When I was ten years old, I stood before the congregation of our small-town church. I wore a cheap dress with a flower print on it. I was glad the dress was ugly-it would have been unbearable for anyone to notice or comment on it. I took the microphone, drew a deep breath, and gave a perfect recitation of First Corinthians, Chapter Thirteen.
The chapter about love.
The pastor’s wife presented me with a prize: a beautiful, gold-plated crucifix. When I got home, I laid it reverently in my dresser drawer, next to my white cotton socks. I never wore it.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
I was raised in a family of strong, pragmatic women. I will be thankful for this until the day I die. The habits and idiosyncrasies of my mother and my four sisters shape all my earliest memories, the contours of my sense of self. And so, I do not exaggerate when I say my childhood was almost entirely defined in and by the language of women.
It was my mother who taught us, early and well, how to work hard, to stretch a dollar, to clean a bathroom or care for a skinned knee, to ride a bike and drive a car. How to hold out a helping hand, and to take one when offered, and needed. At no point did it occur to us that our moral education was anything other than common sense—it simply wouldn’t have occurred to any of us NOT to take care of one another, to protect and help one another if we could. We loved one another. It was a cornerstone of our identity.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
But I have always had a strange relationship with womanhood.
You see, my mother raised five daughters. But only four of them turned out to be girls.
If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
It is a strange thing, to be a boy raised as a girl. A boy whose whole life is defined by the strong women surrounding him and yet to know, even in childhood, he isn’t one of them—even if his body looks the same. If my mother and my sisters, such strong and important parts of my life, were content with the fact of being female, then why couldn’t I be too? How ashamed, how confused they would be, if they knew what I was.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.
Having had the misfortune of being raised Evangelical, I had no idea that people like me could even exist. Not really. “Wicked lifestyles” adults declared with pursed lips and disapproving faces, at the faintest whisper of queerness. Evil. Demon. Rejecting God’s plan.
Somehow, deep down, I knew they were talking about me—even though they never did.
Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
How very evil I must be, I thought, to wish for a boyhood that God had clearly not intended. How ugly, how ungrateful, how wicked. I had no words, then, to describe myself—I could not be a demon, since I hadn’t yet been condemned to Hell. But I needed words.
So I settled on one from the Book of Revelation: the unnatural beast, made of fragmented parts of those that were once whole. That which ought not to be, a creature that God will smite in the end times:
(CHIMERA)
I decided I was being tested, tempted like Jesus in the desert, and must bend and break my will toward begging His forgiveness, seeking His redemption. My sisters would sometimes make fun of my piety, my obsession, and they were right—with my perfect grades, my haughty recitation of scripture, my loud disdain for makeup, lip gloss, jewelry, I was the poster child for being a perfect little Christian girl. “She’s going places,” adults would confidently say. And I would smile, and not correct them. They thought one of those places was heaven. I knew better.
I don’t blame my sisters for being exasperated at such performances-but such performances were never inspired by the reasons they thought. I never thought I was better than them. No; somewhere between the small hours of the dawn, and sickness in the pit of my stomach, I knew—despite all my labors—that I would never be better. That I was so, so much worse.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
Part of the current, prevailing moral panic around trans childrens’ non/existence centers on whether we were somehow pressured into it, inappropriately socialized into a delusion. I am living proof this is not so. There were few, hardly any male role models in my life, and none from my family. I never knew my grandfathers, nor their sons. My father was around for awhile, I suppose, but not really present. I would have liked to look up to him; but even then, I saw little worth emulating. I have no brothers.
For now we know in part and we prophesy in part. But when completeness comes, what is in part disappears.
This is not a story about failure. I did not fail at being a woman. This is a story about a boy whose church taught him a violent and ugly lesson about love, about its conditionality and its absence, when he was far too young to understand himself as anything but a monster. This is a story about a boy who tried very hard to be a girl, because he was taught that God could only ever love her, no matter how much or how sincerely the boy prayed. No matter who he tried to be, what he was was an abomination in God’s eye.
But those patronizing, pious adults never knew how much blood they’d drawn. I never let them see. I learned early, and well, how to hide.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish things behind me.
But there was something else those patronizing, pious adults never understood. Another, older lesson I’d learned a long time ago, about love, about its unconditionality, its presence, when I was far too young to even read words on a page or understand concepts like wicked or evil.
I was raised in a family of strong, pragmatic women. We loved one another. It was a cornerstone of our identity. And this was a foundation laid far deeper than the hateful prison walls the world had convinced me to erect around myself.
For now we see but a poor reflection, as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as l am fully known.
It took me years to remember, to accept that self I knew as a child. It took many more for me to take steps toward enacting it. But I was suffocating behind those prison walls; and, even if they crushed me when they fell, I could no longer live within their embrace. I have rarely been so afraid as when I came out to my mother and sisters—if God couldn’t love me, how could they?
But those strong, pragmatic women, whose habits and idiosyncrasies had shaped my earliest memories and the contours of my sense of self, loved me still. They embraced their long-unknown brother, their prodigal son. I do not exaggerate when I say my childhood—my boyhood—was almost entirely defined in and by the language of women.
And now these three
remain:
faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of
these is love.
I do not know whether or not God makes
mistakes.
I no longer believe in God. But I still
believe in the words I spoke, a lifetime
ago.
When I remember those words, they don’t
belong to Him.
They belong to the women who caught me
when I Fell.▲
