LGBT

I Want To Be Like You: Kaden’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

“When I’m big I want to be a boy like you.”

My four year old self thought I was giving my cousin a complement. However he saw otherwise; I was beaten, called “faggot”, then pushed down the stairs. That complete rejection from a family member was enough to scare me into submission for the rest of my childhood.

I grew up in a conservative homeschool family. At a very young age I showed signs of being transgender I always wanted my hair cut “like a boy.” Only played male characters during play dates, and hated being called a girl. Any effort to be myself was squashed under strict southern baptist doctrine. Thus I did my best to ignore my growing dysphoria so I could fit in with my peers.

After I graduated high school. I slowly came out to  friends with very mixed reactions. I felt that I had to prove myself to them so I made the horrible mistake of coming out to my parents. My mom cried while my dad exploded in anger kicking in my door and telling me “You are as bad as a child rapist!” I was forced into conversion therapy and shoved back into the closet where I spend two more years.

Last month everything came crashing down.

I drove my dad to the store then without warning he started screaming at me demanding to know why I was “Giving God the middle finger”  I was shocked by his sudden aggression. He told me that he wouldn’t allow me to corrupt my siblings by being a “cross dresser”  I locked myself in the family bathroom for safety. While he pounded on the door and threatened to drag me into the parking lot.  In a panic I texted my coworker who came to my rescue. Her mom got security  to keep my dad away while we walked to their car. He threatened her the entire walk but she refused to back down.  As we drove away she told me “We will not let you be homeless.”

When I got to their house I was group hugged and given hot chocolate. The rest of the week was a blur of crying, having the police help me get my things from my parents home, saying goodbye to my younger siblings, quitting my jobs, and adjusting to a totally new environment.

Lucky for me the family I’m staying with have been very patent while I adjust to not being abused.

My progress is slow but steady. I’m saving for top surgery, finding a new job, and I no longer jump every time a car goes by. They have all proven to me the support that they have from buying me my first suit, to helping my save for top surgery. They have given me the confidence to see that my dad can call me horrible names, he can tell my siblings and other church members that I’m a horrible person. But he no longer owns me. I’m no longer going to cower in fear while my life goes by without me.

I am loved, I am important, and have everything I need to be ten times the man he ever will be.

Mirror Blindness: Alex’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

I don’t know when I started trying to ignore everything about myself.

It must have been early in my childhood, but the further I look back, the blurrier the memories get.

I’m Alex, and I spent twenty years being raised in a radical Roman Catholic homeschool community.

My parents raised me to “die to self”, to deny my own wants and unnecessary needs, in order to show my love to God. Love, after all, was an action, not a feeling. If you loved God without giving your body and soul to Him, without “bleeding yourself dry”, that wasn’t real love. It would not save you from everlasting fire.

I was designated female at birth, and as such, my mother warned me against vanity. I got to listen to my mother shaming women for wearing too much makeup, or for dressing immodestly. Their prideful, lustful skin exposure would cause men to think impure thoughts. It would send their souls to Hell.

So, I stopped looking at myself in the mirror, except for the occasional spare glance.

I didn’t have to. My mother insisted upon fixing my hair, long after I reached the age when I could do it myself. I didn’t know better at the time; after all, my siblings and I were isolated from the world, to protect our fragile innocence.

Me and my siblings never had any real privacy. Any time she felt we were being particularly disobedient, or were having “impure thoughts”, she would look through our belongings. Journals and sketchbooks included. Anything she found that she didn’t approve of would send her into a screaming rage. To give you an idea of how picky she was: once she found a drawing I had made of a flying snake, and called it blasphemous.

My mother got harsher with me as I grew, especially after I hit puberty.

She’d tear me down for every error. I don’t like to talk about it, but to summarize, I wound up with a very negative self image. The things she called me: lazy, selfish, bossy, and worse- became my self-image. There was no one whose word I trusted more than hers, so there was no one to tell me otherwise. I learned to hate myself. The only way I knew to cope with that was to be always lost in thought, daydreaming. The stories in my head helped me to ignore my own existence.

Inside and out, I was blind to myself.

Since all sex before marriage was sinful, and even thinking about sex was a grave sin, I never questioned my sexuality. Even the word “sexuality” was just a “liberal” word, and never used. I had strange ideas about love. Because I had never been taught otherwise, I had thought no sexual attraction or romance was even necessary in a relationship. “True love is not like a love song,” my mother had told me. “Feelings come and go; you should marry your best friend.”

My first relationship, as a result, was a catastrophe.

I dated a boy, the son of one of my mom’s friends. We got along well and could have long conversations. Marriage would mean freedom from the tedious world I was stuck in, so I decided to begin a relationship. He was very in love with me, but I did not feel a thing aside from friendship. Why should I? Friendship, I had been told, was all that was necessary. Feelings were unnecessary, and dangerous, as they might lead to the sin of premarital sex.

We fought more often then we got along. Neither of us knew the first thing about a healthy relationship; neither of us had ever been shown an example of one. We’d both come from emotionally abusive parents, after all. Excitement quickly turned to stress; our parents put a lot of pressure on us. Preparing for marriage was a big deal, and dating without intending to marry- that was unthinkable!

The worst part was being pushed ever harder into a feminine gender role. My boyfriend would tell me of a dream he had where I was wearing a “lovely dress”, and that he couldn’t wait for me to care for him and his children one day. He always wanted to be a gentleman; to hold doors open for me, defend my honor, the whole nine yards. Perhaps there should have been nothing wrong with it, but it made me very uneasy.

Finally I cracked under the stress.

He wanted to join a non-Catholic Bible study, and my parents feared it would draw him away from the faith. I tried to control him. We had our most painful fight yet, and then he left me.

The depression I’d had since my pre-teen years escalated after that. I felt like a failure. Some days, I lacked the strength to even leave my bed. I was forced to look at myself for the very first time, if only to find out what went wrong. For once in my life, I had to stare myself straight in the eye.

Not long after the breakup, my parents started to ease up on their previously-elaborate Internet censorship systems. Distracted by other hobbies and projects, they left me to myself more often. I opened my eyes to other people’s opinions, and through sharing my art, made some friends from very different backgrounds. I learned a lot.

Yes, a romantic relationship DOES need feelings. Even if they ebb and flow, they should always exist. I read up on what a healthy relationship was supposed to look like- and in the meantime, found out that the relationship my boyfriend and I had was NOT one. And- love was not a gory sacrifice. It was supposed to be built on mutual kindness and respect. My own emotional health was important too!

Someone who truly loves you would not want you to suffer.

I found, to my surprise, that LGBT people were not the soulless degenerates I’d been taught they were. I also let go of my fear of letting myself be attracted to others. And, lo and behold, girls were so lovely! The emotions they stirred up in my heart felt new and exciting. I’d never let that happen to myself before.

Then, perhaps most importantly of all, I learned that gender did not depend on genitals.

I’d never felt connected to being female. I felt like an outsider, especially among the other highly-feminine homeschooled girls in my circle. Puberty had been hell, not just for the struggle against sexual feelings, but because my body was changing in ways that made me uncomfortable.

For so long I’d distracted myself from this, even when the tomboys around me were more feminine than I! I couldn’t look like a girl without being uncomfortable, so I didn’t want to be noticed at all. When guests would arrive, I might spend a little time among them, talking. But then the discomfort would sink in, and I’d hide myself away. Hearing my own birth name always was, and still is, disorienting.

