Note: I am part of an online community that’s been together for decades now, and our main point of congregation is an IRC chatroom. I am now several time zones removed from most of the others, so I sometimes miss out on conversation that’s happened overnight. In the mornings I often browse through the chat log from the previous night. I wrote this post several months ago, after reading a conversation about trans people that upset me, involving one user who is a pastor. I wasn’t out to anyone there at the time, so rather than confronting or bringing this up with them, I wrote this post in my journal as a way to calm myself.

I read your words the other day, where you stated you had been banned from imgur for posting about trans people. My goal here isn’t to open up an argument whether being trans or transitioning is a sin, put that on a shelf for now. A few of the things you said then and in the following conversation stuck out to me, and I wanted to write this to lay out my thoughts and invite you to think about trans people and gender dysphoria from a different angle. I’ve pulled some quotes from the chat log.

The reason for reaching out to you about this is two-fold, the first being you are a Christian pastor. You are someone who shepherds and leads a congregation, and your words will have weight on those your church. You are not my pastor, but you are my friend. As your friend who is also a Christian I feel it laid on my heart to raise this issue with you. My second reason is something I have not shared with many people beside my wife, a couple people at my church here, and a handful of friends back home – I have gender dysphoria. I am transgender.

I knew from an early age there was something different with me, there was a desire and a pain that I just didn’t have language for when I was very young. Transsexuals (the word at the time) only existed in popular culture as the butt of a joke (think charicature transvestite in a 90s sitcom or Ace Ventura) or as serial killers (think Buffalo Bill or Law & Order perp).

I remember when I was 5 years old, a friend told me about a classmate that had dressed as a girl for Halloween. It was like a truck hit me. I wanted that so bad. It was confusing for me, but I knew enough to know it would be considered unacceptable by my family, and I kept it to myself. I spent a lot of time with my cousins, all girls and 5-10 years older. I remember so desperately wanting to join in when they painted their nails and did makeup together, but again, I knew that wasn’t something I could tell anyone.

There are many other “how did I know” stories I could tell, but suffice to say they encompassed my entire childhood and adolescence. I had a very clear sense of wanting to be a girl, despite trans ideas not really ever being talked about by people around me when I was a kid. No one was around encouraging me to explore my gender or sexuality when I was growing up (far from it!), or telling me I could decide on my own pronouns. If you read the experiences of other trans people, you will find many stories similar to mine.

I grew up in an evangelical Christian household, raised attending church every Sunday morning and bible study on Wednesday evening. My family attended an Evangelical Free-affiliated church. I spent 2nd -12th grade in private school, mostly Southern Baptist. I rode in the car to and from school with my parents playing conservative Christian talk radio. There are many things, both good and bad, that I could say about my upbringing and the church environment (a word that encompasses both school and church for me) I was in. I’m happy to talk about the joys, pitfalls, and quirks of growing up evangelical, but relevant here is the heavy emphasis on sexuality and purity, the sheer intensity of which is difficult to express to those who were not raised in this milieu. Beyond the moralistic way sex was talked about and the general shtick of evangelical purity-culture, acceptance of homosexuality was still a major culture-war issue at the time, and it was brought up constantly as an example of the deep rot of the world outside our doors, sometimes from the pulpit but usually in snide off-handed remarks in conversation.

The rhetoric among evangelicals and right-leaning Christians at the time was in a state of flux. Today, most evangelicals utilize a bit more nuance, and would identify the sin of homosexuality as acting on those feelings, but around the time I was in middle and high school the rhetoric often took the form of homosexuality itself as being a “choice,” and that by choosing to be homosexual, gay people were sinning. Being transsexual was talked about less often, but when it was, it was lumped in with being homosexual. The “gay agenda” isn’t just a trope or ironic joke to caricature conservatives, it was a term I heard used seriously and frequently.

