The Sweetest Poisons: Preston Sprinkle and "Embodied: Transgender Identities, The Church & What The Bible Has To Say". A Review

"You have frightened me several times tonight, but never in the way the servants of the Enemy would, or so I imagine. I think one of his spies would—well, seem fairer and feel fouler, if you understand."

That is how Frodo justifies his decision to trust Strider in The Fellowship of the Ring. As I was casting about for an opening to this review it struck me that Strider is a near perfect opposite to Preston Sprinkle and his book. Here is a man (and his book) who seems fair and feels foul—obviously whether or not he is a servant of the enemy is beyond what I can know—the book is all honey, sunlight, and a fresh breeze, but it is laced (at least for trans folks and those who love us) with deadly poison.

I recognize this opening leaves me at risk of sounding melodramatic or hyperbolic. I want to assure you that it is not. Cards on the table: my major thesis in this review is that Sprinkle's book, Embodied: Transgender Identities, the Church & What the Bible Has to Say, grossly misrepresents not just trans people generally but the basic facts of the matter, both scientifically and theologically; and that this misrepresentation amounts to, at the very best, a mortifying example of laziness, question-begging, and confirmation bias, and at worst a deliberate program of misinformation and deceit.

My intention in this series is to work through the book, in roughly(1) the order it is written in, focusing on specific themes and issues in the book. I will attempt to give credit where it is due (the majority of what Sprinkle gets right is not wanting people to be outwardly cruel to trans folk, and in this day and age, even that does count for something), but for the most, part this series is intended as a warning and critique of Embodied. I will be supplementing my analysis of Sprinkle's thought and writing in this book with what I have learned listening to his podcasts and from reading his blogs and debates with other writers, as well as one or two interactions I have had with him on Twitter.

In this introductory post, I want to cover the two main intellectual flaws in the book. But before I do I want to clarify the social location from which I am writing this review series. I am a transgender woman. I am also a Christian. I hold a Master of Arts in the Liberal Arts and, while I have studied gender theory, theology, and trans theory pretty extensively the only one of those that I have had formal education in is theology (I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Bible and focused one portion of my Masters in theology). Throughout this series I do not intend to write as a sort of removed third-party observer but as someone who is in the text I am discussing. Where Dr. Sprinkle discusses transgender folk from the outside and presents himself as a sort of neutral theological arbiter who has processed information about us and is not providing it to the reader, I will be reacting as a transgender christian woman who is confirmed in her gender identity and in her identity in Christ. I do not pretend to objectivity but would suggest that my subjectivity on this subject is more useful in revealing truth on the subject of transgender people.

1. Flawed Research

Preston Sprinkle engages extensively in motivated and shoddy research. This isn't the first time I have called this out, and at this point, it has happened so frequently that I am practically compelled to conclude he is aware of this tendency and doesn't care. There are many examples throughout his book; two here at the outset ought to prove illustrative.

Unbalanced ROGD Research

One of Sprinkle’s interests is an etiology of transness (a theory of what causes some people to be trans) often referred to as "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" (ROGD). Sprinkle is so taken with this theory that he devotes a full chapter of his book to it. The idea, in short, is that transness has become a "social contagion" by gaining so much currency among school-aged children (especially those assigned female at birth) that theyare developing gender dysphoria as a result of interacting with the idea of trans-ness. The theory—which has, by the way, been thoroughly debunked and discredited—is rather more complicated than that, and since Sprinkle gives it a full chapter I will address the substance of the idea in my review of that chapter; the point here is only to observe Sprinkle's research methodology. In the chapter in question, Sprinkle provides 31 footnotes in support of ROGD, citing 17 unique sources by 16 different authors. He does also recognize that there are critiques of the theory, and provides 4 citations of 3 authors for reference. Out of curiosity, I looked up the Wikipedia entry on ROGD: at that time, Wikipedia provided 16 unique sources in favor of ROGD, and 21 unique sources critiquing the theory. In other words, Sprinkle's chapter on ROGD is more fully sourced than Wikipedia in favor of the theory, yet contains less than a third of Wikipedia's sources against it.

Now, it is possible that Sprinkle read more extensively than those four sources critiquing the theory, and simply chose not to identify organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health's (WPATH) statement on the problems with ROGD, or any of the multitude of scholarly journal articles critiquing the theory on basic methodological and scientific grounds. But if so, that fact itself betrays an almost criminal choice to misrepresent the state of the debate to his readers. It seems easier to believe that Sprinkle invested real time and effort in reading only texts and papers which supported the theory he found convenient to the picture of trans folk that he wanted to paint in this book.

Sprinkle's Whipping Girl Problem 

As of September 30th 2021 Preston Sprinkle had not read Julia Serano's Whipping Girl: A Transexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Of course that in itself is no great crime—the overwhelming majority of people have never read Whipping Girl—and if Sprinkle had not published a book all about transgender people on February 1st of 2021 his oversight wouldn't be a big deal. But he did publish his book before reading it and so it is a big deal. Let me try to explain.

In the trans community we often use the term "cracking the egg" to reference the moment at which one of us realizes that they are transgender. "My egg cracked when I..." is the sort of form this generally takes and I can't think of any one book that is responsible for cracking as many eggs as Whipping Girl is. I can say with near total confidence that if you were to assemble any random collection of 10 transgender anglophone women, the majority of any gathering will have at least interacted with the content of Whipping Girl if they haven't read it fully, likely more than once. If there were a central text for trans women, that text would be Whipping Girl. And yes, I like it, it made a significant difference in my life, but that is not the point. The point is that the idea of an author writing a book about transgender people without reading Whipping Girl is as academically ridiculous as someone trying to write an academic treatise on the history of English literature without having read any Shakespeare. 

In any discipline there are central texts which are foundational and necessary as entry into the "conversation", and there are peripheral texts which might be helpful or useful to a researcher. Often there are far too many texts for any researcher to reasonably read. In this case, the problem isn't that Sprinkle hasn't read a text that I happen to find useful/helpful, the problem is that Dr. Sprinkle hasn't read a basic, foundational text in the discipline. In contrast Dr. Sprinkle did take the time to read multiple texts (central and peripheral) opposing the mainline trans position, and supporting his argument. My concern isn't exactly that Dr. Sprinkle doesn't do his homework before writing, it's that his only rigorous reading appears to be of texts that support the argument he wanted to make while missing central texts which would counter his position.

2. Slippery Rhetoric

Throughout the text, intentionally or not, Sprinkle employs several rhetorical devices of which the reader had better beware.

"If you've met one trans person you've met one trans person"

This quote (which Preston Sprinkle attributes to Mark Yarhouse) is technically accurate and, depending on context, can be not just true but vitally important. Certainly it is common among trans and trans-affirming folk to hear that there is no one way to be trans, and that trans people are highly varied: what we have in common, by definition, is simply that we identify as a gender other than what we were assigned at birth. Beyond that, there is great and glorious diversity in the trans community. Sprinkle's phrase (which he returns to often) is thus, on a certain level, both welcome and accurate. The problem is what Sprinkle does with it.

First, I should note that his focus in the book (and, by the way, also in his podcast and in his general speaking about us) is on trans people who do not fit what might be called the "norm" among transgender Christians; or to be more objective about it, he appears to go out of his way to avoid talking to or about Christians who are transgender, who affirm the goodness of gender transition (living as who we are rather than as the gender we were assigned), and who are happy with that decision. Sprinkle devotes the majority of his anecdotes, case studies, and interviews to people who either do not even identify as trans (they self ID as "gender dysphoric"), or who do identify as trans but have significant reservations about any kind of transition (for example, those who feel that it was an unfortunate necessity for themselves due to the severity of their dysphoria and that other trans people would do better to avoid it). Given that affirmation of the goodness of transition and of being trans is the position with which Dr. Sprinkle has the most disagreement, on this subject this "oversight" is rather stunning.

