the big blue & pink elephant in the room

Here now, in the midst of Pride Week, I wanted to talk a little more about something that I don’t talk about a lot. Everyone and their mother at this point knows I’m an out and proud member of the LGBTQ community. Everybody knows my love and respect for the female existence. But what I haven’t talked a lot about is my struggle living within the female form. I am transgender and therefore transmale (female-to-male). This is not something I readily discuss with just anyone but I choose to share it with you now. Watch films such as “The Life and Death of Martha P. Johnson” (streaming now on Netflix so catch it while you can) and the biography that lies within “Boys Don’t Cry” and you might understand why.

The history of the transgender community is quite scary and tragic but it is also uplifting. The people of this community who are brave enough to stand up and say who they are in the face of very real violence every single day are heroes. I am trying to join the ranks and been mustering the strength a little at a time. It’s been a long boot camp and I am twenty-six years old now. It took me 22 years to realize and accept myself for who and how I am. And I want to talk a little about my story as an LGBT person, a Christian and as a human and how they all intertwine in my DNA.

I don’t remember much before the age four (who does, really?) but I do remember that age distinctly because this was when I started becoming more myself. I started picking out the clothes I wanted to wear, I made some decisions and I started growing into who I am. My natural choice? I ran around role-playing The Lion King or as Aladdin and a myriad of other characters. All of the characters were naturally male characters and hero types. I bestowed upon myself daily (sometimes multiple times daily) a new male name that I would adorn and become. I wore backwards hats and kept my hair as short as was allowed and often pranced around shirtless.

The term “tomboy” was a word that came to define and solidify my identity as a child born biologically female who dressed like a boy. Problem was it wasn’t just an act; it was an outlet for who I really was. At some point I came into the belief, being raised in a Christian household with loving and open parents who have always been the unconditional type, and I declared that “God will change me into a boy.” Now in Alabama in the 90s, a word as radical as “transgender” was taboo to say the least yet my mother simply wondered but let it be.

As a little kid I was happy go-lucky, days were either the best or the worst, that kid loved music and boybands, acting out and rebelling and being their own creature of existence. The change in that little kid came around the age of eight or nine, my parents had distanced themselves from the church for a while, I had started homeschooling and that never quite worked for a kid like me. So you could say I lived a quiet life and withdrew into myself a little during this time. Then I started going to church again, got involved with basketball and started acting in plays. This kept me active but it also put me, a kid that should’ve started growing out of that “tomboy” phase and become more ladylike, on a stage.

Many, most people will never truly understand dysphoria but I will try my best to explain it. Being put on a stage in any way, shape or form will make most anyone self-conscious. Dysphoria is a lot like being a member of the audience and the actor at the same time. Sitting in the crowd and watching the form move about the stage in an unnatural, awkward-like, not entirely genuine way and not being aware that that’s actually you on the stage. That’s the way I can describe dysphoria. To me, it is being made painfully aware you are one way and having an entirely different image and picture in your head of who you are. Maybe it’s the wrong body or whatever, but to me it’s the wrong shape and size and it’s growing, warping itself into a way that you feel and know it’s not supposed to.

Coming of age and into self-awareness was a jarring, exhilarating, challenging and ultimately, I don’t use this term lightly, traumatizing. I still had a belief that God would shape me into the man I was to become but as days past, even as young as I was, I hadn’t even reached a double-digit age and the idea of womanhood was falling upon me rapidly. So for a while I met in the middle, then I went the opposite direction and dressed like my sister, tried dresses and skirts. I wore makeup for a brief time and I was miserable. I was living my life playing a character, a role I never signed up and wasn’t getting reimbursed or paid to play or even enjoyed enacting. I was destitute and my mental health suffered some of its worst during this time period.

My moods became darker, my sense of self was not reality and essentially nonexistent therefore nothing else seemed real and so when by myself, I didn’t know who to be. I grew interested in things and matters that middle schoolers should have no business studying and investing in. I was warping myself to fit the mold, square peg in the round hole, trying to find some sense of solace and refuge; I found it in all the wrong places and it came out in all the wrong ways. I grew up fast and in some ways I grew up hard.

Think of yourself as a child with a name that is not yours, that you have no association with and could barely stand to answer to and try to imagine dressing up in the opposite sex's apparel and everyone applauding the natural and right way of that being. Society, adults and kids alike see you as finally being normal. “It’s about time,” they’d say. One day you slip back into what you know to be your wardrobe, your apparel, your own skin and you’re judged, ridiculed and exiled, whether real or imagined, because of it. That’s growing up as a kid with dysphoria.

So I self-harmed, I hurt the body I was in because it felt wrong and no matter what I did, it would never be right. It was either my mind and heart or my body. My mind would be right, the exterior all wrong. The exterior the status quo and my mind run amok in chaos. It never lined up, never synced, not once in adolescence. Then my body was used for purposes that I did not consent to but I was already numbed to the flesh and blood. My skin and bones were camouflage that didn’t exist and I didn’t acknowledge. So the memory of the pain became blackened, I had to tell myself and train my brain that way. Soon the memory would become camouflaged too and lost in my mind but ended up blocking almost every other growth I could possibly make personally.