Another reason I ignored what I now know to be dysphoria is that I didn’t want to be a boy, either. I’d been taught the angels were neither male nor female, and from a very young age, I’d wished I could be one of them.

Often I’d cried, wishing I had no body at all.

When I started looking in the mirror, I came face to face with things about myself that I’d always known, deep down inside. I don’t feel ashamed of my sexuality. Any shame I once felt has been erased by my parents’ behavior when I finally broke free. The way they’ve treated me since has broken my heart a thousand times over. I looked back and saw the sourness in their prejudices, and that the abuse and isolation wasn’t normal after all.

I’m Alex, and now I’m free to look in the mirror.

I don’t have to be a girl, or a boy. I am free to love girls and other nonbinary people, to love the world I was sheltered from, and love myself.

Trans In Hiding: Lyle’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

“Do you want to go to counselling?” my mom asked.

She asked this after she and my dad had spent at least two hours interrogating me on my faith, the most terrifying conversation I’d ever had. At seventeen, I’d tried my best to explain my own agnosticism through tears, saying how I never truly believed what they did. I hadn’t come out as trans, but coming out as non-Christian alone proved to be terrifying.

It was the first time she’d ever expressed concern about my mental well-being. I knew counselling would likely mean seeing a pastor, and, if they were able to wrench my identity out of me, conversion therapy.

I said no.

Up to this point, my upbringing had prepared me greatly for questions like these. I was homeschooled in a strict Christian household through K-12, and my education was mediocre at best. My mom was my only teacher until I was deemed responsible enough to use video courses, and coping under her authority was difficult. She was impatient, yelled constantly, and punished poor behavior with physical abuse and isolation. When bad grades meant getting hit, I learned to adapt.

It wasn’t long before I began to cheat. By 6th grade, I’d cheated heavily in nearly every subject, routinely lying about completing tasks. My mom was the perfect mix of abusive and neglectful, and rarely checked my progress enough to notice. Even when I was caught, I would fall back into the same patterns when her guard was down, trying my best to both placate her and keep myself safe.

It was a smart plan, and I felt wretched about it from late elementary school till the day I graduated. Every day, all I could think about was how I was throwing away my future, and how much it would hurt if she found me out. It wasn’t a proud thing. I’d distract myself with whatever entertainment I was allowed to block out the petrifying guilt and dread. Some days, it caused so much anxiety that I had to stop playing with the only friend I had to go panic and punish myself.

It was the worst time of my life, but in a messed up way, you could say it prepared me.

I never recognized myself as a girl, growing up. I didn’t know being trans was an option, but I knew I felt different. I hated my name, dressed oddly, questioned gender roles, and gradually cut my once waist-length hair shorter and shorter every year. I didn’t have a word for it, and I wasn’t even sure what I was doing, exactly. I just knew it felt right, and as long as I still called myself a girl, no one stood directly in my way.

I’d begun to privately consider myself androgynous, but even that didn’t fit the way I wanted it to. It wasn’t until getting more involved in social media in 2011 when I learned the term “nonbinary”. The internet had finally given me a term for what I was feeling, and after some time, I asked online friends to use they/them pronouns for me.

All of this was followed by clearing browser histories countless times.

Surprisingly, aside from dysphoria, I never began to hate myself for being trans. For once, I started to gain a sense of self, pushing through my own defensively dissociative state and dwelling on my identity and place in the world. This, however, did make things more difficult. The more my eyes were opened to, the harder things got to bear.

I had already been wrestling with an increasing lack of faith over the years. Christianity had never truly “clicked” for me, but I pretended it did, just like I pretended to be a good student, and a girl. I’d never enjoyed going to church, but was forced to go twice a week, to the point where it became triggering. Till I was nineteen, I heard sermon after sermon that demonized gay and trans people like myself. Most Sunday mornings were spent crying in the nearest bathroom for as long as I could without raising suspicion.

I felt like if the people of that church knew what I was, I’d be eaten alive within a week.

Despite coming out as non-Christian, despite routine breakdowns, and despite watching me literally cover my ears in the auditorium, my parents continued to force me to attend. The only reason it stopped was due to starting work as a 3rd shift grocery stocker, a job I’d specifically chosen to keep myself out of church and away from my parents. My quality of life increased immediately.

And living on an opposite schedule has proved to be more than a blessing for me. Working 3rd shift was a challenge of its own, but I fought hard to keep my first job, and still keep it to this day. Anything was better than the alternative. What better way to avoid the people you’re too poor to move away from?

Getting a job also helped me distance myself. The hardest thing about growing up trans, about growing up non-Christian, about growing up a liar, was knowing that no matter how much they said they loved me, they were going to abandon me. That was always at the front of my mind. If they knew what I was, they wouldn’t love me.

So I felt no obligation to love them back.

Even as young as sixteen, I anticipated being cut off from my family, and prepared. The only thing I could remember my mom telling me during our pitiful “sex ed” day was how some of her cousins were lesbians, and how lesbians were sinners, and how we were to avoid these cousins. I already knew that, someday, I’d be those cousins. I’d be the shameful qu**r in my relative’s warning tales, someone who only existed as a nebulous sex demon. I’d never follow the path they wanted, I’d never be an aunt/uncle figure for my siblings’ future kids, and I’d never be respected for what I really was.

And that was hard. It’s still hard. Trying to live with people who will hate you isn’t easy. Facing that no one will support you in financial crises due to what you are isn’t easy. Looking at my sweet thirteen year old brother and knowing I’ll likely be banned from speaking to him isn’t easy. I may not get to talk to him for well on five years as he faces the same abuse I did. And when we’re allowed to talk again, he may shun me with the rest. I worry about him the most.

But even now, I want to use it to my advantage. 2017 is the year I plan on moving out, escaping a toxic household to strike out on my own with gay friends who really love me. Coming out is likely to follow, the topic being practically inevitable at this point. I want to declare who I am as loudly as possible, cutting off every abusive relative in one fell swoop. It’s still going to hurt like hell, but you can’t say I’m not prepared. I’m ready to be banned from parties, weddings, and funerals. I’m ready for excommunication.

I’m encouraging it.

Homeschooling, in its own messed up way, may have helped me leave less traumatized than expected, teaching me enough to duck out of potential conversion therapy. It highlighted and encouraged my abuse, but it’s shaped who I am today: a twenty-one year old nonbinary man with nothing to lose and everything to gain. An autistic bi artist with a real future ahead of them. My treatment may have handed me an array of mental illnesses (avoidant personality disorder, social anxiety disorder, agoraphobia, the works), but I was able to survive, and I’m getting better.

Not everyone can say that much.

-Lyle (they/them, he/him)

Trans Is: Elliott Grace’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

My name is Elliott Grace, and I am a homeschool alumni.

I am Non-Binary Trans, and this is my coming out.

This is probably one of the hardest things I’ve written up to this point.

I’m afraid to come out, to share this. I’m afraid of being questioned, being rejected, being told that I don’t qualify as trans. I’m afraid that people will try to correct me, argue that this is not who I am, that I am wrong and will eventually find out they were right.

Some of my close friends already know I consider myself trans, and sometimes I explain that I use “they/them” pronouns when I’m introduced to someone. It says “trans” on my facebook profile, but you only know that if you’ve looked for it, and it doesn’t explain what that means to me.

Because I don’t know what it means.

It would be nice if there was a quiz I could take, a checklist of things that grants me permission to use the term “trans” to describe myself and my gender. I wish I could give you a straightforward and approachable description of what it means to be non-binary. I wish I could explain everything it is and is not, and educate you so you’re better equipped when someone comes out to you.