What Sprinkle does with the phrase "if you've met one trans person, you've met one trans person" is to focus on cases of trans arguments and identities which he feels more able to fit into his overall argument. He reminds us that they too are trans and thus, by "debunking" their experience of transness (often with the help of their own affidavits and quotes), he is able to give the impression that he has significantly weakened the case for trans affirmation in general. His unstated working assumption is that if all trans identities are unique, then all claims to transness are equally valid. Again, there is a level on which is an important claim that much of the trans community upholds, myself included: you do not need to experience dysphoria or pursue transition to be “really” trans. But Sprinkle's usage of the phrase implies that the basis on which any given trans person claims to be trans can equally apply to all trans people—even when he goes on to cite people do not even claim to be trans but whom he includes due to factors which both trans people in general and the scientific community have concluded are not legitimate constructs, namely Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and Autogynephillia (AGP)(2). By implication, then, Sprinkle is saying that someone who claims to be trans on the basis of autogynephilia (i.e., sexual arousal at the thought of being or becoming a woman) is making just as legitimate a claim to the meaning of transness as, say, Laverne Cox. In contrast, trans folk, the medical establishment, and the scientific establishment all maintain that AGP is not a legitimate diagnosis, and that while the trans people who are put into that category really are trans, they are not made trans by the experience Sprinkle is referring to as autogynephilia. Sprinkle's unstated reasoning runs something like: all trans experiences are unique and therefore, since trans people are nonetheless a group, undermining any one trans experience amounts to undermining transness as a whole. (In logicians’ terms, this is a delicate combination of the strawman fallacy and the fallacy of composition.) This is augmented in his book by a complementary bit of slippery rhetoric: his use of "trans*."

Trans*

Since so many gender identity terms can overlap with each other, some people put an asterisk after the word trans, stylizing it as trans*, when thye want to use it as a broad umbrella term to inculde a whole range of identities that aren't strictly transgender, such as nonbinary, genderqueer, and the like. I'll do the same in this book [italics original] 

-Chapter 2

There are a lot of problems with this little passage, and I intend to address them specifically when I review Chapter 2. Here, I want to focus only only the fact that he chose to use "trans*," with the asterisk, throughout his book. His claim (that "some people" use the asterisk version of trans) is probably, technically, true—I am not about to make a universal negative claim; but I have hardly if ever seen a trans person use it "in the wild," and I am a trans woman who is reasonably active in multiple secular and Christian trans social circles. So Sprinkle is using a term which saw some popularity in the early 2010s—Serano documented its rise and the beginning of its decline in 2015—but had already faded before he sat down to write the book (Embodied was published in 2021). Trying to be extra PC or inclusive and getting something like that wrong, wouldn't be a significant problem and a cis person, even one who has researched and published a book on trans people might be excused for using dated language if only Sprinkle had made a point of using the term well; he doesn't.

The reason there are umbrella terms (like the short-lived trans*) is so that we can effectively discuss diverse things which share a particular commonality. For that reason, those terms should only be deployed when that degree of generalization is necessary. If there is a more accurate term which could apply, it should generally be used instead. Thus I might use the acronym LGBTQ+ if I am referring generally to lesbians, gay folk, bi and pan people, trans people, people who identify as queer, and any other people who aren't generally considered straight and cisgender(3); but if I am only referring to gay men, I will use the term gay, or if I am (for some reason) only referring to cis gay men, cis lesbians, and cis bi/pan folk I might use LGB(4). Rather than following this rule of linguistic clarity, Preston uses trans* (or "trans* identified") throughout the book, even when more specific terms are available. Again this, in itself is excusable in the abstract—we will sometimes switch up our use of terms at the cost of strict accuracy for the sake of linguistic variety, or because the distinctions we might gain from more precise language aren't relevant to the topic at hand—but the way Dr. Sprinkle actually uses the term is misleading in the particular case of this book.

The effect that his usage has has is twofold: first, Sprinkle's repeated use of trans*, even where more specific terms are available and would be more accurate, counteracts the positive strength of "if you've met one trans person you've met one trans person" by lumping us all together linguistically even when such a move is not relevant. This allows Sprinkle to have his cake and eat it too, insofar as he has paid lip service to the fact of trans diversity while simultaneously lumping all of us into a single category that is subject to the critiques he makes of specific members. When it is convenient to him for us to be a monolith, he gets to treat us as one, when it is helpful to him for us to be diverse, he treats us as diverse.

Second, I noticed, about halfway through my reading of the book, that the constant use of the asterisk tends to make the term (and, by extension, the concept) feel dubious. We put an asterisk next to a term when we need to indicate that it should taken with a grain of salt. By the time I reached the end of Embodied, it had become almost impossible to read Sprinkle's “trans*” without a sense of a shrug.

Conclusion to the Intro

I am aware that the introduction to this review is not winsome. If you go and read through the two part series I wrote back in 2015, responding to his review of Ken Wilson's A Letter to my Congregation, you will see that seven years ago I had a much higher estimation of Sprinkle's intentions. Since that time, I have watched him persist in the sort of habits I identify above. As he gained an interest in writing, speaking, and podcasting about trans people, he was given multiple, earnest entreaties to widen his reading and to engage with the broader scientific consensus on the subject. Throughout this series, I intend to highlight certain places where Sprinkle has either admitted to or demonstrated a shocking degree of ignorance regarding basic trans theory, and of the shape of the conversations that trans people and especially trans Christians are actually having.

For all of that (and it is a lot) I do want to end with a positive comment about Sprinkle's book or, rather, about his project. Preston Sprinkle does seem to sincerely like the trans people he knows and speaks with and he does actively advocate against the sort of culture war vitriol that so many white evangelical Christians are directing at LGBTQ+ people—and that is something. I also want people to be kinder to trans folk and if Sprinkle's book helps to move people in that direction then I will be grateful for that while I remain deeply concerned about his book, his habits, and his work as a whole. And for people who are trans or who may have just begun to wonder whether they might be trans, I am very concerned that this book will cause deep, deep harm to them. 

Footnotes

(1) for reasons that will become clear over the course of the series, I will have to jump around somewhat.

(2) The complications and difficulties in talking about ROGD and AGP are manifold and I will explore and explain them in detail in my reviews of the relevant portions of the book. For now the most concise way I can explain it is that both terms refer to constructs which both the medical and psychological communities and the vast majority of trans people consider bunk. There are people whose experiences can be imperfectly described by these terms but the categorization itself forces false premises onto the experiences of trans people.

(3) I absolutely will have something to say about Sprinkle's decision to not use the term "cisgender" in my review of chapter 2.

(4) though these days I probably wouldn't given the use certain hate groups in England are making of that shortened version of the acronym.

Series Index

Intro

Part 1—Chapter 1: People

Part 2—Chapter 2A: Terms

Part 3—Chapter 2B: Sex and Gender

Part 4—Chapter 3: Varieties of Trans 

Part 5—Chapter 4: Male, Female & The Image of God

Part 6—Chapter 5: Gender Stereotypes

An Open Letter to the Ex-Gay Texas Politician who is Actively Hurting Queer Children

Hi

 I am praying for you. 

And no, I can't keep a little of the southern sting out of that phrase. I won't deny that I am furious with you, that I grieve deeply over the evil you are doing to God's precious little ones, or that I blame you for it. All of those things are true.

But also, I really am praying for you.

I have to pray for you, my heart has to break for you, because of what was done to you. And dear one, you will one day be healed. I pray that your healing will begin soon but if not in this life then in the time beyond time you will begin to recover; you will begin to let God love the you you hate today. With so many people it is easy—too easy—for me to see their crimes against us and to hate them for it. I am working on that, but that is not where I am with you.

You, I pity.

I am sure that doesn't feel good to hear—nobody really wants to be pitied—but that is how I feel about you. I know that there is a part of you that wakes up and yearns to be fully who God made you to be. I know that there a part of you that aches like a prisoner unable to fully extend his legs at the knowledge that you "have" to deny this beautiful part of yourself—your precious, glorious, holy queerness—that they taught you to hate.

