it fair because, due to physical or mental infirmity, they too will never have the chance to marry a beloved, or to pursue a lifelong dream. Isn't that also unfair? Why do the gays and the lesbians and the queers complain so much, as if they have any it different?
As it happens, I know a thing or two about disability. I have been disabled since birth. I've spent most of my life periodically in and out of hospitals for surgeries and shots. My disability is visible and immediately apparent. And, I want to add, I am still one of the incredibly fortunate ones for whom the impact is, all things considered, relatively mild. Nonetheless, it could be fairly said that yes, cerebral palsy is, for me, a cross to bear in this life. But in this case, I have no problem believing that in a next life it could be cured and I could be made whole. It is not a part of my identity, my being, my sense of self, even though it impacts every aspect of my life every day. The same cannot be said for my feelings of what the church calls "gender incongruence," which speaks to the very heart of who I am, how I see myself, and how I wish to relate to and be related to by other people.
But let's make the comparison fair; let's capture what's actually happening here. If, hypothetically, the church's position on disability was that I should refuse any medical intervention—if I should go without Botox injections or surgical intervention to correct any part of my physically limited, infirm body—would I say no? Would my parents have said no to the various surgeries I underwent as a child, choosing instead to put all their faith in God to let me suffer as a demonstration of faith? If a wheelchair or crutches or a cane was considered to be a faithless, arrogant sign of me deigning to know better than God's perfect design for my body, should I have simply suffered and gone a lifetime without?
That, I think, is the distinction that so many apologetic defenses of queerphobic rhetoric and doctrine fail to understand. We live in a violent, unfair, unjust world where people suffer and die unfairly every day. But we don't believe in a cruel God who commands us not only not to help, but to spend our efforts ensuring that no help is possible. Nothing could be further from the God found in Mormon scripture. The church does not threaten to revoke your good standing if you get vaccinated. It doesn't use its wealth and influence to eliminate access to vaccines for everyone while arguing that they contaminate God's perfect plan for our bodies. It doesn't demand of me that I suffer in silence, lame and crippled, simply because it would be spitting in God's face to have my muscles lengthened, or my bones properly reoriented, or my body assisted by artificial rods or braces. It doesn't look at natural disasters or the viciousness of war or the devastation of famine and command us to withhold our aid and allow the afflicted to suffer and die, lest we arrogantly interfere with God's mysterious and perfect purposes.
But now imagine that it did. What would it take for you to obey in such a scenario? What would it take for you, knowing that the breakthroughs of modern medicine could enable you or a loved one to take up your bed and walk and live a full life, to deny that treatment because the church believes you are better off being disfigured or deformed now so that you can have that life in a far-off, unseen future? I think it would take an extraordinary revelation to convince me of that. Maybe that makes me faithless; maybe I'm a doubting Thomas. But I think God would have to personally visit me with a extraordinarily compelling, transcendent explanation if the church expected of me that I should turn down all the miracles of modern medicine and willingly suffer a life of limitation and infirmity purely because of abstract theological and teleological concerns about a future that might one day come to be. It is, in my opinion, not for nothing that Christ condemns celibacy in modern LDS scripture (cf. Doctrine and Covenants 49), and that Mormonism in general rejects the ascetic and monastic practices of other traditions in favor of incorporating all the truth, and all of the sociality, it can lay hold of. Should we be so quick to demand of our queer siblings something that Christ condemns for everyone else? At the very least, should that not give us some pause? Some willingness to reconsider how much weight we should really give to ancient authors whose outlook on sexual issues was, compared to today, really quite limited?
It should go without saying: the church is not willing to ask these questions. An unflinching, unquestioning asceticism is what the church asks of queer people, and most especially trans people. The church does not have an explanation for why we are the way we are. It does not know the ultimate cause of feelings of gender incongruence. (It thankfully no longer speculates about such things, and instead seems to be content to leave that to the domain of science and medicine.) And yet, it clings to its theological rationales even in the absence of such answers. It expects me to spend the whole of this one life with white knuckles and clenched teeth. Knowing that there are real medical solutions—and reliable medical consensus—out there, it nonetheless paternalistically shakes its head. You don't understand, it says. You may think that having surgery and finally being able to walk will make you happy, but you are wrong. The happiness you may think you gain from being able to swim, from being able to run, from being able to take up your bed and walk—that's not true happiness, because you don't understand that God simply hasn't ordained you to be able to walk. You don't understand that you will be able to walk, someday, after you die, when we've all passed on to a world you can only dream about. But here and now? No. It's your cross to bear. You must suffer it gladly. As sad as it is, that's just the way of things. No, it won't change. It will never change.
This rhetoric is invincibly self-assured. It will admit no challenge. If you suggest that it's lacking in empathy, you're likely to provoke an angry, defensive response, or be accused of preying unfairly on emotionally charged issues like suicide or self-harm. (Only Satan would do something so cunning!) It doesn't matter how earnestly you talk about how happy you would be to be able to walk if only you could; it doesn't matter, even, if you do choose to be healed by medicine, and describe living a fuller, richer, happier life now that you're finally able to. You'll just be told, tautologically, that your experience simply cannot be correct, because wickedness never was happiness. You cannot believe your own lying eyes. You can only trust what the church says, and the church says that one day you will eventually pay a miserable price. The freedom and happiness and authenticity you experience now, having been freed of your yoke, is merely a counterfeit by the evil one working to drag you to hell. I couldn't stake my life on that. And I do not have kind things to say about church leaders and members who are unwilling to recognize that our lives, not theirs, are what they are staking on an invincibly self-assured faith in God's cisgender, heterosexual blueprint.
All this is to say that I did not choose to make myself a stranger to the kingdom of God. I found instead that the church, through studied ignorance and carefully, pointedly averting its gaze, made a stranger of me itself. The church distanced itself from me because of its unwillingness to hear my experience, even as it continually implies or outright states that people like me are a scheme devised by Satan. Its unwillingness to reexamine any putatively foundational beliefs about gender or sex reveals an unspoken attitude that there really is nothing to be learned or gained from listening to or empathizing with the gay or lesbian or queer or trans experience after all. And that makes all of its aspirational words about learning and listening and doing better into little more than a tinkling brass and sounding cymbal.
More to come in a part 2.