A Conversation with God Turned it All Around

March 30, 2009

This personal story was generously contributed to SisterFriends Together by Tiffany.

I am a transsexual Christian.  In that sentence, the word “transsexual” is an adjective.  An adjective is a word that describes. It tells the reader an attribute I possess.  I have the attribute of being a transgender woman.  I like to explain it this was: people are usually understood as being body, mind, and spirit.  My mind and spirit are female and I’m working on getting the body to match. I didn’t always recognize that it was an attribute.

I grew up in a very traditionally-minded community; both in my family and church. I first became aware that this was part of me during the end of summer before I started fourth grade.  My mom had left me at a babysitter’s house for the day.  I was just one of several kids there that day.  I was feeling rather lonely that day.  I didn’t want to play with the other boys and none of the girls wanted to let me play with them because they didn’t want to play with a boy.

I was watching TV while the girls played dress-up.  Then they left the room to go play somewhere else and they left some of the clothes they used for dress-up.  I remember a red dress caught my eye and I decided to try it on.  It just felt right.  I felt pretty but then the babysitter came in.  She scolded me and told me what I was doing was bad.

That brings me back to grammatical analysis.  The babysitter told me what I was DOING was bad.  She told me that my adjective was a verb. A verb is an action word.  In a sentence the verb acts.  The dog JUMPED.  The cat CHASED the mouse.  The confused and naive transgender child LISTENED to the babysitter yell.

There is an important difference in understanding being GLBTQ as an adjective or a verb.  As an adjective, I now understand being trans as part of who I am.  However, when I thought it was a verb, it meant something very different.  It was something outside of me; something that I had been told was wrong and sinful, and since I thought it was something separate from me, I thought it was something I could avoid.  After all, I had to because I loved Jesus and certainly didn’t want to be a part of any sinful actions.

Since being GLBTQ is an adjective, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t “avoid” it and that just made me feel terrible. This was the cycle of my life for years. I tried to not be trans and failed because it was inherently impossible. I felt awful as a result.  As this went on long enough I began to feel the weight of adjectives I had begun to use when speaking about myself: “weak,” “not good enough,” and “worthless,” – just to name a few.

When I was in my third year of college, I no longer felt their weight; I was crushed by them.  I didn’t seem like a person in perpetual crisis.  I had friends.  I was an honor student.  I even had a part time job at a local church. In reality however, I was emotionally destitute.  I spent large portions of my free time literally locking myself in my closet and crying.  I slept on the floor of that closet many nights.

The next part of the story sounds melodramatic, and I hesitate to tell it because I’m afraid no one will believe me.  However, it did happen and is part of my story.

One night I was curled up on my closet floor crying and starting to consider suicide methods.  Then I felt the Holy Spirit get my attention.  I didn’t hear a literal spoken voice, but it was the closest I’ve ever experienced.  God simply said “Why are you crying?”

I let it all spill out of me; all the guilt, all the shame and all feelings that I was a freak.  I told Him I couldn’t stop being a girl. I told Him that I tried and tried to stop without results.  I told Him that I knew that being trans was so unrighteous that I was separated from God no matter what. God simply said “Who told you that?”

At those four words, my world changed.  I suddenly realized I couldn’t think of a single scripture verse that addressed transgenderism.  I didn’t feel condemned anymore.

It would be easy to say that the next day I was out and proud but that wouldn’t be true.  What actually transpired was I felt free to explore how I felt.  I spent a few months thinking and praying about how I felt.  I experimented with my gender presentation, looking like a man or a woman or androgynous.  I talked with friends about how I felt.

One day a friend asked “So you dress like a girl, act like a girl, and want to be treated like a girl?  Do you ever want to be a boy again?” and I instinctively said “No; of course not.” That day, months after the closet floor conversation with God, was when I actually came understood that I am a woman.  ”Female” is an adjective that accurately describes me.

Now, I’ve going on about adjectives and verbs, but I haven’t once mentioned nouns.  An noun is the word that is a person, place, or thing. In the first sentence, the noun I used was “Christian.”

After I started to come out, I lost my job at the church, had my roommate and best friend suddenly decide to move out, and couldn’t even go to church without having long drawn out conversations about what name I was called (and I had these conversations over and over and OVER again with the same people).  I’m not going to pretend it didn’t hurt, but I do find peace in my noun.

All the adjectives are part of me, but the noun is me.  And that noun, Christian, reminds me that God loves me; that Jesus took on flesh to connect with me; that the Holy Spirit of God dwells within me.  The noun says that I am an adopted daughter of the King of Kings, a princess who is becoming more like the Jesus Christ every day.  And when I remember how much my Heavenly Father loves me that he lavished all that on me; it makes dealing with people like my old babysitter a little easier.

Posted in Personal Stories