When you attack us, when you mock, slander, and lie about the most vulnerable among us, I can't help but see the lies and pain that brought you to this state. And I know that I can really only imagine it. I am not a victim of conversion therapy attempts as you once told me you are. I dodged that fate by a hair and by the grace of God; I wish that you could have as well.

A friend of mine asked me what I think about sin recently and I found myself thinking about you. Could there be a clearer example of the tragedy of sin? Who you are in the world today was done to you. In churches we hear about original sin as though it were genetic but why would it need to be genetic when it is in the air that we breathe. Were you ever afforded the simple joy of seeing a beautiful man and not hating yourself for it? I will pray for that for you. You were born into a world that told you to hate yourself; more than that you were born into a world that told you to hate your queerness, to hate the strange spark that God placed in your soul.

I am not here to make excuses for you. You are fully responsible for the choices you make, you didn't have to turn your pain into hatred for all of your queer siblings who don't suffer the same repression you have been conditioned to wear. No, I'm not making excuses for you but I do want you to know that I see you.

I see you.

Not the you who is probably responding to this with a mocking laughter emoji, not the you boiling in fury at the effrontery of it all, not the you who is, even now trying to decide how to use this letter against me or against our shared queer community. I see the you in whom that tiny spark still burns. I see the you who can never be erased, no matter how much it is denied. I see the you whose stubborn seed of hope that maybe, just maybe, I am right and God loves your whole queer self as a whole queer self, is right now being attacked by all the other parts who built emotional systems and psychological structures of resentment, anger, disdain, and hatred in an effort to keep you safe from becoming someone who couldn't survive their attempts to make you into a good little Ex-Gay.

The one time I saw you talk about it you didn't say what methods they used on you. Did they tell you they could make you normal? Did you have one of those rubber bands in your wrist where you snapped yourself a jolt of pain each time you noticed you were staring at a handsome guy? Did they tell you that it is your parents' fault—warmed over pseudo-Freudian platitudes? Did you go to a camp or was it an office? 

And I know that the reaction you need to have to this letter is to mock it, to rage, or to fight it. If you see this on Facebook you will probably respond with the laughing react. It makes sense, you have to make this ridiculous so that it doesn't reach you. I understand that this isn't safe to take seriously when I am speaking to a part of yourself that you have protected almost to death now. I know that if you take this even half seriously you will have to confront the immense pain you have caused, and are working to cause, queer children all around this country. I know that, for you, our queerness has to be bad because if it is good, and holy, and beautiful then what does that say about you? 

Yeah, sin, like I said. You have taken what has made you needlessly suffer, and where you might have seen it for the sin it was, instead you baptized it, and now you are trying to tear that holy joy away from anyone who is able to experience what was taken from you.

I wish you would repent. I know that one day you will but oh the cost and the pain between now and that day. Until then know that I will oppose you at every step and that I will be doing it for the good of that one eternal spark of real you inside this monster you were convinced to create. You can rage or scoff but one day when our God reveals your true name and all is made well at the end of all things, you will thank God that there were people who worked against your evil ends as the Spirit of Truth worked to fan the queer fire in your soul.

 

How and Why I Left My Vineyard Church—or was I kicked out?

In April of 2015 my wife at I met our pastor and his wife at a bar near the church. We had asked our friends and small group to pray for us and for the meeting because we anticipated that it might be tense. At that time, our relationship with the pastor and his wife would probably best be described as a strained friendship. We all (I think) still liked one another as individuals but had come to realize that we were leaning in different directions spiritually and theologically. At least that is the way I would have characterized the relationship. Those disagreements though, they were coming to a head.

A week or so earlier my wife Ashley, who was serving* as the church's worship leader had asked why the leadership team (at the time I think we were referring to it as the Pastoral Council) hadn't met in quite a while and the pastor had responded that he had chosen to disband/dissolve the council. As Ashley and I were both members of that council and had not found out about its dissolution in any formal way until that communication, we were alarmed enough to ask to meet with the pastor and his wife to discuss things.

Thinking about that meeting I had thrown together a list of items of concern that Ashley and I had developed over time. In preparation for writing this piece I went back and reviewed the list. My concerns at the time involved concerns over leadership structures, over Ashley's treatment as the worship leader, over my own administrative weaknesses as the children's ministry leader at the church, and over two theological differences, one having to do with LGBTQ+ folks and the other having to do with a growing acceptance of word-of-faith/name-it-and-claim-it** type ideas within our congregation which, in my view, reduce the Holy Spirit to a divine magic wand. At the end of my concerns I wrote these questions as entries into conversation for the evening:

• What is your vision for VCCCM [the name of our church at the time (Vinyeard Community Church of Central Maryland), it is now called The Well] for the near and long term future, where are you trying to take us?
• How do you envision loyal, critical, dissent at VCCCM?
• If you have been confused about “where I am [on LGBTQ theology]” why have you never asked me?
• How do you understand the leadership and authority structure in the Vineyard?
• [The Pastor's wife] has often repeated the phrase “we need to believe it” from the front. What, specifically, is the “it” that we need to believe?

We notified our small group*** about our upcoming meeting and asked them for prayers. We never did end up discussing most of those concerns though.

---I started this piece several years ago but found myself unable to complete it in a satisfactory way while I was still closeted. Everything prior to this (aside from some formatting) was pulled from drafts of versions I wrote before coming out.
The material from here forward I wrote after coming out as a trans woman---

The pastor (let's call him Mark) opened by telling us that he had indeed dissolved the leadership team unilaterally and without actually mentioning it to anyone on that team. He didn't give much of an explanation at first and to this day I don't know his full reasons, but what came next did clarify some of it. He went on to tell us that he had come to the conclusion that my presence, specifically as a vocally LGBTQ+ affirming person on our leadership team was preventing a significant move of the Holy Spirit in the church. He "reassured" me that I was still welcome to keep teaching Sunday school and that Ashley was still welcome to lead (he had resisted making her a worship pastor) worship but was clear that when he reconstituted a leadership team I would not be on it. 

That paragraph needs context. 

A perennial concern or desire among many Vineyard churches is the arrival of a significant revival movement marked by supernatural occurrences. Because those don't break out particularly often (the Vineyard was founded as part of one) many pastors and congregations can tend towards a preoccupation with figuring out why they aren't at the center of one of these revivals. A common framework for this (and one our pastor seems to have subscribed to) is the idea, derived from a particular passage in the book of Joshua, that certain people who are guilty of particular "unconfessed sins" will prevent said revival from taking place. Our pastor at the time was increasingly convinced that one of these revivals (commonly referred to as variously large "moves of the Holy Spirit") was right around the corner for our church if he could only identify what it was that was interfering. 

At the same time, I was engaged in a protracted formal online debate with a Vineyard pastor on the West Coast over the status of LGBTQ+ people before God (That debate eventually became my series on why God affirms same-sex marriage which you can find HERE) and the Vineyard USA had very recently published a denominational Position Paper, declaring same-sex marriage, and the ordination of people in same-sex marriages invalid before God. The Vineyard has since unpublished the paper (Position Paper 7 Pastoring LGBT Persons) and, from what I understand, has directed all Vineyard USA pastors to hedge when asked about the Vineyard USA's position on LGBTQ+ people and to redirect any/all media questions to the central offices, but as of this writing my understanding is that it is still in effect and that any Vineyard church which performs a same-sex marriage or ordains a same-sex married person will be kicked out of the denomination****

I was acutely aware of the denomination's now official position on same-sex marriage (their position on trans folk remains undefined and I hope to write a good bit about that in the future) and had even spoken with Mark about my disagreement with it. He had assured me at the time (maybe 3 months before this meeting) that I was fine. I had been particularly worried after seeing the denomination force out (I think they called it "disfellowshipping") a long time movement elder and a lesbian pastor after the two of them (prior to the adoption of PP7) had publicly embraced a the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in their church—you can read that pastor's reflection on those events HERE. After some encouraging conversations with Vineyard associated scholars from around the country I had started to think of myself as occupying a "loyal opposition" sort of role in the Vineyard. I loved the movement, I wanted it to improve, I knew they were wrong about same-sex marriage, and I would be part of a nascent movement pushing them towards full inclusion. 