But I’m not prepared to do any of these things, so I’m just going to come out. I’m going to tell you what it’s like to be the me who is trans.

. . .

Trans is thinking it’s normal to hate being a girl, because my parents were misogynistic and openly talked about the ways girls were bad.

Trans is assuming that I didn’t want to be a girl because it sucks to be a girl in christian fundamentalism, not because I’m trans.

Trans is missing the gender roles from my childhood, because when I followed them people approved of me.

Trans is not coming out to my parents because they stopped talking to me years ago.

Trans is hating my voice, and not watching recordings of myself so that I can forget what it sounds like. Trans is knowing that If I’m reminded what I sound like, I’ll likely end up trying avoid talking altogether.

Trans is the happy and safe feeling when a partner says to me, “you’re dashing” instead of “you look pretty.”

Trans is spending a couple years trying to figure out if I’m a guy.

Trans is needing to get permission from my boss to shave my head.

. . .

Trans is a client telling me I “stole a man’s haircut” and having to play nice when I want to tell him to fuck off.

Trans is cringing when someone refers to me as “ma’am.”

Trans is feeling guilty for not appreciating passing as a woman, when so many people wish they could.

Trans is waiting to change my name at work until I change jobs because I’m afraid it will be too hard.

Trans is wishing there was a box to check besides “male” or “female” when I have to fill out a form.

Trans is crying in the bathroom at the doctor’s office because the staff chided me for putting down the “wrong” name on my paperwork even though Elliott is my legal name.

Trans is my doctor asking what’s wrong, and when I tell him he says “you don’t look like an Elliott.”

Trans is when the bank says my husband Elliott is a signer on my account.

Trans is thinking I don’t deserve to ask people to change the way they talk about me.

Trans is debating whether I want to take hormones.

Trans is dating someone that wishes their body was more like mine, and feeling like I should be more grateful.

Trans is other trans people feeling threatened when I say that I’m not a man or a woman, because it will be harder for them to convince people being trans is valid if I don’t fit in the gender binary.

Trans is wishing I had a beard so people wouldn’t think I’m trying to measure up when I wear makeup.

Trans is when I feel like I’m in drag but so many people just see a girl in a dress.

Trans is people telling me I’m a trans guy, even when I tell them I’m not.

Trans is when my mail is addressed to “Mr. Elliott Harvey.”

Trans is other trans people telling me that I don’t qualify as trans because I don’t hate my body enough. Trans is wondering if they’re right, because what I hate most about my body is being disabled.

Trans is deciding I don’t want to take hormones right now, but being afraid people will tell me I’m not trans if I’m not on hormones.

Trans is answering to Elliott and then asking to be called Grace.

Trans is when people think I’m a boy, until they hear my voice.

Trans is people asking what my real name is.

Trans is not asking people to use they/them pronouns for me, because I don’t know how to handle it if they refuse.

Trans is going on a date with someone that assumes I was born a boy, and listening to them complain about how awful people who were born girls are.

Trans is when people assume I’m a trans woman and I don’t correct them, because at least they think I’m trans.

Trans is knowing that I will never pass as non binary, that people will always try to see me as either a man or a woman.

Trans is the joy I feel when someone says they didn’t know whether I was a boy or a girl.

Trans is coming out to the internet, but still feeling unsure about coming out to friends.

Trans is me.

I Am Trans: Reese’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

Hi. Name’s Reese, like the peanut butter cups.

I first realized I was trans FTM in college, I believe. I read some post or another on Tumblr (I know, I know), and it got me thinking: Was there such a thing as being agender? It sort of fit in my head, because I’d never liked girly things, like Barbies or nail polish or even the color pink.

(Which is a perfectly acceptable color, by the way.) It ate away at me for years, being non-gender conforming. I hid it behind jokes and feeling generally uncomfortable in my own skin.

“Oh, I don’t wear nail polish, it makes my fingers feel weird.”

“Oh, no thanks, I can’t walk in heels.”

I mean, these are very highly gendered things that shouldn’t be gendered, but at the time I felt like I was…failing to be female.

I really didn’t understand anything LGBT+ during pretty much my entire life until college. I was raised in a fairly strict Christian home, and was homeschooled K-12. I do remember pseudo-teaching myself to read, with some “help” from my mom, who was my teacher. We used the A Beka Book programs, starting out with just textbooks, then moving on to the videotaped classroom experience.

At any rate, I discovered Tumblr around 2010-2011 (which was… an Interesting Time, as it were), at first because of the Broship of the Ring comics by Noelle Stevenson, and then because of the Doctor Who/Sherlock/Supernatural craze. (Yes, I was a SuperWhoLockian. No, I still haven’t forgiven myself for it.) But there was a whole lot of “Gay is good!!!!!!! Because boys kiss!!!!” nonsense going on, which struck me as odd, but I went along with it.

Fast forward to 2014, when I first started feeling like being agender was being truly and honestly myself. My mother “found” (snooped in a notebook that I carelessly left out) a coming out letter where I detailed my plan to have a hysterectomy/top surgery, because I wasn’t their daughter anymore. (I also came out as biromantic/asexual, but that’s another story.) I was working midnights at the time, so I woke up at around 1:30 PM to a phone call from my sister-in- law, who was literally shaking as she fed my infant nephew his lunch. My mother had gone completely off her rocker. She took the letter she searched for (how did she know to look in that notebook? Should I have left it out? Was she just looking for a piece of paper?) directly to my brother and sister-in- law, because I had mentioned that I’d told them about being biromantic and asexual.

She literally said to them, “The next time I see you, I’ll have a gun.”

She threatened them with violence, because she thought we were “hiding” things and “lying” to her, and (her favorite word for a while) “deceiving” her. She turned out to be mentally ill, and that overshadowed the emergency family meeting we had later in the day. Fortunately I had the night off, so we could have a meeting. I was shaking and sobbing the entire time. To quote my father, “We’ll talk about what’s in the chair later.” Guess who was sitting in the chair? Yours truly. My father, the man who I thought understood me the most out of all the adults I’d ever talked to extensively, called me a “what.” Not “her,” or even “who.” “What.”

I’ve never felt so dehumanized, so belittled, so Othered than at that moment.

Most of the “family meeting” consisted of my older brother talking about forgiveness and something else that was probably really good and important, but I was just too shocked to listen. I was numb. How could my mother do this? How could she be so completely mad that she threatened her own son, her own daughter-in- law, her grandson, with violence? What about me? Was I going to be kicked out? I was making minimum wage at a McDonald’s and barely paying off my student loans.

What the hell was I supposed to do? Where was I going to go?

“You’ll always be my daughter.”

That pretty much ended my closeness with my father. I’d always wanted to be like him, to be book-smart and goofily funny and able to fix things with my hands. But after that conversation, I just wanted to go bury myself in a hole somewhere and feel the crushing weight of earth on my body. It would’ve been better than the crushing disappointment, the feeling of “Who you are isn’t wanted here.”

I’d been tentatively feeling my way around the gender spectrum, first finding solace as an agender person, then realizing that I felt more masculine than anything. I don’t doubt NB folk, but I know who I am and what gender I am.

I haven’t exactly come out as trans to my parents.

My mother, as I said, is mentally ill and refuses to seek treatment for it, and my father is at his wit’s end as to how to deal with that, so I feel like starting T and changing my name/gender and/or getting top surgery would be something that would, well, be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. So I’m waiting to come out.

