TL;DR Blog

The last few years have been extremely challenging but very rewarding as I've moved from a place of fear, to finally learning that “coming out” is really “letting others in”. And I've been grieved by the Covenant's moves to close people out.

Three years ago, all the things that I had tried really hard not to think about, to “man up” and ignore, were getting too loud and I was very quietly starting to freak out about it. I wasn’t quite ready to even come out to myself and I was scared of what could be ahead of me.

Two years ago, I had admitted to myself (and only to myself) that I was transgender. I didn’t have a clear way forward and was rapidly approaching a crisis point. I knew I needed to come out to Liz, but the potential ramifications for my marriage and my family terrified me.

One year ago, I was at least moving forward, even if I felt like I was making it up as I went along (there’s not a script for transitioning). I’d been out to Liz for the better part of a year, I was working with a therapist, I’d been on hormone therapy since the fall, and I’d been gradually coming out to trusted people. I had also just wrapped up my time here as interim worship leader and I was contemplating when and how to come out here. I was at peace with my decision to transition, but uneasy about coming out to everyone at church.

This year, I’ve recently finished up my last semester of giving music lessons at Northwestern, I have secured a new location for teaching, and I’m out to my students, so I’m “full-time”, which is to say I no longer have to pretend to be someone I'm not.

The last couple years have also been a very interesting time to be an LGBTQ+ person in the Covenant. I’ve become all too aware of a certain twisted symmetry in that my gender transition, as I’ve learned to accept myself, has come at a time when it’s become increasingly clear that the Covenant does not accept people like me.

To be clear, I did not expect the ECC to suddenly roll out a rainbow carpet, but I had hopes that there would be room for dialogue and more importantly, a recognition of and allowance for congregational differences and freedom in questions of inclusion and affirmation.

There are a number of tropes that used to be very common in articles or stories about trans people that were intended for a general audience - phrases like “a man in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in the wrong body”. They still crop up from time to time, but fortunately we are often seeing a more nuanced portrayal these days. Essentially, these were attempts to describe dysphoria, but speaking for myself, and many other trans people I’ve talked to, they don’t really resonate, and they really confused me when I was first trying to figure things out.

For me, as with many trans folks, dysphoria really reared its ugly head when I hit puberty. There are plenty of things from before that make more sense in hindsight, but it just didn’t occur to me to question my assigned gender. Up till then, I basically liked my body, so ideas about being trapped in the wrong body didn’t make sense to me. Instead, it was the right body--my body--but it felt like it was going wrong.

Without getting into the science of it (google “transgender brain study” if you care), it seems that for whatever reason, my brain is more feminine than the average person with an “M” on their birth certificate. And my brain was not equipped to handle male puberty. Even though I knew what to expect and had been assured that it was a confusing time for everyone, it just felt wrong. It was like being gas-lighted by the entire world - being told that everything that was happening to me was perfectly normal while something inside of me was screaming, “No! You should be going the other way!”

Eventually, I figured out that I wanted to be a girl. But I’m not sure that I ever really quite admitted that to myself, because I knew it wasn’t okay. I knew, even before I had an inkling that this might apply to me, that being gay was wrong, so being trans, which is basically just extra gay, was probably extra wrong.

I’ll fast-forward over a couple years of serious depression and suicidal ideation. Nothing ever really resolved, but I learned to compartmentalize and manage things, although not in a particularly healthy way (What could possibly go wrong from bottling up these emotions and trying not to think about them?). College and grad school happened, Liz and I got married, and we found the Covenant.

We’d both been completely disillusioned by the rigid Baptist fundamentalism that we’d grown up with and endured through college. The ECC by contrast seemed like a place where there was room for all those questions where the answers we’d been given no longer quite worked. Maybe a place where the answers didn’t always matter quite so much. I was even surprised to learn that there were voices advocating for inclusion of LGBTQ+ people and that people generally didn’t freak out about that. (Not that it had anything to do with me, of course.)

And so the Covenant has been our home for over a decade. We’ve worshipped and served alongside you here since literally our second week in Minnesota 9 years ago. Our children have always known Bethlehem as “church”.