And I thought that was sustainable. In fact only a few months earlier Mark had laughingly recounted that several people from around the country had emailed him after reading my debate pieces just to make sure he knew what his congregant was doing. We both shook our heads at how ridiculous that was. I knew he disagreed with my position but I thought he had my back.

That is the context.

So there we were sitting across the table from a pastor—our pastor—and his wife, telling me that my position in leadership was, or had been, the reason they believed that God had not sent a big revival and miracles to our church. The offer of teaching Sunday School felt like an insult. They were willing to use me and my labor but trusting me with any leadership role—that was a bridge too far. Ashley jumped in at that point and informed them that if they weren't willing to have me in leadership, she wasn't interested in continuing as their worship leader. They accepted this with some grace and we fell into the nuts and bolts of what our separation from the church was going to look like. I wasn't any more interested in attending a church whose leader believed I was stopping God from healing people than I expected anyone else to be and I told them so. I was struck by how my situation—I wasn't even out to myself at the time, in trans parlance my "egg hadn't cracked"—paralleled that of LGBTQ+ folk in the denomination as a whole: "serve: yes; lead: no; and oh by the way we think you are a contaminant in our church". I had already started warning queer people that the Vineyard was not a place where they would be fully included; now that was true for me too*****.

To this day I don't know whether we handled the next step well. Oh I know we were right to leave; I just feel odd about the "how". Ash and I talked about it and decided to give them a month or so so that they would have time to find a new worship leader. I think that was fair, though we certainly weren't under any obligation to do it. The part I feel "some kind of way" about is the reason we gave. We told a half truth. We discussed it with Mark (I honestly can't remember how much of this was our idea, how much of it we just sort of let happen, and how much was a surprise the day the announcement was made) and on the last Sunday we attended, he announced that we would be shifting to attend a church in Baltimore, "closer to where they live and where they have felt more and more of a calling of late". That wasn't strictly untrue—Ash and I had talked about finding a church in the city a number of times before all of this went down but had always decided against it—but we knew, and Mark knew, that that was also not reason we were leaving. I remember feeling conflicted that day. The congregation prayed for us (that was the weekend of the Baltimore Uprising and one or two lines in their prayers for us as we "ministered in the city" was as much attention as the Vineyard Community Church of Central Maryland paid to those events) and it was over. I chose not to "make a scene" or challenge the narrative and we left. 

Given that I am writing this now I don't think I made the right choice there. I should have said something. I should have been public about what had happened. I know that we shared our story with some of our friends before and after we left but I don't know who ended up hurt by that church who might have avoided some pain if they had heard the story earlier.

I don't have a lot to add to that. It is in the past and we are in a very good place at a very good church. We are OK but I want the story out there. 

Footnotes:

*Ashley was unpaid and her hints and questions about being ordained as a worship pastor had been largely ignored.
**This is a simplification as this particular theological debate is not the focus of the post. More specifically I was concerned that the pastor was embracing a over-inaugurated form of Charismatic theology mostly informed by the Bethel folks in lieu of a more classically Vineyard-esque now-and-not-yet theology and practice. As I understand it this has continued to be a significant discussion within Vineyard USA circles.
*** A close knit spiritual community which met several times a week for shared meals and once a week for prayer and bible study.
**** The Vineyard USA (and International) does not consider itself a denomination but a "movement" but for our purposes "denomination" gives a better understanding of what they are and how they are organized and operate.
*****If you have been following my story recently, yes the parallel was deeply uncomfortable for me because even recognizing it felt like appropriating a queerness I felt I had no right to. "Blessed are you when they persecute you for My sake unless you have been so scarred that accepting that blessing makes you feel shame".

Sehnsucht or The Night I Shattered

Just a heads up: In this post I am going to be talking about queerness, about God, and about my own emotional/mental health experience in relation to those subjects. There will also be some C.S. Lewis.

I want to get back to blogging regularly. I am not going to promise that that will happen but it might. One thing that has been in the way of frequent posting over the last few years was the fact that I was not out about my identity. I have known I was trans since mid 2017 or so but for three and a half years I had this idea that I could just know that I am a woman but continue to live a life pretending to be a man. There  were reasons I tried to do that, but it didn't work. During that time though, I did not think of trans-ness as a bad thing, and certainly not as something sinful or evil, mostly I think I just thought of it as excessively inconvenient to the life I wanted to have. The result was that I had a lot of thoughts about how transness and queerness interacted with or shone light on the rest of my life and the ideas I was playing around with. I tried to write some of those thoughts into blog posts but I just couldn't bring myself to write as though I were removed or detached from them. So mostly I didn't write them at all.

And now I am out and there is nothing really stopping me from getting to work on this backlog of ideas and thoughts I have been kicking around for four years. So here we go:

In his sermon The Weight of Glory Lewis (without using the term) describes the experience of sehnsucht: 

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

Now in The Weight of Glory, as well as in the many other parts of his writing where Lewis explores this experience, Lewis identifies it with the desire for God and usually ties it to an apologetic argument. In fact I find the use of sehnsucht as a  broader theological fact far more interesting than as a bit of apologetics. Still, sehnsucht does an admirable job of describing a certain invaluable facet of my experience of God. 

But theology, much less Christian apologetics, is not really what I want to write about today. I promised queer content and I intend to deliver.

Ashley and I watched a movie a few weeks ago. It was Tick Tick Boom and for the purposes of this story I only need to say that it is a musical about Jonathan Larson, the man who wrote Rent, and that the AIDS epidemic features heavily as the context for the musical. After the movie we started getting ready for bed. I wandered into the bathroom and, still discussing the movie but intertwined with other parts of our lives in that way that we do after a compelling film, Ashley commented to me "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer". It staggered me—literally. To my recollection I have never physically staggered just from hearing something before, I had always though it was more of a metaphor. That night those words made my knees go loose for a second and I had to catch the towel bar to keep from falling. 

It actually took a few minutes for my mind to catch up with my body (my subconscious). My immediate response was something along the lines of "wow that is definitely true...wow" but as we kept talking I realized I was grinning like a fool. Then I was feeling overwhelmed. I started to brush my teeth but just as I was putting toothpaste on my brush a great, indistinct something came rushing towards a barrier in my mind that I hadn't known existed. For a second I saw it looming and gasped "Oh..it's going to happen" then it hit and I shattered.

I have mentioned this before but I grew up Evangelical. That means a lot of things for who I am and how I experience the world, and one of those things is that I grew up believing that queerness is sinful. It was a nebulous belief at first. I didn't know what "gay" meant until I was accused of being it at a summer camp once—I had been sitting with my legs crossed in a way that I only later found is associated with femininity in US culture—but somewhere around middle school my Christian education ensured that I found out about homosexuality and that it was sinful.

At the same time I was starting to notice a particular note that would appear in certain stories, or around some people. In Surprised by Joy Lewis, again discussing sehsucht, says that one of his early experiences of it was the longing for something he called "northernness": 

Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. …And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country, and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together in a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss 

That thrill was something I started to treasure and to look for and for a while it existed in me together with the evangelical belief about the sinfulness of queerness without the two meeting... for a while. It couldn't last though; the draw I felt towards queerness—the fascination or longing—eventually showed itself to be too often present in the company of the homosexuality I had learned to call sin. Now this was confusing at first; Evangelical children are not, as a rule, taught about umbrella concepts or the nuanced and complicated ways in which trans identities overlap and differ from sexual orientation. I knew I wanted to be a girl and I knew I wasn't into guys, and I knew homosexuality was sinful and I knew I was drawn to this thing and knew that the thing often showed up around homosexuality and it was all just very confusing. The result though was that I distanced myself from that longing. I told myself it was sinful, or at least that it would lead to sin, and I worked hard to mimic the reactions to of those around me. "This—This thing," I told myself "is not for me, it is not about me, it is bad for me".