I have very fortunately either learned to completely shut down my dysphoria, or I have very minor dysphoric symptoms, but there are days (since I still present as female in public) where I have to steel myself, grit my teeth, and say, “Okay, they’re gonna call me ‘R;,’ and it’s not ‘Reese,’ but it’s close enough, right? I can do this.”

To this day, I still don’t like little stupid things, like hugs, or buying women’s shirts (because they’re SEE THROUGH, dammit, and that shit WILL NOT STAND), or even washing myself in the shower. I have been wearing baggier clothes to work, ones that don’t flatter my figure or make me look feminine, but it’s been hard. I work at a Christian-based company, and it’s… it’s a bit like being homeschooled again, which is nauseatingly comforting, or rather nauseating because it’s comforting. Nobody swears, nobody really takes the Lord’s name in vain, none of that. And it’s a nearly all-female crew, which makes things even worse, in a way, because I have to use my girly-girly customer service voice, and I have to withstand people saying “God bless you” when God either blessed me with his Holy middle finger or simply forgot to do the whole “blessing” thing.

I mean come one, nobody blesses on Wednesday!

(I was born on a Wednesday. Y’know that one poem, “Monday’s child”? About the days of the week? Well, the line for Wednesday goes, “Wednesday’s child is full of woe.” I would like to thank God and also Jesus for that little bit of whatever-it- is.)

My self-image has always been skewed, since I was basically born with major depressive disorder, and apparently when you’re born like that you don’t get the mandatory Self-Esteem package. And of course, not being able to come out safely has been worse because of that. But at the same time, I take comfort in the fact that I know who I am now. I am Reese, and Reese means… me. Will I ever be okay in my own skin? I don’t know. I honestly have no idea. I just know that I’m more comfortable with myself now than I have ever been, and I hope that I will only get more comfortable as time and money and legal changes allow. I mean, it’s fairly difficult some days more than others, but I’m not out, which is both blessing and curse. I don’t have to deal with slurs being thrown my way, I don’t live in a metropolis, so I don’t have to deal with any kind of sexual harassment, and to top it all off, I’m so shy and awkward I either wouldn’t notice unless it were blatant harassment, or would notice and would (in my head, anyway) get increasingly snarky about it until the other person got uncomfortable and shut up. (In reality, I think I’d nod and smile until they left/I left that environment, and then I’d go home and cry. Or possibly kick myself for not being brave enough to stand up for myself.)

As far as community support goes… I don’t really talk about being AFAB, except on my sideblog/private Twitter, so. My online friends (which are, come to think of it, for the most part either LGB or trans men themselves) have been nothing but supportive and kind About my issues, going so far as to respond to my over-emotional posts about whether or not I’m “really” trans (because let’s face it, if I’m not out in public, if I don’t “act masculine” at all, if I’m not taking T and/or immediately planning surgeries, am I “really” trans, or am I just some stupid Special Snowflake Tumblrite who really desperately wants to be “different” in order to “fit in” with the “different” crowd?) with kindness and Compassion.

My two brothers have sort of expressed support.

My older brother in particular has been kind and accepting, and my younger brother has been at the very least reading my emo tweets and going so far as liking some of them. I really can’t say about my sister-in-law, and I’m quite sure my grandparents would possibly die of shock if they knew.

My mother… is mad, and I don’t trust her as far as I could throw her. I fully intend on coming out once I get the money/financial stability to say, “Oh hey guys, by the way, my name is Reese and I’m a dude, LOL bye see you in Europe” (where I plan to move once I can get a job lined up).

As far as faith is concerned… being depressed sort of killed all positive aspects of faith for me. I thought God hated me. I thought I was sinning somehow, because why else would I be sad? I must have been making God angry, and that was why He was making me sad. And so on and so forth. My faith officially died during my sophomore year of college. I was exhausted, and I kept up appearances until my second attempt at getting my degree, at which point I threw all pretenses out the window. Knowing what I know now, I wonder that I was a believer as long as I was, because if God truly loved me, if he really really honestly wanted me to be fulfilled, why would He have put me through this?

Am I supposed to be held up as an example of what to do when suffering?

If so, what is the point? Honestly, it boggles my mind that people who suffer are expected to take their pain and turn it positive, like some kind of twisted Pain Olympics.

“Aaaand here comes Van Gogh around the bend, painting away! Oh, he is going so strongly! Oh wait, he shot himself. Well, at least we got some pretty pictures out of him, eh folks? Naturally, we’ll only like them after he’s been dead for a while, but hey! Ahead of his time, am I right?”

I know for a fact that being bitter is a bit like being a robot with internal rusting, where it eats and eats away at your infrastructure until you collapse/implode, but really? What if I want to be whole, and not in pain? What if my pain is preventing me from creating? What if I don’t want to do anything anymore, because everything hurts? Why do we prize pain over anything else? Is it a learning experience? Yes, of course. Should terrible things happen? No, but they do. Are you “not really” something because you don’t suffer from/for it? Absolutely not. Creative people, or people in general, exist and create in spite of and in active resistance against the pain they experience. Does pain make something more precious? Is that why we value it?

If anything, pain is a handicap.

Is that why we cheer so loudly when someone in pain produces something?

“Oh look at him, he ran 300 yards with a broken leg! Never mind the fact that because nobody fixed his leg and waited for him to get better that he’ll be crippled for life, he ran 300 yards on a broken leg! Amazing!”

I digress. Basically, faith, while nice and good and generally not an objectively terrible thing (honestly, it’s what you do with and about and because of your faith that makes it terrible), I don’t really see any value in it. I’m biased, of course. But what can I do?

The hardest thing about self-discovery is honestly other people. I’m a sheep, I’ll say it now. It is very difficult for me to have an original thought. I tend to agree with sensible people, so I must have some modicum of sensibleness, but I am as unoriginal as a stick figure comic on the Internet. (Can be original, but it has to try really, really hard.) I have heard many differing opinions about trans/NB-ness, from openly trans/NB people no less. I’ve heard trans men staunchly discredit NB people as “trying to be special” and “taking away from our legitimacy as a group.” I’ve had NB people completely not respond to me when I asked for reassurance in my gender identity (though come to think of it, they were probably the wrong person to ask).

Overall? It’s been confusing. The language we use to talk about ourselves has been  changing constantly as we do more research and learn more about the human body/brain and gender in and of itself. I really honestly don’t know what to think of myself nowadays. Am I a man? Am I a deluded female who has internalized so much misogyny that she doesn’t know what to do with her female aspects? Is my rejection of stereotypically “feminine” things a reaction to having “femininity” shoved down my throat because I was born with certain genitals? Am I honestly a trans man, or am I dishonestly trying to “steal” another identity because I want to “be different/cool”?

And so on.

On good days, I know I’m trans and male and I read my friends typing my chosen name, not my deadname, and that makes me feel…not content, but fulfilled.

On bad days, I type angry Twitter rants through my tears and try not to cry too loudly.

I suppose the impact of not coming out has been…well. I’m honestly not sure. It’s been easy in that I don’t really have to deal with being outright rejected and/or cursed up and down for who I am (yet), but at the same time, I get no support from my family (which I really doubt I’d get to begin with), so. I’ve been sort of stunted, in that regard. I always get surprised when people are nice to me and use my name. As far as emotions… I’m going to sound like a lame action hero, but I prefer not to have them if at all possible. I’m an avoidant sort of person, which means vulnerability gets paraded around as either a horrifically self-deprecating joke, or, if I can’t get away from facing my emotions, I get Too Real and make people uncomfortable.

