As I have grown as a person and learned to accept what I am, my
views on God and religion have changed.
My current view of God is that he is a loving God who, either by design
or by chance, has allowed people like myself to be made. I don’t know why he allows transgender people
to exist but who am I to think I could know the mind of God. I do have a couple of opinions about why we
exist (I will not be going into that with this post) but these are simply my
opinions as will be the most of the content in this post. Personally, I don’t think of God as either
male nor female and think that the fact that society genders God is ridiculous,
though, due to the limitations of the English language, I will refer to God in
this post by the gendered pronouns that are used the most currently.
When I was a child and first grasped the concept of God, I
actually had a view of him as a wrathful and vengeful God that you needed to do
everything in your power to not piss off.
I believe that this distorted view was because I was raised in a
Southern Baptist Church and anyone familiar with the Southern Baptists of 30
years ago, knows about their love of the hellfire and brimstone speech. Because of this, I got what I now feel is a
distorted view of him. Back then I
thought that if there was something wrong with you, in my case feeling like a
girl whilst in the body of a boy, then you must have done something to offend him
and because of this distorted view, I prayed for forgiveness constantly while
begging him to fix what was wrong with me.
Because of this I repeatedly rededicated my life to him, thinking that
if I dedicated my life to him in enough times, it would appease him and he
would finally fix me. It’s kind of sad
that it would take until my late 30s to realize that there wasn’t anything
wrong with me and the only reason I felt broken was of my own making.
As a teen, I started to become angry at God due to the lack of an
answers to my prayers and I started to think that God was more of a dark God
who liked to play cruel jokes on us lowly humans for his own amusement. As puberty progressed, my anger only got
worse and in my later teen years, I began to curse him and started to turn
towards other religions like Wicca in hopes that I could find something to fix
the perceived wrong by God against me.
Of course none of those religions lead to any answers or resolutions to
my problem so, once again, I moved on, believing religion to be a lie and turning
away from it all together. This period
of time didn’t last very long because as much as I tried to convince myself
that there was nothing to believe in, I came to realize that I needed to
believe that there was some reason for me to be the way I was and so, I turned
back to God, desperate for answers.
When I was in my early 20s I thought that I might have finally
gotten an answer to my prayers about being fixed. It was at this time, not long after I had
rebuilt my walls in a continuing effort to try and keep the woman inside locked
away, that I met the woman that would become the love of my life and,
eventually, my spouse. I thought then,
and still do to this day, that she was a Godsend because when we started to
date, the internal struggle that I had dealt with my whole life up till that
point seemed to melt away. I knew that
God had allowed us to meet because she was the one that I was supposed to be
with. It was as if the whole reason
behind my struggles with dysphoria was so that I would know she was the one
once I got to know her. Life was, for a
period of time, good and I didn’t have to deal with my dysphoria all too much,
though as time went on and our relationship progressed, issues did creep up
from time to time but I was easily able to hold them at bay. When she accepted my proposal for marriage,
the dysphoria was once again squashed to almost nothingness, and I was thanking
God for bringing her into my life daily.
When we were finally married, I thought that I had been cured
finally. I had been bonded to my better
half, the person who had become my sun and my rock. Every day was a blessing from the Lord and I
finally dropped my walls which proved to be a mistake.
As depression started to settle in with my dysphoria following not
far behind, I once again started to question God and wonder what I had done
wrong. Eventually things reached a point
to where I was once again having suicidal thoughts and I broke down, seeking
help for the depression that was beginning to consume me. At first, I sought the help of one of the
leaders at the church that I was going to at the time (this was around the time
I stopped viewing God as a wrathful and vengeful deity that would punish his
followers for every little thing and started to view him as a more loving and
caring God) and that helped a little but, due to things beyond my control, the counseling
that I had been receiving ended and I tried once again to put my walls back in
place. By this time, I had told my
spouse about my dysphoria and she took it in stride at the time because it
looked like it wouldn’t become a major issue that would lead me to where I am
now. While I was able to get my walls
back in place to a degree, the depression and suicidal thoughts I was suffering
from continued and I ended up seeking professional help. At that time, I was diagnosed to depression
and put on medication which helped a lot but due to the struggles I had been
facing, my anger at God had returned and would not be resolved until I finally
decided to seek help for my dysphoria, which was once again working its way to
becoming an issue in my life.
Once I was determined to speak with my psychiatrist about getting
help for my dysphoria, a divide sprung up between my spouse and I, that was
partially my fault because I was seriously beginning to talk like transition
might be my only path forward even though I was determined to avoid it if at
all possible. As I started talking with
my therapist, the same one I see to this day, I found that it was elating to
finally have someone to talk to about what I had been dealing with in my
life. We started trying little things
that I could do in my life to indulge the woman inside and hopefully calm that
part of myself down so that I could live a relatively normal life as the man
that I was so desperately trying to be in an effort to hopefully save my
marriage to the one person that means the most to me. I knew that God had led me to this therapist
and knew that because of that, I would finally get the resolution I
needed. I also started going to a local
support group and developed a few friendships there, one of which has helped
me, in addition to my therapist, a lot in dealing with the issues that have
sprung up with my journey of self-discovery.
I didn’t know at the time what form that resolution would take and I
have since learned that it wasn’t the kind of resolution that I thought it would
be.
With time, though, it became apparent that the gap between my
spouse and I was growing ever wider and so I doubled down on my efforts to
minimize the changes I would have to make in my life as an effort to save my
quickly falling apart marriage. Because
of my pushback against the progression, my stubbornness about only doing the bare
minimum, that was occurring in my life both, my depression and dysphoria flared
up at the same time leading to me attempting to take my life again. When I finally broke down and told my
therapist about my suicide attempt, we started to have a discussion about me starting Hormone
Replacement Therapy, after she made sure that I wasn’t still suicidal, because
of how much it helps people suffering from gender dysphoria. She informed me of the risks and side effects involved with HRT and wrote me a letter of recommendation to a local
endocrinologist for me to consult about starting HRT.
While all of this was going on, I turned to my friend in the support
group, the one that helped me with other issues before, to inquire about the
church that she went to because I was starting to feel that I really needed to
start getting closer to God again and I had been out of the church for several
years by that point.
It has been this church that has really shaped my current views on
God, reinforcing the loving and caring aspect of him and moving me further away
from my Southern Baptist roots. Through
this church, I have come to realize that, while I don’t know exactly why he
made me the way that he did, he is not punishing me for some wrong that I may
have committed. He made me in love and
has a plan for my future, whatever that might be, just as he led my spouse and
I to one another. While I may have a
long and hard road ahead of me as I try to discover exactly who and what I am exactly,
as well as what paths I will eventually have to walk, he is there, watching
over me because he loves me. As I have
learned to stop hating myself for what I am and began to love myself instead,
he has shown me that he is still there, ready to guide my way should I become
lost again. I do not know what his plan
for me as a transgender person is exactly, nor do I know how my increasingly
failing marriage plays into that plan, but I will put my faith in him that
things will all work out in the way that they are meant to. I hope that part of
that as a healing of my marriage because the blows that have been struck
against it have been devastating, just like I hope that a part of it is
understanding and acceptance from my family, but most importantly, I hope that
through me his love shines through for at least one kid who suffers as have to see. Maybe that will help lower the
numbers of the suicide epidemic among transgender kids and youth as well as
opening the eyes of their parents to the reality that their children have
legitimate feelings in regards to dysphoria. I also hope that,
it will give their children the strength to be open and honest about who they
are so that they don’t have to go through what I did. With God’s love all of this is possible.
- Arylin Michelle
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