A friend of mine posted recently that post-Evangelicals have a complicated relationship with our own desires because we are taught that we need to reject our desires and replace them with God's desires. It takes a long time to figure out—and longer to integrate—that what that has often meant is that we need to replace the desires God has actually given us with the desires that straight white male Church leaders have for us. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that queerness is sinful. 

For a while I thought that it might be a sort of tragedy that befell some people, but that didn't last long. I came to think, then accept, then believe, and now I know, that queerness is beautiful and holy. 

But the thing about growing up, the thing about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop believing that queerness is sinful without remembering why I had decided that it is not for me, not about me. Queerness was beautiful but I was not queer. And of course that is the other thing: I could decide as a 12 year old that queerness was not about me but I was never able to stop the longing for queerness. The soul broken off from itself cannot stop wanting to be made whole no matter how well we bandage it. 

I was magnetically drawn to queerness but I was a cis-het dude; there was no way for me to connect. Not that I didn't try; I read books about queer people and queer theory, I studied LGBTQ+ history, I sponsored my high school's GSA, I made friends with LGBTQ+ people, I advocated, I watched movies, I went to pride parades, I volunteered, I debated with people online, I wrote blog posts, I got kicked out of my church. And it was all satisfying—sort of; it all scratched at an itch—but though a heavy coat. Anyway though, it didn't matter; here was a community that was on my heart—a community whose holiness I could see even if so many Christians around me couldn't seem to—and I was going to atone for my past and, far more importantly, I was going to be towards them the way we all should. I wanted to badly to be a good ally. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that I was cis or het.

For three and a half years I lived in this in-between space: publicly a cis-het guy and knowing myself to be a trans lesbian. But see the thing about how we develop as people, about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop thinking I was a straight man without remembering, or at least without knowing what that meant for who I am. I wanted to be part of the trans community; "You are valid" is a phrase I saw applied to me and to people like me all the time. And it was true, and it is true, and every trans person is who they are and I could still struggle to ever really feel like that was true. 

That was the stage in my life where I stopped crying. I have never been a really big crier, but I haven't worked to avoid it either. There is this thing that happens when people think you are a boy. From the time you are little you get told in a million loud and quiet ways that growing up means getting control of your emotions; you need to master them. Then if you are the sort of person that most people tend to assume is a boy, in you teens you get these floods of testosterone. My experience on testosterone (and I have heard similar things from other people who have been on the hormone, both voluntarily and involuntarily) is that it makes your anger super accessible. I have seen this overstated as though T turns people into hulk-esque rage-beasts but it is really more like anger is one book on your shelf of emotions and T just pushes it out a little so that it's easier to grab. But, you see, this becomes kind of a whole thing for people who believe we have to master our emotions because now the consequences of not mastering them is that people get hurt, maybe people we like or even love. There is a reason that self-control is a virtue and it isn't a bad reason. And I did have a temper and I did have to learn to control it. 

Anyway I got good at controlling my anger. Then I learned a neat trick. It turns out that if you try, you can turn nearly any negative emotion into anger. Sadness, depression, shame, and embarrassment can all be turned into anger. I developed a go-to method for handling negative emotions: turn them into anger and then control the anger. During those three years I would sing the virtue of my method. "Anger," I would say " is the only negative emotion that moves you forward. I turn my sadness into anger because it drives me to change the circumstances that made me sad." 

I am now convinced that this is a perspective which is really only available to the sort of white men who can comfortably assume that their own channeled anger will result in positive change in their circumstances; it often doesn't work like that for the rest of us. I mean let's be real, it didn't work that way for me. I had plenty to be angry about and I channeled it into doing all sorts of good things but nothing I was willing to do was going to change the pain of not being myself.

The thing nobody warned me about (I mean culture sort of warned me about it but not in that "this applies to you" sort of way that might have worked) is that turning your negative emotions into something else is called numbing; really that's any form of trying to not experience your negative emotions. And you can't selectively numb. 

So I stopped crying. Then I stopped really laughing. I really missed it too. I would think about it a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing I could save the life I had built by pretending to be something I wasn't. Eventually I realized that the attempt to be him was going to destroy everything I wanted for him. 

And I told my wife that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told my family that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told the world that I am trans—I am a woman. I started laughing again about three months after I told Ashley. But I still didn't cry; I still couldn't cry. 

See the thing about healing, the thing about growing, the thing about sewing back on the chunk of your soul that got torn away the day you realized that you couldn't be—weren't—the girl you knew you were* is that it takes time. Imagine sewing a hand back on after it has been severed for 39 years. You can connect things back together—the skin, the bones, the muscles, the blood vessels—but until the nerves connect, you aren't going to be feeling much from that hand. But what if those nerves heal too? What if they grown back together. What if your wife says from the other room "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer"? 

And then your body knows that you are queer and that you are healing a step before you conscious mind does. And then you are about to integrate with your own experience—the experiences you were always having and never letting yourself have because you couldn't only now you could and now you did and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. And then the toothbrush clatters into the sink and then you are crumpled up on the bathroom floor sobbing and you don't know why yet but you are starting to know why and you already always have known but you are also about to find out. And then there is snot and there are tears and your wife is holding you while you shake and you weep because life cannot be this good, and your own self cannot contain this much beauty. But it does and it already always has and now you know that—only it isn't that you know that, it is that you are knowing it right now. 

And then I was breathing and laughing and crying a little less and I wanted to tell Ashley how good this was and how grateful I am and we moved from the bathroom floor to the couch and she grabbed some tissues on the way and I opened my mouth and then the next wave hit and I was always already queer and I was always already everything that I had only known from behind glass and under the gauze that I had wrapped around my mind and then there was no them in queerness there was us. And every emotion I had had about them were altogether in one moment emotions I had already had/was having/will have about us. And of course I am sobbing again, I am shattered but I am born and breathing and held and whole.

So anyway yes. Sehnsucht. That is a little bit what I think it means to yearn for being united with God.

I am me now.

*Ok it is a lot more complicated then "I knew". I have written a lot about that Here and Here

Hidden

I want to give some context for this piece (apparently I am more concerned about being misunderstood than I used to be). This is a work of creative writing that began (about 90% of it) in the late summer of 2017, the year I had realized that I am trans and also decided that I was "not going to do anything about it" which is to say I had decided to know/admit/acknowledge my gender identity to myself but not to come out, not to identify publicly as trans, and certainly not to transition. Of course that is not how things turned out (and you can read about that process HERE).

I decided to share this piece (once I had edited it, cleaned it up, powdered its nose and corrected the typos) for a couple of reasons: First I hope that this might be helpful to other people who are struggling to figure out whether or not they are trans. Second I think it gives some insight into what figuring out who we are can look like for some trans people and I have a hope that if more cis people have a better understanding of us, that will contribute to a better and more beautiful world for all of us. And third, I am rather proud of it as a piece of creative writing and I want to share it with the world.

And now some important caveats: In this piece I am using a very specific conceit to explore the process of coming to know myself more fully. That conceit involves splitting my self into two sperate personas. Doing that is fraught for a number of reasons. For one thing it risks giving the impression that I (or even worse, trans people in general) suffer from some from of dissociative identity disorder. That is not the case, and I do not at all want to give the impression that it is. I want to point out that this conceit has been used numerous times by cis authors and artists to explore the relationship between the conscious and the sub-conscious or between two strong desires which happen to be in tension, or to explore any number of ways in which we humans experience internal conflict or dawning awareness. And I am certainly not the only, much less first, trans person to use it. A few years after I had written the core of this and while it was still sitting in a journal folder, I ran across this terrific series from Mae Dean at Real Life Comics and more recently Robin Brooks gave a charming treatment of it for similar ends. For another, this conceit risks giving the impression that I do not consider myself the same person as who I was for 39 years. This one is a little more tricky because there are trans people who prefer to establish a hard distinction between their past and current selves and that is certainly reasonable and works well for those it works well for. In my own case the experience has been much more one of continuity. I have always been me but up until last year I was me-with-constraints now that I am out I am still very much myself but I no longer am limited by the restrain of false-male-ness. Put another way, I have always been my true self, but now I get to be my full self; and that is glorious.