This is very rambly, for which I apologize. I honestly don’t really have a hopeful message here. It can be hard, it can be easy. It all depends on who you are, where you are, and how you are, as well as who/where/how other people are with regards to your gender identity. I think of a Terry Pratchett quote, from The Wee Free Men, about trusting in yourself, and believing in your dreams, and following your star.

And if you do all that,

“…you’ll still be beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”

I suppose that’s the best advice I can give.

You have to put in the work.

I have to put in the work. We have to put in the work. And we will screw up. I’ve probably screwed up at least a dozen times (badly) telling this story of my being trans, and I will probably continue to screw up until I’m dead. But it’s the trying, the incessant reaching for and struggling towards a goal, or a series of goals, or just getting through tomorrow. That’s what’s important. If you’re going to do anything, you have to keep moving forward. (A shoutout to Meet the Robinson’s, which was a very underrated movie, in my opinion.)

Never stop reaching.

Gender Rainbow: A Call For Stories

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, torbakhopper.

By Shade Ardent.

Trans. Non-Binary. Gender Non-Conforming.

Until recently we have existed on the edges of society. Often estranged from family and community, or living a hidden life for our own safety. We walk the paths hidden from society too often. When we come out, we are frequently met with derision and physical danger. With the recent legislation and now the current National Geographic issue discussing trans issues, our existence and challenges have come to the forefront of society’s dialogue. This awareness has brought new acceptance but also new challenges for our community.

Homeschooling can bring particular challenges with being trans, non-binary, or gender-nonconforming. The closed-off lifestyle filled with strict gender roles and fundamentalist teachings is largely unsafe for us. When there is no way out, what do we do? How do we survive?

Are you a trans, non-binary, or gender non-conforming homeschooler or homeschool alum?

Homeschoolers Anonymous would love to hear your story.

Here are some story prompts:

Did you know you were trans/non-binary while being homeschooled?

How did you find out?

If you came out, how was it received?

Did you find support in your community?

Did you find out after you were homeschooled?

How did this affect your self-image?

What has been the hardest or easiest thing about self-discovery?

How did this impact your faith, or lack of it? Did you have to hide yourself for safety, and if so, what means did you use to hide? How did that affect you emotionally?

We are going to begin posting stories on January 16th, and continue throughout the month.

If you are interested in participating in this series, please email us at HA.EdTeam@gmail.com.

We take privacy seriously and will happily make your submission anonymous at your request.

Policy: We accept autobiographical stories with a minimum age of 13. Stories belong to the people they happened to.

I Grew Into A Culture Warrior: Lauren Wood’s Story

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CC image courtesy of Flickr, Grufnik.

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Lauren Woods” is a pseudonym.

When I saw the call for stories about homeschool families and politics, I immediately thought of the article “I Lost My Dad to Fox News.” As a person who likes to stay politically informed as a result of my upbringing, I don’t often trust Salon, but that article echoed many of my feelings towards my own father.

Before I can continue, it’s helpful to understand that, as a kid, I had a lot of anxiety, which follows me to this day. While I attribute some of my anxiety to my deep-seated fears about the wooden rod with which my parents spanked us, I’m not a psychologist and can’t say for sure if that was the cause. I did attend a small, fundamentalist high school because my mom recognized that she couldn’t teach things like chemistry and algebra, but my parents still held many of the homeschooling circle’s beliefs, such as courtship.

The first time I can remember an awareness of politics in my family was the pro-life march that our Southern Baptist church organized every October.

Perhaps it was called the Mile for Life, but I believe my first appearance was as a seven-year- old.

Basically, we formed a long line down the main street in my hometown with signs with slogans like ABORTION KILLS CHILDREN, ABORTION KILLS WOMEN, and I can’t recall the others. It scared me deeply to think that thousands of people in my own hometown were killing babies. I didn’t know about sex until at least nine or ten, and considering that there was no abortion clinic in my county (and I believe there’s only one in my state), this fostered a deep paranoia that millions of babies were being killed all around me for some inexplicable reason. I also didn’t understand why women were supposedly dying too. So even though I didn’t want to go, I was very scared about all this death, and I did hope that maybe my sign might convince someone not to kill a woman or child. Refusing to attend the Mile for Life would have absolutely warranted a spanking, because defiance was the quickest way to the rod.

My dad often listened to Rush Limbaugh in the car, and watched the usual cast of FOX and co. When the Gore/Bush election happened, I heard a lot about a conspiracy called global warming, and how Gore would destroy America. Again, I was terrified. I didn’t want my whole country to be devastated. The nail-biting voter counts in Florida were all I heard about, and I sat on the edge of my seat hearing about it, petrified that a single vote would destroy the nation.

A few years later, I also learned that a few states were allowing men to marry men, and women to marry women. I didn’t have the vocabulary for the word “lesbian” or “bisexual”, but I did hear about homosexuals, and my only exposure to that “lifestyle” was from the pulpit of First Baptist. My pastor taught that homosexuals hated God, the nuclear family, and America.

I had no idea why, and I didn’t consider myself “homosexual” because I was not an adult, I didn’t hate God, and I didn’t America.

The thought that I was gay never crossed my mind. Rush Limbaugh said that homosexuals would lead to America’s destruction just like the fall of Rome, as Rush Limbaugh said, and it scared me. Slowly, I began to realize in middle school that it was not in fact acceptable for me to want to hold a girl’s hand or kiss her.

While homeschooled, I learned that evolution and global warming were liberal conspiracies. I learned to fear liberals and how they wanted to destroy my family.

I learned that even though racism didn’t exist, except possibly reverse racism, I was probably not ever supposed to date a black man.

I spent a long time on message boards (probably due to my lack of interaction with other kids) arguing for conservative politics so that they wouldn’t become liberal leaders and run the country into the ground, similarly to how many former fundies express a need to witness to everyone so that they don’t go to Hell. In some areas, that wasn’t too difficult due to the amount of sheer racism and misogyny on the internet. It was always nice to meet other people who agreed that reverse racism was definitely a huge issue and feminists were evil.

Like many homeschool children, I repeatedly heard the phrase “Honor your father and mother, and your days will be long.” They often told me that if I dishonored them with disagreement, I would not have a happy life, and they tell me that to this day. My father made it clear that he was God’s representative to us on earth, and as such, it was his job to let us know right and wrong.

Throughout high school, although I was not homeschooled then, I quashed any budding “liberal” ideas. This included any acceptance of my “homosexuality”, a word I have come to hate. My father’s bookshelf was peppered with Dr. Dobson’s and Charles Colson’s latest, and I read all of it at his suggestion. Both have a lot to say on political issues, and I knew that since my father agreed, I would too. In an effort to change myself so that I might not accidentally end up an atheist at a pride parade, I watched straight or male-male sex scenes in the hopes that I could rewire my brain to associate men with pleasurable feelings. It never worked.

We ate dinner together every night, a blessing and a curse. While my father didn’t rail about politics on a nightly basis, he did bring it up often, complaining about how an anti-American Muslim was now president of the United States. We saw D’nesh D’souza’s conservative propaganda films about how Obama wanted to let immigrants take over this fine nation.

It was a heartbreaking thing to finally realize in college that I could like women, just like those Fat, Ugly Man-Hating Feminist Lesbians who were all going to hell.

I’m not sure why their appearance mattered, but it was usually included in a criticism of lesbians.

I still struggle with my weight, even though I am naturally tall and skinny, out of fear that I might resemble the caricature my parents despise.

