Someone over on YouTube (where you too can actually see you’re truly) asked me if religion deterred me from transitioning earlier in life. It’s a good question and i answered them privately and i’ve been thing thinking about that question as something i’d like to address here.
Religion did play a role in deterring me from transitioning earlier but not in the sense that you might think. I never held a religion-based belief that there was anything morally wrong about being trans or about wanting to live as female. I had and have no personal religious objection to the issue.
Quite to the contrary my parents stressed to us the great love of God in Christ. They taught us that we could take everything to God in prayer. I somehow got the opinion that since God knew all about me that i could actually talk to God about my feelings. I that’s what i did from the days of my childhood.
My parents never gave me the impression that being trans was wrong. they never said anything to me about anything related to gender or sexuality. But the larger society definitely taught me that a boy who acts girlish is a sissy and will be teased, tormented, ostracized and beat up. So i never talked to anyone but God about my gender stuff.
The place where religion deterred an earlier transition had to do with what i wanted to do for a calling/vocation. I was raised in a church body that didn’t ordain women and i wanted to be an ordained minister so transition was out of the question. After i was ordained i loved the work. I knew that transitioning would mean that i would have to leave ordained ministry and i was not willing to do that. I figured that i could live with the stress of being one thing inside and being something else outwardly. Because i loved the work of being an ordained minister i stayed male and tried to find some way to accomodate my gender issues.
I eventually found out that i couldn’t live with the pressure. As my ability to be effective in ministry decreased and as the psychological pressure pushed me toward self-destructive behaviors i knew i had to do something or die. So i left ordained ministry and it was the saddest day of my life. When i left the church i had no intention of returning to ordained ministry. In fact i was not sure that i wanted to go to any church ever again. The painful purposeless days that followed were horrible. And it was Christ who brought me through that dark time.
So since there was no longer a reason to remain male i went ahead and started my transition. I found myself and the psychological pressure and the self-destructive behavior stopped. I relaxed into a new life where there was congruence between the inner me and the external me. That felt great.
But i never left Christ (and it goes without saying that he never left me). I found a new church home in the Episcopal Church. To my surprise the same Christ i came to know in

was also in

Over the next few years the Episcopal Church saw what the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod saw: a call to ordained ministry. So i am back doing the work of ordained ministry and finding great joy in this way of serving God and the church. I must that i never thought that i’d end up in a different church body, being female, being ordained and being happy.
So yes, religion did deter me from transitioning earlier but it also played a key role in getting me through transition. Faith also gave me a reason to want to keep on living that was beyond myself.