Also I dealt with some pretty significant internalized transphobia so if that isn't something you are comfortable reading you might want to skip this piece.

So with all of that having been said, here is Hidden:

Hidden

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I am told, and I believe, that most people were created by God. I imagine it must be really nice. There must be a comforting solidity to it, being created by God. I mean... God, the Fundament of all Being. There is God and then God makes stars, galaxies, water, sunsets and you. You are right up there with galaxies. Do you ever stop and just stand there feeling solid, and grounded, and real?

I'm not really like you in that way. In a lot of ways I am a lot more like Frodo. I guess that is pretty cool too on some level—Frodo is the hero after all—but it has its drawbacks. J.R.R. Tolkien thought that one of the glories of humans was the work of sub-creation, that humans get the dignity of being creators and creatures at the same time; humans create within the scope of the everything that is already made by God. And that is great and all but did you ever stop to think how Frodo might have felt about it? Sure he gets to be the hero, he lives something like forever beyond the sea, but all of that is because he was created by a geeky philologist who had a hankering for writing British mythology. There must have been something a little unsettling about all of that for him.

You were probably made by God so maybe you don't understand. I was made by a confused little girl living in North America in the 80s and I really feel for Frodo. I don't think the little girl really even knew what she was doing at the time. And from my creation forward I probably grew and developed in a way that is a lot like the way you did. Things came at me and in response I developed, I changed, I grew. A personality emerged; it has preferences, ticks, tastes, little things that drive it up the wall, and stories, songs, poems, and dreams that make it weep—or at least they used to have that effect, it hasn't been crying much anymore. It longs—I long—for home. But what is home, what does "home" mean when the mind you sprang from belongs to a little girl who forgot her own self? What is "return" for a derivative being, the product of a self-forgetting sub-creator?

I think she was happy for a while—before she made me. I remember that she was a tomboy with a couple of boy best friends before gender and "ways of being in the world" complicated existence. She can't have been perfect and there is no way I can be avoiding some fairly monstrous hagiography here (is it really "hagiography" when you are talking about your own creator?) but I don't remember her being sad at first—well, not before the anguish—not before me. I don't think she knew she was a girl back then, she didn't really think of herself as a boy either or if she did I don't think she had much of an idea what that meant. Her friends were boys, her life was fun, her parents loved her, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted. At least that is how I remember it.

Then came the anguish. I don't really know what brought it on—I know she didn't have the foggiest idea. One minute she was sitting at a little desk working on her school work and the next she was sobbing having what I can only retroactively diagnose as an acute panic attack. In one arbitrary moment her whole world had suddenly skewed wrong.

Everything felt wrong. She felt wrong—profoundly wrong. Her hands were wrong, her hair was wrong, her stupid clothes were stupid wrong. Her face was wrong. I remember that the wrongness was a very physical thing. For a while I described the whole thing as a sense of being irredeemably dorky. Imagine that you woke up tomorrow to find that, in your sleep, an enormous purple and orange flower had grown out of the side of your head. Imagine knowing that it could never be removed, and that for the rest of your life people would see you as "that person with the ridiculous flower"; no outfit will ever look right, you will never achieve a "look" at all because everything will always clash with the flower, everyone will always notice the flower.

The little girl's parents (and they are lovely and loving people) were, of course, concerned. They didn't know what she was crying about and she didn’t really know how to tell them (six year old children do not, as a rule, have particularly well developed psychological or social vocabulary). All she could say was that she felt like nobody would ever like her.

Her parents tried to comfort her. They promised that people would like her, they reminded her about all of her friends and her loving family. She knew they weren't wrong, but they were barely communicating. It wasn't about being liked, not really, that was just the closest language she had, it was about being right; it was about the stupid giant purple and orange flower growing out of the side of her head that no one else could see and was also all anyone could see of her. All that her parent's managed was to calm her down a bit and convince her that she was perfectly like-able just the way she was. But by doing that, they cut the cord binding her grief to her language. The anguish didn't go away, only her ability to talk about it.

She accepted the comfort (she had already learned enough to know how to comfort the people trying to comfort her) then retreated to her bed for a while and lay there with the agony. It was a real thing. She knew, she just knew, that the wrongness would not be going away. And so she did the only thing she could. Drowning in the wrongness she clutched at the only life-line she could reach. Combining her pain with her determination to live, she created me. My creation didn't feel magical to her. I was not her inspiration; my birth was hardly spiritual or transcendent. No, I began to exist as she chose to make peace with her anguish. She took all of the wrongness and she accepted it; she took it into her own self. She made a boy for whom all of that wrongness could be rightness. Taking everything she liked about herself, she cut and shaped a boy who could hold as much of it as possible. He couldn't hold it all of course, but she managed to fit a lot of it into me—at least I think she did. This boy—me—was still raw and only barely formed; he, I, was nothing more than a person who could comfortably wear the weight of her wrongness and preserve as much as possible of her own self. Last she took her consciousness, her memory of her whole self, and she gave them to me, and I became alive for the first time.

We were always together after that. Have you ever gotten into a relationship so much that you sort of forgot where you ended and your friend started, where "she" became "we" and for a moment you couldn't remember which one of you it was that loves hot chocolate and who it was that finds grasshoppers offensively pretentious? We were like that, my creator and me. On me, her wrongness wasn't wrong and so I handled most of the interacting-with-the-world for us. Don't judge, wouldn't you want to protect a little girl like that? The thing is, though, being in the world is sort of how people grow and work out who they are. So the more I got to be in the world the more we found out who I am, the way I deal with friends and with bullies. So many of those little bits that together form a personality, grow out of our experiences in the world. I might have started out as a barely formed lump of pain and determination—albeit one that looked a whole lot like my creator but then don't you claim to bear the image of your creator as well—but it didn't take long for me to start developing into a more and more distinct person.

We very rarely disagreed. I don't know if we disagreed at all until recently, but that comes later I think. Mostly we wanted the same stuff, liked the same stuff, hated the same stuff. We don't like bullies, we hate feeling awkward, we learned that anger is the armor you can put on sadness if you want to fix your problems. We learned that laughter is how you breathe and that friends matter a lot. She was always helping me out too, she has always been better at seeing who is hurting and she cares enough to make me care. Together we studied the world and together we figured out just what sort of boy she thought was cool, and together we worked and worked to turn me into that boy. We goofed up sometimes; it's hard to build a real person out of a hodgepodge of archetypes and pop culture images—we (she?) figured out the trick is to build in some personal touches and quirks. I don't really have any of those of my own, so the only way for me to be real was for her to give them to me.

I don't really think we forgot about her. If you look at it one way, we never really even knew she existed—or that she wasn’t me—or that I wasn’t her? I mean, her existence definitely turned out to be a huge shock to me; I think it surprised her too. I came along so early in her life, and everything hurt so much when she made me. I don't think she thought of me as another person, I was just the version of us that didn't hurt so much. I am the one that could survive in the world. I am not wrong.

I'm not perfect though (have you ever wondered what it would feel like to realize that you couldn't perfectly protect your own creator, that you can't quite properly perform the one role you were made for?). Sometimes I wasn't strong enough or solid enough to protect her. While we were kids—elementary and middle school mostly—this generally manifested as a wistfulness. We would see some girl. I remember this one girl; we played on a youth baseball league for a couple of years—we weren't great but we weren't terrible either; we got by with humor and an infectious smile—and this girl was on a team which played adjacent to our field. She was fast and confident with long black hair and an athletic build. We always felt strange around her—sort of happy and sort of sad. I told my friends I had a crush.