They found out a year and a half ago that I am gay, in my senior year of college, my father threatened to pull me out of university. He only didn’t because my major is very uncommon and can’t be found at any more conservative schools. I attend a Southern Baptist university, now in graduate school, although it’s a moderate one that doesn’t care (too much) that I have a girlfriend. My parents now consider it an evil, liberal institution for not somehow stopping me, and now say they don’t care whether my little sister attends a Christian university or not, “because it didn’t help Lauren.” In political discussions, they are often interested in my brother’s thoughts, because they consider him “on the same page” while I am “rebellious”.

My parents also expressed great paranoia throughout my life about what they were certain I told my friends about them. When my father found out I was gay, he said, “I know that you’ve told all your friends and teachers that I’m a close-minded bigot.” I didn’t think I had, but he shook my confidence, so I called my best friend asked if I’d ever spoken disrespectfully of my parents. “No,” he said. “You’ve only ever spoken highly of them.”

Again, defiance is the number one way to get on the wrong side of my parents, and they tell me that my identification as a Democrat/liberal has dishonored them.

On their anniversary, my father tweeted, “25 years together—THIS is ‘love wins’.” He also tweets things such as a girl with a shirt saying, “I’m not going to let Muslims rape me to prove how tolerant I am.” My roommate has encouraged me not to look at his Twitter anymore so that I don’t get outraged; my father tells me he doesn’t have Facebook because he is afraid he will get in too many political debates. I said, “But you don’t have any Democrat friends, do you?” He replied, “Oh yeah, you’re right.”

I can tell for sure that my mother believes I am simply rebellious and want to be a Democrat because I resent my strict upbringing. I don’t think she will ever be able to get over from the fact that a liberal lesbian could have come out of her home—ironic because I am the only one of my three siblings that attends church regularly. My father sees me with a few more dimensions, I think, because he still often tries to engage in political discussion with me, but still holds that anyone with my political views is either willfully defiant or simply ignorant. My sister tells me that my parents wish I wasn’t “so political,” but really, I feel like my upbringing has forced me to stay aware so that I can back up every belief.

The last time I visited home, he asked what news sites I read. He downloaded The Atlantic app at my suggestion, because it seems to be a fairly moderate source, much more moderate than his usual outlets. It’s the biggest accomplishment I’ve made towards nudging him away from the Matt Walsh types that tell him I hate God, I hate men, I am stupid.

I laughed at hearing how my parents think I am too political, because they raised me to be so involved in current events.

Except as a kid, I was raised to be a Culture Warrior for the Religious Right. Of course I am still politically active, because I am still defending myself against what I believe to be dangerous ideology. It’s just that it’s theirs.

How the Daughter of a Focus on the Family Executive Came Out as Gay

HA Editorial Team6 Comments

Editorial note: Amber Cantorna’s story is reprinted with permission. It was originally published as a Facebook note on December 26, 2015. 

I was 27 when I had finally mustered every last bit of courage to have “the talk” with my family. I had been pondering, planning and praying for months. My heart weighed heavy and anxiety took my mind down every possible outcome. I knew, as the daughter of a Focus on the Family executive, the results of my truth could be devastating. But I had reached the point where living a lie was worse than whatever lay on the other side of truth. After much counsel, preparation and prayer, I felt the time had come to tell my truth. So on April 14th, 2012 I invited both my parents and brother over and we all took a seat in the living room of my split-level apartment. I told them the journey I had been on over the past several years and then, spoke the 3 short words that would forever alter my future…

* * * * *

Though I was born in Kalispell, Montana, by my third birthday we had moved to Glendora, California where my dad had accepted a job offer at Focus on the Family. When the company then relocated to Colorado Springs in 1991, my family did as well and that is the town where I grew up.

With the values and teachings of Dr. Dobson at the core of our family’s foundation, my parents decided to home-school both my brother and I from start to finish. They made daily devotions and cultivating a relationship with God a priority from a very young age. With programs like AWANA, we memorized Scripture frequently both in the program and as a family. A typical girl, I grew up playing with American Girl dolls and having frequent tea parties. I believed that my knight in shining armor would come for me, if only I would wait for him. At my thirteenth birthday, I even had a “Purity Ceremony” in which I signed a vow to stay chaste until marriage and was given a ring that was to be worn on my finger until it was someday replaced by a wedding band. I had been taught all these grandiose ideas of what love and traditional marriage were supposed to look like and innocently embraced them all as truths.

My mom came from a musical family, so (almost from the womb) she trained us as well, investing a lot of time into fostering our musical talents. We frequently sang at retirement homes and for Christian schools; we did full concerts at smaller churches and were always ready to perform for visiting family and guests. I was very blessed to be given 13 years of classical piano training as well. By the time I was 14, I was touring Europe with a youth choir and soon after, with the Young Continentals. Performing was a huge part of my life, and I thrived on it. As a very high-achieving perfectionist, I constantly put pressure on myself to rise to the top.

However, not all of that pressure came from within. As I moved more into my teen years, I began to feel the outside pressure of upholding my family’s reputation as well. As the daughter of a man who held a high profile position at Focus and whose work was known and loved around the world, being his daughter caused me to feel the weight of maintaining the appearance of that “perfect Focus family.” Friends would often comment to me how lucky I was, but behind the mask of perfection, I found myself struggling with depression and anxiety coupled with a need to keep all those struggles hidden behind a facade.

By the time I reached my early 20s, I still had never dated a guy. I admit at times I thought maybe there was something wrong with me, but mostly I just believed what I had been taught: if you prepared yourself spiritually and wait sexually, the right man will come along at the right time. The fact that I might be gay really never crossed my radar. I truly believed that God was just shielding me from the heartache of high school romances like the ones my friends were having, and that somehow the first man I would meet and seriously date would just magically be “the one.”

But at the age of 23, things in my life took a drastic turn when I suddenly found myself falling in love with my roommate…who was a woman. What started as a simple friendship, over time morphed into what was clearly becoming more than friends. I was so aghast the first time we kissed, I wasn’t even sure what was happening. My head was spinning, in more ways than one as I tried to figure out this mysterious attraction. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that experience ended up being the beginning of a deeper wrestling, the beginning of searching and eventually, the beginning of coming out.

I knew I couldn’t just sweep this “problem” under the rug, but I was terrified. I was terrified that in studying and digging deeper, I might find what I had been taught all my life to be true: God disapproved of homosexuality and, therefore, He disapproved of me. Focus on the Family teaches that marriage is strictly between one man and one woman and I was equally as terrified that in digging deeper I might find that belief to be false. Because if God did indeed make me this way, I would become part of a minority that is stigmatized, especially in Christian circles, and that too would be life-altering. So either way, my life would never be the same.

But, as I sat one night with my journal in hand, heartbroken over the loss of my first love and all together confused as to how and why it all happened to begin with, I gathered my courage and told God I was ready to start walking the difficult road ahead. I prayed, studied and researched for months allowing everything I had believed up to that point to be re-examined. I talked to people on similar journeys and, in doing so, found those who were both completely in love with their same-sex spouse and also completely in love with God, without any conflict between the two. That was when I began to realize that there didn’t have to be a dichotomy between my faith and sexuality, as I had been led to believe. Finally, after a long and difficult climb, the Scriptures in question settled in my heart, I found the answers I needed and knew that in God’s eyes, I was not only accepted but also loved for exactly how He made me.

The odds were high, however, that my family would not feel the same. Anxiety, panic attacks and nightmares swelled as I approached the day where telling them my truth would disappoint and break the illusion of that “perfect Focus family”. As I mustered every ounce of strength I had on that chilly April day, I looked my family in the eyes and said those three small, but life-altering words, “I am gay.” With my exposed heart hanging in the air, I awaited their response. To my deep dismay, the only response that came out of my dad’s mouth was, “I have nothing to say to you right now,” and he walked out the door.

