Frying Pans From Heaven: When A Transgender Person Sends You An Email…

I often hear Christians say that it’s one thing to have these feelings — attraction to the same sex, gender dysphoria, etc. — but it’s a whole other thing to act on them. I understand that it might be difficult for a cisgender person to understand what it’s like to be disengaged from our own bodies, but compassion demands that we try to understand. Here, K’s words shed some light on what this feels like:

You have to understand, living the wrong gender isn’t a merely intellectual disappointment, it’s a total soul cancer. It’s physically painful. You are fundamentally estranged from yourself. Your body doesn’t make sense; you don’t feel your own feelings, but only notarized summaries of them from an intricate bureaucracy; the bent of your mind and thoughts is alien stuff that you can only really direct with outsize effort. When you do realize you’re not the gender everyone assigned to you at birth, it becomes a gnawing pain at every level of your being. Cartesian dualism of the body and the mind is the luxury of a cisgendered person. There are no neat divisions. Your body physically strains and aches with physical pain; your heart bears down on you with all the guilt and rage of living a constant lie at every level and atom of your material and spiritual being. Your spirit is shut up and beating itself to death against a cage that cuts it off from any contact with heaven.

K – Email dated 7/23/16

It’s important that when we love our transgender friends — and you may be surprised to find out who they are — that we balance our responses carefully. K tells the story of how she came out to a Christian friend, who then asked her why in the world she would want to identify with a “group so opposed to Christianity.” K then points out that 86% of the LGBT community grew up in a house of worship, most likely a church. She says:

Most of us still love Jesus. I still love Jesus. So that hurt like a motherfucker.

Christians, please don’t do this.

K – Email dated 7/23/16

On the next page, read about how Christianity chooses to ignore the transgender experience — and how we force milk down the throats of the lactose intolerant.