There were other times like that. I remember she sort of wanted to play with some of the girls in my fourth grade class. They were doing more and more impressive games with jump ropes which looked like fun. I found those girls sort of intimidating though, and playing those jump rope games would have been wrong on me; at least back then I really thought it wouldn't quite work with who she wanted me to become, not in public anyway. So I waited and we played the same games with my little sister and her friend when we got home.

Neither of us minded being friends with the boys anyway. We weren't really great at the sports side of things but we love giving everything to a competition or a fight; I have believed for a long time that sufficient passion covers over a lack of talent to at least some significant degree. And when our group moved away from sports and started playing games with our imaginations—pretending to be the Ninja Turtles, or making up our own superhero personas to defeat imaginary bad guys—I really got to shine. We both love stories and imagination. Those guys were fun and they were good friends.

Stories were a big thing for us; they still are. When we read stories we stop existing in this world altogether and instead we exist like a ghost floating over the world of the story. I have always been able to forget my worries, stresses, and pressures when I am reading. Some days I don't think that I have ever actually read a story—I think she reads them. When we are reading stories I stop existing; she has no body, no context, no social location. It's how she escapes from me. I don't mind though, I like the stories too and we have had a lot of fun thinking about them over the years. By high school we were reading five or six novels a week. It was a stressful time and I think she needed time away from us to breathe. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Some time in early middle school I read The Tin Woodman of Oz. For a portion of the book, the main characters get transformed into strange animals and forms for the amusement of a giant witch. She adds something to the enchantment that causes them not to mind the transformation. We found it overwhelmingly arresting. I clearly remember something happening inside of us when we read that passage. It was a new thing but it contained echoes of other experiences. There were hints of the agony and hints of the wistfulness but

Tip

there was something more, something new, something urgent. And there was shame too. I had borrowed The Tin Woodman from the library and I must have read and re-read that passage dozens of times in the two weeks I had the book. After the first time I read it at night, under the sheets of my bed using a flashlight as a reading light. I had no idea why I couldn't let anyone know that I was fascinated by that passage but I knew I had to keep it secret. Having someone find out about that book would be like having someone see me naked. It is a strange thing to be ashamed of something you don't understand and don't have any language for.

I think now that The Tin Woodman of Oz must have given her hope. I do know that after that I read all of the Oz books that I could get my hands on. Did you know that in Ozma of Oz we find out that Ozma, the princess of Oz spent her childhood magically transformed into a boy named Tip? L. Frank Baum had a hell of an imagination and those books are way stranger than most people realize. Did you ever notice that almost all of the protagonists are girls?

Ozma

She really liked Pippi Longstockings too, and Nancy Drew. One of the cool things about having a reputation as a voracious reader is that adults, and even other kids, eventually stop questioning your choice of reading material. Everyone knew I would read almost any story I could get my hands on so I was able to supply her with Pippi and Nancy and Beezus almost as much as we read Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Henry.

She must have had some idea of what was going on during all of this time. I don't think she ever vanished into me entirely. I think now that that might be why we had such an aversion to male-female boundary crossing when I was young. One time, probably around late elementary school, I visited some friends. Two girls and two boys all around my age. Well, the girls were close to my age, the boys were younger. That day the sisters decided to dress one of their brothers up as a sister. It was... fascinating? I remember not knowing how to feel about it but knowing that I should not let on how strong my internal reaction was. The kids I was playing with all clearly thought that the whole thing was silly and fun, so I went along with that reaction but I freaked out when they suggested doing me next. I think she was afraid someone would see her. I have always experienced a measure of fear anytime I encountered public gender play. There were other emotions involved too and I think they probably changed from time to time but the fear was always a constant.

I don't want to give the impression that I interacted a lot with my creator over the years. Most of the time we didn’t much notice each other—either because our interests were identical or because she left me on autopilot—and sometimes she would cheerfully advise me in the form of an inner monologue about what sort of man I ought to become. I think sometimes her dreams would slip through and I would catch myself day dreaming about how cool it would be to be a certain type of girl, but I knew that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about that so I didn't. Well, no, there was one time when a friend of mine spent the night and, while we were in our beds chatting before falling asleep he blithely informed me that sometimes he thought it would be cool to be a girl. I think she told him that I agreed but maybe not. He did say it though.

In a lot of ways puberty was a pretty decent time for us. Our body developed in a way that seemed to satisfy her; just like she had planned, it was just right for what she was designing me to be. Or it was pretty close anyway. She never really minded—at least at the outset—that our body was increasingly wrong for her. She was pleased for me as my voice cracked and deepened and when I got to start shaving; I think she was amused, excited, and impressed with how well these developments all worked to make our body more and more into a fortress which would hide her from an unfriendly world. In fact, it helped me to defend her (or hide her?) more effectively.

Girls became fascinating in middle school, or rather that is when they became fascinating in that way. There was a cover of Elle magazine which had a picture of a woman with prominent cleavage. I was fascinated by the woman on the cover and couldn't figure out why, but I did know that I would be embarrassed or ashamed if someone caught me looking. The magazine was at a tutor's house and I remember working to sneak covert glances at the woman on the magazine throughout the lesson that day.

I need to stop for a second here and remind you that she is really smart, and a pretty keen observer. By high school, she had definitely worked out the most effective way for me to live into her wrongness. She had figured out what sort of guy I needed to be in order to maximize my own realness and to give her a chance to express as much of herself as possible in the world without ever being seen as herself. Humor, wit, a love of reading and critical thinking, loyalty to friends and family. We know that the best deceptions incorporate an element of truth (the more the better really) so outside of a few failed and humiliating experiments, she never made any serious effort to make me into some sort of macho hulk. I was never the soldier or jock type, but I also learned quickly how to avoid being seen as effeminate. It was the 90's and the funny-but-passionate kid was an easy role for her to slip me into.

I should also clarify that for all of this time—the cracks won't start to show till much later—I was just who we are. She never thought of any of this as deception or playing a part; were just learning how, and what kind of man we would be able to be in this world. We knew our options and she was living within reality. Neither of us had made a connection between the old anguish, the wistfulness, or our desires, and the possibility that she might exist.

I don't really remember whether the stories or the cross dressing came first. It was probably the stories though. People grow during puberty. That stage in life is certainly a physically liminal one, but it is psychically liminal as well. I think maybe she stopped fitting into me quite as well around puberty and that only makes sense doesn't it? It can be hard to tell a little boy and a little girl apart but once they become teenagers they differentiate a lot more. As my sexuality developed along the fairly typical "straight, red-blooded, male" lines we discovered together the special wonders of the female form. She wasn't struggling to get out exactly, I think maybe a better statement would be that she began to wake up, or at least to stretch around that time.

Seen another way, I stopped being right in the world around the time I went through puberty. I don't really remember how it was that I discovered the genre of gender transformation erotica on the internet but discover it we did. Here was a sexuality which felt comfortable, which "fit", in critical ways for the first time—the problem was that it didn't "fit" for me at all. It made all the sense in the world for her—at least it would have if either of us had realized that she existed at that time—but for the first time we had stumbled into a way of being in this world for which I was the one who was wrong. We both want to be with women, it's just that we both want to be with women as women. We resolved the tension by deciding that I am a pervert.

It is easy to convince yourself that you are a pervert when the things you want feel so shameful. I think puberty and the feelings that go with it were something of a godsend to us really, I think they kept me around longer anyway. Sexuality gave us a box to put our experiences in. If they didn't fit perfectly, they at least fit into that box better than they did into anything else we had. I think she must have decided that I am a pervert—sure that's a problem but it's a manageable one. Most perverts are perverts in secret anyway aren't they? And besides, there is nothing odd or unusual about being ashamed of your perversions. I think she likes girls too. I know I do and that made a lot of things straightforward for us; with a little forcing and a little forgetting, it could contextualize all (or at least most) of the

strange feelings I had ever had when I encountered femininity. Clearly, we decided, I was just hyper-sexual and so incredibly straight that my healthy sexual interest in femininity must have somehow overflowed and caused some perverse desire to enter into it myself. There is the one writer, C.S. Lewis, who said that we don’t just want to experience Beauty, the deep longing of our soul is to enter into it—to take part in it; but I don’t think he meant that the way I experience it.