From that moment on, things went from bad to worse. In a follow up conversation we had at my parent’s house several weeks later, they compared me to murderers and pedophiles, told me I was selfish for doing this to the family without thinking about the impact it would have on them and asked me to turn in my keys to my childhood home. Over time, because of their unwavering belief in Focus on the Family’s teaching and interpretation of the Scriptures on this issue, I was quietly pushed aside and shunned from the family. Only in my worst nightmares were the consequences as drastic as what they proved to be in real life. I lost not only my immediate family, but also my relatives, my church, many of my friends, and essentially, even my hometown. Because of the toxicity I felt living in a city where it seemed my every move was being watched by some degrading eye, I ended up moving to Denver. Even though almost four years have passed, I still feel anxiety every time I drive to Colorado Springs. Unfortunately, though many of my loved ones claimed to have unconditional love, what I discovered is that their love actually came with strings attached.

My world felt as though it were spiraling out of control. I’d never felt so lost or alone in all my life. Consistent nightmares and self injury reared its ugly head in my life once again and for the first time ever, I truly could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. Suicide became a viable option in my mind.

Over the coming months, there were several key people who invested in me and added value to my life and in turn, rescued me from that dark place I was in. I don’t remember an exact turning point when I decided I wanted to live, but about 10 months after coming out, the tides had turned and I was sharing my life story at community hour at the Denver church I was attending. Though I didn’t know it at the time, that day was the day I met the woman who would one day become my wife.

I didn’t pay her much attention at first, but she noticed me from the start. After several months of intentional pursuit on her part, we started dating. We both quickly knew that each other was “the one” and about a year and a half after we met, we were married.

Amber and her wife, Clara on their wedding day.
Amber and her wife, Clara on their wedding day.

Somehow along the way as my relationship with her solidified, my relationship with my parents became even more bleak. When we got engaged, my parents realized this wasn’t just a phase that would pass and the gavel came down. We cut all ties.

Not having any family at my wedding was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to go through, and yet, it was still the best day of my life. In front of the people who stood by me when it mattered the most, I got to consecrate my love to my wife in a sacred covenant before God. In that moment, all the labels washed away and I was able to be fully myself, completely in love with my wife and also completely in love with God. It was the perfect day.

We’ve been married a year and a half now and our journey continues forward. There are still bumps in the road and hard days where I miss my family. The truth is, I still cherish my family values just as much today as I did growing up, but I’ve just had to learn to re-focus my family. I truly have so much to be grateful for. God has given me beauty for ashes and is continuing to be true to His promise and make all things new and beautiful in His time.

In their free time, Amber and her wife, Clara enjoy traveling as well as spending time in the Rocky Mountains with their two furry babies.
In their free time, Amber and her wife, Clara enjoy traveling as well as spending time in the Rocky Mountains with their two furry babies.

By Amber Cantorna
Speaker/Writer
Beyond: Renew Your Faith, Restore Your Hope, Reclaim Your Love

To learn more about Amber and follow what she’s doing or to book her for an upcoming speaking event, please visit her website at AmberCantorna.com and “Like” her on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Beyond.AmberCantorna.

Amber now speaks and writes, sharing her story to help bridge the gap between LGBT and faith communities.
Amber now speaks and writes, sharing her story to help bridge the gap between LGBT and faith communities.

Family was my Everything: Alida’s Story, Conclusion

HA Editorial Team2 Comments

HA note: The author’s name has been changed to ensure anonymity. “Alida” is a pseudonym.

*****

In this series: Part One | Conclusion

*****

Sometime during that first semester away, one of my Facebook friends shared an article from Homeschoolers Anonymous. I’d heard the name Cynthia Jeub before in the speech-and-debate social circle, so I clicked.

I read a lot of things on HA. It was a really empowering experience. Some of it made me thankful that my family wasn’t as extreme as those in the stories I read. Most of it made me furious, especially the stories with strong themes related to courtship, purity, and financial independence, all of which are important parts of my personal journey.

I started doing my own research.

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t trading one set of evils for another. The first time I had heard about HA, it was by overhearing a conversation a few years ago between another homeschool mom and my own. They were talking about some kind of online forum founded by angry former homeschoolers who had been ‘seduced by the lies of the world’ during their time at secular college. The people behind HA, they said, wanted to bring down homeschooling and turn our young people against their parents. I was told never to visit the site.

I’m a communication major, an editor for my university’s newspaper. A major theme in our department is the importance of a journalist’s role in truthfully telling a stranger’s story. The journalist must set aside their own thoughts and opinions, focusing on what happened in their subject’s life. The journalist must truly believe in the concept that every person’s story is inherently valuable and worth telling. These ideas really resonated with me. I focused on learning to listen to someone else’s narrative. Developing a more generous, more open-hearted attitude helped me expand my ability to love people.

As I learned more and more about the broken systems and frameworks of the culture I had been raised in, I started to feel more and more at ease in society.

The strangeness of being in a different world wasn’t as bad once I learned that my little corner was the strange one after all. I learned about feminism, race relations, and LGBTQ issues in American culture. I decided to educate myself on American subcultures I had previously been shielded from.

Learning about others allowed me to learn about myself.

Discovering who I am helped push me a little closer to fearlessness in many ways.

Learning the truth about my sexuality was a big turning point for me. For a long time, I had suspected that either the entire rest of the world was lying about sex being so exciting and being the first thing on their minds or that there was something very wrong with me. I had always assumed that my lack of sexual attraction to people was some kind of unfortunate result of the way I was raised, that maybe after trying for so many years to not think about sex (because that’s “wrong”), I had somehow gotten really good at doing so and lost the ability to function normally. But as I got to know myself more, I came to be at peace with the fact that I just have a different sexual orientation. I’m Asexual. (check out http://www.asexuality.org/home/?q=overview.html to learn more).

As I struggled to understand more and more about the details of myself and the people I was meeting, I tried to decide if it was worth coming out to my family. I knew what they would say. All my life, I had been told that no other sexual orientations existed aside from being straight. Everyone who “said they were gay” was just confused and “lost in the ways of this world.” So I said nothing.

The research hours I was putting in toward learning about everything from religious cults to feminism to minority relations and beyond was all starting to take shape. My views on social issues shifted, and I found myself re-considering the anti-LGBT systems I had been taught to believe. I’m now pro-marriage equality. How had I believed for so long that it was OK to legislate the behavior of our entire country’s population based on the religious beliefs of one sub-group? I channeled all the Libertarian arguments my speech-and-debate friends had repeated over and over and decided to really follow up on my belief that everyone should have the right to pursue happiness on their own terms as long as it doesn’t harm others.

By second semester, I had started dating someone, and after a while, we discussed that we were both interested in forming a longer-term relationship. So I told him about my sexuality. For me, deep emotional and intellectual intimacy was not inherently linked to sex, I said. I wanted to make sure that before we made a bigger commitment, he knew I didn’t want to have sex with him, and my desires probably wouldn’t change. He told me that sex was really important to him in a relationship, and he just couldn’t see anything long-term working out without it. It hurt, but I guess I knew what I was in for. We decided to stay friends. As time has gone on, our friendship has somehow managed to persist; I even slept over at his house once when I was having roommate trouble. We are affectionate and still kiss, but my feelings toward him are platonic now. And we still never have sex.

