Mormons, queer people, and the weird reconciliation between the two

When I was in high school, coming to terms about who I was and what I was going to do directly coincided with when I stopped going to church. 

I came out as transgender on November 28th 2015 and stayed at home from church on November 29th. I didn’t feel safe, and I certainly didn’t feel religious.

I pretended to be asleep come 9AM, I told my parents I couldn’t find my dress shirts (technically true), and I faked a headache on multiple occasions. It took months, but eventually my parents got the message: I didn’t want to go to church anymore.

And, honestly, that was that. It felt inevitable; I and the church could not coexist in any healthy way, period. During missionary farewells I sat in the foyer in casual clothes and cried in the car afterwards. I started hormone replacement therapy. From that moment on, my body slowly got closer to who I really was.

Jump to today, and you’d think the biggest change would be something easy to spot; I look female now. But it has less to do with my body and more to do with the people who see it.

  

My gender is no longer avoidable for people from my old life, and most of those people are LDS. That’s a problem.

Throughout all of this, I relied on the support of my friends to get by day to day. The same friends who went to church on Sunday and gave 10% of their income to an organization that had a history of using that money to actively fight against my rights.

I watched from the sidelines as the church banned kids of same sex couples and doubled down on anti gay sentiments. I watched just yesterday as they yet again denounced my existence as a girl. In moments like these I can’t help but turn these friends, and wonder: how does your support for me and your faith coexist? How do you reconcile that? 

For a long time, it was easier to ignore that question. I lived in Utah County, and conformity was survival, natural even. I tried my absolute best to fit my entire personality into a box that adhered to Mormon standards. I didn’t ask questions I didn’t want the answers to.

But then, something changed: I started spending time in the city.

Suddenly, most of my friends weren’t LDS, and a lot of them never had been. I met my now girlfriend. I started seeing more equality stickers on the bumpers of cars and I kept getting invited to poetry slams. You get the idea.

I began hearing vastly different perspectives on the church, and none of them were flattering. My boss, a Mormon of 30 years, left the church around this time. Eventually, somebody mentioned the CES letter to me, and I Googled it. At that point I already didn’t consider myself religious, but learning about the ugly side of the church that I had been raised in for eighteen years was shocking. It was rape, plagiarism, and gag orders.

As the weeks became months and the months became a year, I saw my Mormon friends less and less. Only when I was with them did it begin to dawn on me how much I’ve changed. The reality is that we’re not compatible like we used to be, and it’s tearing me apart.

When I finally built up the courage to ask a few close friends how they reconciled their (genuine) support for me with the church they worshiped, it almost always came down to one word: ‘love’. Did they believe homosexuality was a sin? Yes. They had to. It was out of their hands.

And you know what? I can't just look the other way anymore. While I certainly believe there’s something to be said about love and tolerance, the actuality is that it isn’t enough. Every day when I walk downstairs in my parents house, I pass a framed copy of ‘Family — A Proclamation to the World’. A document published by the church in 1995 that explicitly rejects same sex marriage and denies the existence of transgender people. Every day.

I never wanted to by a cynic. I wanted to believe in love and tolerance. I wanted to believe we could co-exist. But every day I hear stories of LGBT youth killing themselves. Every day I think of my friends who are survivors. Utah’s teens are most likely to die from suicide than any other incident. And it’s not a mystery why. Love and tolerance isn’t enough. I wish it was.

A message to my Mormon friends and family:

I can’t fit in your box anymore. I’m sorry. 

I love you.