I was talking the other day with my mother about my struggle with the idea of God in recent years since coming to terms with myself. I have had a relationship with God and been a cognizant, proclaimed Christian myself since the age of ten. I have fallen on my knees at the alter and in my bedroom. I have spoken in tongues. I have had visions (of minute importance but visions nonetheless). I’ve known the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit intimately and we have walked together through my life. I have volunteered in the body of Christ with my blood, sweat and tears in the name of Jesus. I’ve been a vital part of it and now I feel cutoff, a bit rebuked by it in some ways, more than a little actually.

That brings me to my beliefs, the God I know versus the God of organized religion. I know the general church and Christian overview of LGBTQ issues in general and I know their argument against transgenderism and changing God’s creation in anyway. I’ve read, I’ve heard and I’ve seen and I’ve lived it. I’ve also studied His word and I’ve also studied historical contexts.

Very well-known, the passage most cited in the argument against transgenderism is Psalms 139:13-16. The key quote, “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” (NIV version)

Also known as “God doesn’t make mistakes” and He doesn’t. He hasn’t made a mistake in making me and forming me the way he has either. I blamed God for a while after I hit puberty and manhood did not befall me. It sounds ridiculous but it is the truth. This was also my stupid human self-righteousness and privilege as a child of God in America, thinking I was owed instead of earning. I don’t blame God anymore. Do I get frustrated with God? Yes. In the argument of God doesn’t make mistakes, it is correct. He is infallible. He is infallible in the toughest, grittiest, salt-in-wounds of ways sometimes.

God is infallible when a woman miscarries and loses a child. God is infallible when a child is born blind. God is infallible when a child is born as both genders. God is infallible when a person grows cancer and God is infallible if that person dies. God is infallible when a person falls into a coma and the brain is no longer active. God is infallible in tragedies and triumphs. What I want you to also realize is that God is also infallible in seasons and history of change and transition.

God is also the God that sent his Son, Jesus to perform miracles. He is the God, through Jesus, who made a man born blind see again, a lame man walk again and he is the man who spiritually transformed Saul the heretic, a man who helped stone Stephen, made him blind and unable to eat or drink for days into Paul the Apostle. So I’m a strong believer in transformation both physically and spiritually through God.

I would have died four years ago probably; I was at a point where my life was unlivable except for the love of my family and my God. As I’ve written previously, I had a choice to live or die. I was choosing death by denying who I was and therefore God’s will for my life. I had no direction and I had no purpose. I have purpose because I am a spiritual person through which God works and placed a burden, a challenge and an uphill battle but not one that cannot be overcome. So I am fearfully and wonderfully made. And I am also transgender.

So God and I have signed the peace accord now and I have slowly fallen back into His loving care, allowing that to surround me and enrapture me again. This after feeling alienated for a time of years, whether from a community I once belonged to or of my own doing. I cast no blame. I just know relationships have collapsed and failed that were once longstanding. I feel hurts in that brokenness but I walk better due to it and I walk stronger. I have found a communion in humans, sinners and lovers and fighters and I walk amongst them. I no longer try to stand above or below nor do I see anyone else in such ways. I simply love and heal and live.

I realize now that my burden is no more than anything that anyone else carries, mine is just a little more physically apparent. I do seek to transition when and if the time is right (still working that out). For now, God has changed me in ways that make me less dysphoric although I still have to wake up and choose to be who I am and not deny it by default though some days I still tend to do that. It is as easy and as difficult as getting out of bed in the morning and seeking life. For a Christian, it is as easy and as difficult as it is choosing to live for God.

This is no phase. This is no trend for me because this is my life. This has been my life for as long as I can remember it but now it has a name and face and possibly, finally a place in the world. And I know I am not alone. From an innocent child who uttered that God will change him into a boy. The man he is slowly but surely and steadily growing into still believes that because he sees it and he feels it and he experiences it every single day.

I am human and I have a right to who I love and to who I am. No man will take that from me. And it’s between me and God. I am tired of feeling like the elephant in the room, I am tired of growing quiet, to be hushed and silenced by judgment and fear. I choose love and openness though a guarded heart within a fortress remains. But I no longer fracture my being for any one person, place or thing. I simply bring to the table who I am, what I have so I breathe and I love.

And I do not hide and I do not feel ashamed. It is one of the few things in which I feel pride.

Here's a few documentaries and films that I feel are educational on the trans experience and I recommend anyone willing to inform themselves and see a different perspective to watch:

"The Life and Death of Marsha P. Johnson" (2017) [available on Netflix]

"Tomboy" (2011) [a French film available with subtitles, this film is very near and dear to my heart because it feels very close to my own experiences as a child]

"Paris is Burning" (1990) [also available on Netflix]

"Boys Don't Cry" (1999)

"The Trans List" (2016)

"Laurence Anyways" (2012) [this is a long, French-Canadian film available with subtitles and because it's length, I've certainly put it at the bottom of the list]