HRT, as it is usually known, is a common part of gender transition and switches up the dominant sex hormone in the body from testosterone to estrogen or vice versa and essentially induces a second puberty. Aside from some obvious and not-so-obvious physical changes, most people also experience mental and emotional changes (not that it’s surprising that changing hormone balances has that kind of effect!). In situations where cisgender people have been given cross-sex hormones, the result is often depression or other negative results, but for trans people, the changes are usually positive (although it can take some trial-and-error to get things sorted). For me, it meant that within 48 hours of starting the medication, my mood and outlook dramatically improved and the inside of my head just felt suddenly quieter. For a couple weeks, I was unusually cheerful, patient, and hopeful and I was freaking out a bit because it was so weird. Eventually, it became the new normal and I realized that while it usually wasn’t as bad as it had been in my teens, I’d been living with near-constant depression throughout my adult life. Over time, I felt my emotions become more integrated, for lack of a better way to describe it. I cried a lot more, but a lot of that was just the release of years of built-up pain. That fear that had been running through my life was easing and no longer being fueled near as much by my self-hate.

This new outlook, coupled with the fact that I was actually moving forward with my transition, which still kind of blew my mind a bit, made it easier to start coming out to some trusted people. Then the news about Judy Peterson’s “discipline” broke and suddenly I felt very vulnerable. I was employed by the church at the time. If I came out, would I risk my job? If I came out and Pastor Matt didn’t do anything, would that endanger his job? Thanks to the many conversations that had been happening, we now had a much better idea of who was likely to be supportive, but it also felt like coming out was more likely to cause people to view us as a potential source of division. So even though I was experiencing much less internal conflict, I was still afraid.

In the following months, the denomination’s rather heavy-handed attempts at “loving well”, like the Embrace initiative, really only felt like more of the same kind of othering that I was already familiar with. A motion at last year’s Annual Meeting to talk about forming a task force to talk about revisiting questions of LGBTQ+ inclusion was soundly defeated, although it was far from unanimous, and the sentiment I heard expressed by delegates voting against the motion was one of “we figured this out 20 years ago, why do we need to talk about it again?” Personally, I kind of feel like there’s a better understanding of some of these issues than there was 20 years ago, but maybe that’s just me.

Back when I first came out to Liz, we kind of figured that we would quietly leave Bethlehem last spring. Once we realized both how much support we actually had within the congregation and that this whole thing was way bigger than us, we committed to stay on for the time being. I believe that knowing and talking with other people is really the only way to understanding differences. You know us. And things change when people realize that some of “us” are “them”. I am not insisting that Bethlehem suddenly put a rainbow flag on the front lawn, but I do feel that people should understand the human cost of the Covenant’s current position and direction.

The question of First Covenant’s excommunication is not just a question of LGBTQ+ inclusion. It is also very much a question of Covenant freedom. But it’s not not a question of LGBTQ+ inclusion. I will say quite plainly that the longer we stay at Bethlehem, and as members of the ECC, the more I feel like I am tacitly endorsing a status quo that I do not support. I would not be here tonight if I saw a conflict between my identity as a queer trans person and my identity as a child of God. And yet, while I have in the past been able to ignore or rationalize away the possibility that our church is not a welcoming place for LGBTQ+ people, my experience over the past year has made it very clear to me that while there are a great many people who are welcoming and affirming, our church as a whole is not. To be clear, there has not been any overt hostility, but my experience of Bethlehem has changed in so many small and subtle ways that still add up to a significantly different experience so that I would be extremely hesitant to invite one of my LGBTQ friends to Bethlehem. And I worry about the children of our church, what they’re learning about “us” and “them”.

(I was horrified at the email we received yesterday from John Wenrich’s office, which reinforced an “us versus them” attitude and suggested that First Covenant was taking the focus away from causes that we should be directing our energy towards, as if justice is a zero-sum game.)

Ignoring dysphoria doesn’t fix things. Also, analogies break down. I transitioned and it really helped my gender dysphoria. I don’t know what kind of hormones to prescribe to a denomination. But I do know a couple things. I know that it’s necessary to let go of the fear of all the things that could happen in order to step forward into a better way of being. And I know that there’s no us and them, there’s just people who bear God's image in so many different and wonderful ways, and I want to be a part of a church that welcomes all of them, celebrates all of them, and allows all of them to use the gifts that God has given them.