Jerseygirl, JESUS
When I asked K if it was okay to share some of her words with you, she agreed, and wrote a sort of open letter to Christians. Here are some excerpts that I found particularly moving:
For very obvious reason, trans people are in a better position to give support and advice to trans people than cisgender people are — at a very basic level, the desire to be a Good Liberal Ally gets in the way of having a real read on when we actually *need* advice and support. Half the cis friends I came out to offered condolences and sympathy at a moment when I was feeling most ecstatic and in joy over myself.
I’ve already been healed enough from walking with Jesus that I don’t give a damn, on some days I don’t remember what fear is, and I’m ready to jump right in and fight whatever crap culture and Christianity have to throw my way. What’s tripping me up, personally, is “conscience dysphoria,” relationship with a Christianity that’s trying to train me into being a privileged white person that is so fundamentally opposite to everything that I am and that my heart bleeds for.
But anyway, when we do hurt, and when we do come to you with hurt, for me at least the most important thing you can do is to offer a listening ear and a shoulder to cry on…When I have to engage with theological debate over how Christian I’m being and how stupid I’m being with my personal emotional management; when I have to engage with your savior complex instead of your open arms; even when I have to engage with good intentions but misunderstanding, I’m not feeling loved and supported and free, I’m feeling put on by a chore to do or a fight to finish, expending energy I don’t have on an external threat before I can go back to my room and heal up there, like always.
Being transgender more than anything is a frighteningly *lonely* experience.
What hurts and kills us — not just trans, but queer and black and disabled and everyone that society wants to forget — is invisibility. When I had realized my transgender to myself but not come out to my friends yet, it *physically hurt my body* to keep it a secret and pretend like I’m a man. Every single muscle, joint, and organ, like I had multiple sclerosis or something. Before that even happened, when I had an idle daydream once about having been born a girl, my entire being — my physical body, my mind, my spirit, my heart, every part of me — yearned so hard for that, that it was a physical struggle to even move my body enough to finish out the shift.
When you try to generalize or universalize our experience so it fits neatly into a Christianese model of gender according to how cis people imagine it, we don’t feel loved or accepted. We feel erased. We feel the weight of the message: “I love you, but only if I can trick myself into seeing you as a cis hetero white person.” “You’re not allowed into the spaces of *real* intimacy until you change yourself to fit my paradigm.” That kills us. That literally, physically kills us, with the number of transgender teens driven to suicide because they are not allowed to live their real selves in real intimacy and community.
K- Email dated 7/23/16
K has even more poignant things to share about what it means to be transgender. Read on to learn more.
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