There is a certain way Christians talk about queer people when they think they’re alone in the room, and no one else is listening in. It’s a way that’s dismissive of queer people’s stories, their self-accounting of their own experience. It is devoid of empathy. It’s condemnatory, otherizing, and often even mocking. They are props for culture warriors to punch at or illustrations about the very bottom of the depths of sin you could fall to (a common narrative in testimonies!). I heard classmates suspected of being gay mocked as “fa*****.” I sat in chapel, bible class, and bible study hearing many times people talk about how disgusting trans people were. In the school handbook, there was a rule prohibiting any involvement in “gay, lesbian, or transsexual activity.” I can recall one guy who was expelled from school for coming out, and I suspect there were a couple others expelled for the same reason (the reasons were always kept hush-hush, we never saw them again and no one talked about it).

I internalized this. I told myself these things. I told myself that I was choosing the dysphoria, that I caused it with particular sins. I told myself that if I just set my mind to repenting of those sins, and tried hard enough at controlling it, God would set me free of it. Up until recently, I was still telling myself those things. I bottled all this up, never telling anyone until 2 years ago. The closest I had come before was answering a yes/no question on a therapy intake questionnaire in college: “I sometimes wish I was the other gender.” I answered truthfully, and turned the form in. On my drive home I wept in fear and grief, as I realized the gravity of what I had just done. I ghosted the therapist, and bottled it all back up.

Jesus is, always has been, and always will be the center of my being. My identity in Christ is a rock that the rest of my person is rooted in. My faith is my firmest conviction, something that can’t be untangled with the rest of “who I am.” That being said, the dysphoria has never gone away, nor has it lessened. The pain is intrusive, constantly with me. It colors most of my day to day thought life, no matter how hard I try to redirect my thoughts, nor how hard I pray for relief. It grows more wearisome every year that goes by.

To be honest, I’m a little tired of talking to Christians about it, too. As well-intentioned as most are, they are lost when it comes to giving me advice, as are most Christians who write about this. The main pieces of counsel I receive are “you need to place your primary identity in Christ,” “bring your feelings into alignment with your body,” or “we all have to take up our cross daily and deny ourselves.” Those are platitudes. They don’t provide me with any real guidance. In truth, they’re not talking to me when they say those things. They’re talking to themselves, trying to come up with something theologically correct to say when they’re stumped to give real direction.

It is a feeling of grief I live with daily. In 30 years of living with this, I haven’t come up with words proper enough to express the burden and just how it feels. Though I’ve never been suicidal, I have wished many times that I wasn’t alive. That wasn’t wasn’t from what other people thought about me or fear of them not accepting me, it was from the grief I feel internally. It’s inexplicable, hidden, but very real.

I believe in miracles, and I believe that God can heal. I’ve prayed just about every day in my life that he’d fix me. I have no doubt in my mind that God could make the dysphoria go away if he chose to. He hasn’t. He doesn’t seem to be doing it for other trans people, either.

You talked about me in a hurtful way yesterday, not realizing I was in the room. You didn’t know you were talking about me, but you were. I say this not because I want to express my own feeling of offense (I’m not, I don’t take it personally), but because it illustrates my point and belies my hope that you will be fruitful as a shepherd. You are a pastor, with many entrusted to your care. If you continue in ministry, you will, undoubtedly have people like me sitting in your pews. You most likely do right now. They might be hidden, repressing, or struggling to balance an oppressive burden on their shoulders with what they’ve been told is being loyal to Christ. You may never realize their presence, but they’ll be there, trying their hardest to follow Jesus. When you talk about trans or gay issues, remember that you’re not talking about a theoretical issue, you’re talking about real people with names, all with their own stories.

If you choose to approach speaking about people who struggle with gender and sexuality having already made up your mind that you know more than them about their own struggles, you are choosing to protect your own beliefs over sitting with them in their pain. You treat them as a threat to argue with or prove wrong. If you talk about their struggles with suspicion or derision in their presence, before they make their own stories known, you may drive them away.

“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” There is no qualifier here. Jesus didn’t say that our love would usually be interpreted as hate by the world. The Gospel may be foolishness to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews, but measuring the veracity of your own words by the offense you cause is not a wise heuristic, nor is it biblical. It is dangerous. Every human being bears the image of God, and part of that image is the ability to distinguish love from hate. We must carefully examine the messages we broadcast to the world in the name of Christ. If we are being told a message is hateful, that, at the very least, must give us pause.