So I also started cross dressing in high school. I am not proud of it (I am not built to be proud of it) but it is a fact. I am beginning to wonder whether she might actually be proud of that. After all, cross dressing probably marks the first time she asserted herself powerfully enough to dictate my actions. I didn't do it a lot—only when the mood struck, the family was asleep, and I was sure I wouldn't get caught. I would sneak into the bathroom with my stash, lock the door, and turn into... a girl. You have to realize that this was a fairly confusing thing for a teenage boy to find himself doing. It wasn't really sexual—which would have also been confusing if I had let us notice it—it just felt good for about 10 minutes looking at myself in the mirror. Then I would take everything off and try to erase any trace of what I had done. Then I would get in bed and fall asleep praying that I would get caught so that someone would stop me from doing that ever again.

My senior year in high school, my family found my stash. So that was awkward. They are a pretty cool family and I think they were more confused than anything else. I think they just threw it all away and confronted me about it when I got home from school. I kind of apologized, they made it clear that "it" wasn't cool but everything stayed pretty vague and nothing further was ever said about it. I think I ran across the term autogynophilia* on the internet around that time so at least I had a name for my perversion.

I went to a small religious college and those don't provide many opportunities for cross dressing so I managed to stop that behavior after high school; she was relegated back to my fantasy life and only dared to hint at her own existence when I was especially aroused. Sexuality had become the only context in which she could emerge safely because it was the only context we had for making any sense of her.

After college I got married. We both really love my wife. I should probably mention at this point that our whole upbringing and background was both religious and conservative. So it shouldn't surprise you to hear that we were hardly affirming of LGBTQ folks. I was definitely on the side of Team Conservative Christian. I don't know the extent to which shaping me towards being a "Big Hearted Conservative" type person was her decision or just the natural consequence of my surroundings as we grew up. But that is definitely what I was trying to be all through high school and college. At the same time, this meant that everything relating to her was something I spent a lot of my early adult life categorizing as "sin". I don't think she really had any problem with this since she had created me as a way of righting a wrongness she originally sensed within (without?). To the extent that she manifested in me, we both assumed that she was, herself, a wrongness (and yes I realize that there is some inversion and circularity involved there, people are complicated OK?). I didn't have any qualms about getting married. We were, we are, in love. Sure I was a pervert but I was pretty sure I had that under control and I was totally up front with my wife about the fact of my perversion as I understood it at the time. Well I was mostly up front anyway. I didn't get into specifics, I just talked about how I struggled with "sin". At the time it just seemed inappropriate and distasteful to talk about what type.

Our outlook on LGBT people changed over time. Someone once asked me whether I believe that souls have gender. It occurred to me that I do but I have been struggling to find some proof or strong argument for that conclusion ever since. It just sort of seemed obvious to me at the time. Bodies are bodies. They are shaped in different ways and have different functions. They fit our purposes more or less well. The stoic philosophers used to argue that, since we have limited power to shape the world, the only way to become happy was to shape our desires to conform to the world; I get what they were saying but I think they were full of shit. Souls also exist. My whole experience of life tells me that souls can be and sometimes are gendered in a way which just doesn't fit the body. Some bodies just don't naturally function in a way that allows the soul to express itself fully. Anyway, we were affirming of transgender identities several years before we were affirming of lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships; but it was the latter that led to the big change for us.

Sometime after I had changed my take on LGB relationships (and we try to be a good ally now) someone—a gay man—asked on social media why it was that straight cis people who do ally work are so often assumed to be queer; can't people just be doing that work because they are decent human beings? I think it must have been a Saturday morning because I hadn't taken a shower yet. I cheerfully agreed with the person and said something or other as an encouragement to him. But as the day wore on I started to think about his question more and more. I was (I am?) a straight ally after all. But then I have always had that niggling thing in the back of my mind reminding me that it would be pretty cool to be a woman—but that was just my perversion wasn't it? I decided to take a minute and really properly examine that niggling thing so that I could get a proper grip on it, understand it, and move on.

The thing is that, by then, I had learned a lot—a whole lot—more about LGBTQ folk than I had known back in high school and college. I mean I have always been drawn to queerness. I would never tell a trans person that their sense of a gendered self is a perversion. By then I had, she had, we had made quite a few LGBT friends, We, I, she, had read so much more. We know, I know that autogynephilia is utter bullshit—most cis poeple find it arousing to be in their own skin with their own bodies. But we hadn’t take that experience out and looked at it in a long time.

When I really need to concentrate on a problem or a question I think about it in the shower. It's a quiet environment, the water provides just enough of a physical stimulus to allow me to concentrate at maximum efficacy, and I am relatively unlikely to be interrupted mid-ponder by one of my children.

So I asked myself as I stood under the flow of water do I actually want to be a woman? What is really going on with this? Until I asked the question I genuinely expected an answer in the negative and to be able to get on with things. Instead I suddenly felt like I was falling: I couldn't answer "no". I could not, when being honest with myself, honestly say that I don't want to be a woman. Cis people do not want to be the opposite sex, cis people do not want to be another sex, cis people are happiest being the gender that they are; that is what makes them cisgender . But, the more I thought about it, the more I turned the thought over and over in my head, our head, her head, the more I found I wanted—no desperately wanted—to be a woman. And then it was like a bomb going off in my psyche. Everything was wrong again—I was wrong again. The next thing I knew I was curled into a ball, shaking under the water from my shower. I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no”. Oh God, oh God, I want to be a woman. What does this mean? What do I do with this? Am I a woman? What even am I?

 

Even existential panic can’t last forever though and eventually we managed to pull myself together enough to finish my shower and get dressed. After all, I had almost half a lifetime's experience repressing—protecting?—this thing inside me; I was practiced at it; I knew that this shower experience was not something that the life I had built would be able to survive, and I have built a good life. So I concentrated on pushing, crushing, ignoring the whole experience. At least that is what I decided to do. It isn't what happened.**

Footnotes:

* This was my experience of what is called Autogynophelia theory. The theory has been thoroughly debunked but managed to hurt a lot of trans women and is still pulled out and weaponized against us by bad faith and misinformed people.

**When I returned to this theme after processing all that shows up here and ultimately deciding to come out and live as my full self, I planned to write a sort of sequel from "the girl"'s perspective—and I may end up doing that some day—but what I ended up writing was this poem and honestly I think it is a great follow up.

You really should read this wonderful series by the incomparable Mae Dean

Lazarus

 LAZARUS

Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the sister of Lazarus, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.

I am here and I am me 

and, I was always me. 

Now though, 

I am learning to un-learn 

the rough ruts I carved into my mind 

when I carved him out of pain and fear. 

When he first found me 

I could only be 

in the form of thought and longing 

but, 

I was me, 

and he was me 

finding myself, and now

I am myself, and he is not dead, but we 

because he was always me. 

The love, the life, the pain we lived; 

my loves, my life, and my pain. 

And when I was him, 

and when I was only just remembering to be me, 

and when I was only just learning how to not be him 

but to have been him, 

I told him to tell me that if I just let him 

suffocate me a little longer, 

then the air would not burn so sharp 

nor the light pierce so bright

as I emerged, 

but now I am a little stronger, 

and now I cannot tell myself that this coat is my skin, 

and now I want the air to burn if it means that I get to feel the light. 

I want to breathe,

and I am breathing, 

and maybe now 

these are shallow breaths

but, 

the dead skin of this mask is sloughing off,

and every day it gets harder to plaster it back on to my face 

and to use his visage to smile at the world. 

When Lazarus heard the call to wake and to come out 

he did not take a shower, or change his clothes before he sought the sun, 

and I do not want to wait in this tomb until the stink wears off 

and Martha brings me a clean set of clothes.