My dad called and said he was worried about my moral conduct. Through my brother, he had found out about the time I slept over at the guy’s house. He demanded to know if I had had sex, and I told him the truth. No, no sex was had. To myself, I wondered for the first time — was it really any of his business? He kept pressing me for answers, so I came out to him and did my best to explain asexuality as I sobbed on FaceTime. I don’t think it was fair that I wasn’t able to have this conversation with my family in person, in my own time, and on my own terms.

The academic year ended, and for athletic reasons, I spent most of the summer away from home. I wasn’t near my family when Marriage Equality became legal on June 26. I was so happy, but knew it was important to pick my battles, so I didn’t post anything on Facebook about my support for the ruling. I hardly even commented on my friends’ posts.

All I wanted to do was have a peaceful relationship with my family.

But they knew.

By the time I came home with just under three weeks of the summer left, one of my siblings had already told me that I “didn’t belong in this family anymore.”

It hurt so much, especially after having sacrificed what felt like everything, over and over, in the name of family.

I didn’t know what to do. I noticed that living at home was different than it had been. Early on after my arrival, we had a confrontation about our now-differing political opinions. Even though the confrontation sucked, I was glad we had clearly articulated our differences and could move on. But we couldn’t move on, apparently.

My mom found ways to make so many daily interactions and normal tasks into opportunities to remind me how wrong my opinions were. I felt so trapped, like I couldn’t take a step in any direction without setting her off. Within the week, my parents and I got into yelling matches that covered everything from suicide rates in LGBT kids (who are up to 400% more likely to attempt taking their own lives as straight kids), to the Facebook incident from the year before.

I remember so clearly the moment one of those nights when my mom told me that I didn’t have a right to privacy.

I hate the way I screamed back at them; I hate the way I had absolutely no control over my response to the situation. I felt like a separate person. I was out of control. Something about being cornered, not being accepted, being talked down to over and over had triggered intense anger problems I thought I had gotten over years ago. “You need professional help,” they told me. They wanted to take me to see a pastor for counselling.

I immediately said no to that. I was open to getting help from a professional psychologist for my anger, but there was no way I wanted to sit down with someone who would speak with me from only a religious perspective, trying to ‘correct’ the fact that I had a different political opinion than them. We compromised and found a psychologist who was a Christian but also had a formal education in mental health, etc. Talking with her was really good for me.

We talked more about my anger and sadness. She didn’t tell me that I was evil or give my any of the fear-mongering rhetoric I somehow expected.

She listened to what I was feeling and affirmed that I wasn’t crazy for thinking things on my own.

She said it was ok that I was mad when my mom said I didn’t have a right to privacy. She said I was correct in having switched my Facebook password last year. She said it was ok that I have my own opinions, and while it was nice that I was still was on board with Christianity as a whole, my family still would have no right to make me feel like shit if I wasn’t. It felt so good to have someone say that I’m not crazy or a bad person for doing and saying and believing and acting the way I choose to.

And that’s where I’m at now. With one year of school left, I’m doing my best to figure out how to become financially stable as quickly as possible so I can complete my transition to adulthood by living on my own after graduation. I still believe that my family is the most important thing in my life, and I want to find a way to live at peace with them. But I think all this stuff I have to experience is a good thing. I’m ok with it.

Purity Culture and My Sexuality

HA Editorial Team4 Comments

HA note: The following is reprinted with permission from Cynthia Jeub’s blog CynthiaJeub.com. It was originally published on April 17, 2015. 

“I know that it’s a secret,
And that I gotta keep it,
But I want the lights on
Yeah, I want the lights on
And I don’t want to run away anymore
Leave the lights on, leave the lights on, leave the lights on
What would they say, what would they do?
Would it be trouble if they knew?” –Meiko

I had my heart broken twice before I realized I’d been in love. That might sound like an exaggeration or melodrama, but it’s actually possible thanks to the wonders of purity culture.

When I was a teenager, I read and re-read books like Sarah Mally’s Before You Meet Prince Charming, Eric and Leslie Ludy’s When God Writes Your Love Story, and Debi Pearl’s Preparing to be a Help Meet.

They kept me strong in my dedication to never think about sex, or to think about members of the opposite sex. I had my obsessions and celebrity crushes, but if the image of seeing someone naked ever entered my mind, I’d fight it out with quoting the Bible.

I knew I would only ever give my heart to one person – the man I would marry. He must show interest in me; women don’t initiate. The concept of mutual consent, mutual interest, was never introduced. If he didn’t reciprocate my feelings, it was a meaningless feeling, and feelings were worthless. I needed to control my very thoughts, so I could give my whole heart to my husband, along with my first kiss. Just toeing the line of saving sex for marriage was too low a standard for me.

Blame doesn’t fall on any one person for how I controlled my thoughts. It was a personal choice, something that was very important to me. The people around me reinforced the notion that I was doing the right thing. Some people were better at the game of self-thought-policing than I was, and they made me feel like I could never be good enough. Some people saw me as unapproachable because I was so sincere. Every failure looked like rebellion and felt like despair.

Surely I didn’t love my best friend when I started college. He didn’t love me, so I told myself to “guard my heart” and push away all emotions of attachment. At the same time, our late-night conversations kept me going through my darkest depression and most intense stress. I finally told him that I needed space to figure out why the sight of his name gave me such indecipherable pain.

It would take me months to unlearn what purity culture had taught me to do: conceal all desire, even from yourself.

So it was that I fell in love with a man, and didn’t realize what had happened until afterward. I just assumed I was straight because I was attracted to men. It never occurred to me that I might make the same mistake twice, equally blinded to my desires toward a girl.

It was similar – I had a crush on her, but didn’t know it. She once kissed another girl in front of me, and I desperately wanted to kiss her. Even that feeling was not enough to make me think I wasn’t totally straight. I figured I was just curious, having never been kissed. Giving gifts is something I rarely do and often feels like an obligatory chore, but I gave her thoughtful things that I knew she’d like.

When we had a fight that ended our friendship, I was devastated. Another friend asked if I’d been in love with her. I said no, of course I wasn’t.

A few months later I got an email, and was instantly interested – this person, who hadn’t revealed their gender or identity, matched me intellectually. I assumed the sender was male, and entertained thoughts of meeting, and we exchanged lengthy emails.

The person who wrote these intelligent, complex, and beautiful emails revealed that she was a girl, and I realized it made no difference to me.

I started asking my friends questions – you don’t see both the male and female body as equally attractive? I’d assumed that everyone appreciated the aesthetic differences between the genders.

In the world I grew up in, there were two kinds of people: straight, and broken. Nobody was born gay, the church and chapel services insisted. The idea of other identities on a spectrum was far outside our reality. The idea of romantic and sexual relationships other than marriage was blanketly labeled as “sin.”

Of course I’d think I was straight. If I could close off my feelings for men, I could certainly close off my feelings for women. It was only after I started to learn what attraction felt like, that I knew I liked girls. I always had liked girls. I just didn’t know that my experience was any different from anyone else’s, because we never talked about our feelings. We never defined our terms.

Humans are beautiful to me – whether they’re male, female, or non-binary.

You could call me sapiosexual, in that I love people for their intelligence, and my level of attraction depends on how smart and interesting the other person is. Many sapiosexuals, though, don’t find the human body sexually attractive, and I do. It’s also accurate to call me pansexual, because I’m open to dating non-binary or trans people, in addition to the binary genders. For me, the title I’ve chosen is bisexual.

I’m bisexual. There, I’ve come out, now you know.