I wonder what would have happened if I had just responded with, “no”.

Would that have satisfied me? Or Justin? Would my own self-protection, my gatekeeping over the little privacy I had left as a trans pastors’ kid in a small denomination, been worth suppressing another round of rage?  

As I began seminary, I was barely beginning to accept that I was worthy of such protection and privacy. I definitely did not know this in college. In my conservative Christian college, my sexuality and later my gender problematized me, endangered me, or rendered me into a fetish. My first kiss, my first drink, and my first sexual experience, which all took place by the time I finished freshman year and turned 18, were the results of others’ predation, experimentation, or both. Coming out as trans at the age of 19 did bring me some clarity and joy, but it also pushed me to the edges of my college community.

I was called into disciplinary hearings for using men’s restrooms. Parents of students wrote vicious comments on online articles I wrote for my college newspaper. One of my professors cornered me in the men’s restroom, yelling at me and using my old name while I hid in a stall. I was doing an independent study with him that semester. The next time we met to discuss my research, he told me that my presence in the restroom had triggered him, alluding to past sexual abuse. He did not seem to have considered what I might have been experiencing as I hid from him in a filthy stall.

Similar incidents followed me home. When I came out, my parental relationships ended both all at once and slowly. I could go on and on about each way this happened, but that would probably be boring since they’re all about one thing: grief. One aspect of the grief I experienced from coming out illuminates my discussion with Justin particularly well. From the time I came out as queer at 17 until the day he died, my dad would not look me in the eye. But he remembered to tell me both that I embarrassed him, and that I would always be his little girl. Which, of course, was confusing and enraging and hurtful.  

Justin contacted me about two months after my father died of a massive stroke. I was raw, angry, and so very sad. Of course, Justin would have pissed me off even if my father had not recently died.

His language revealed his inhuman understanding of people like me: we are crises. Our existence is near incomprehensible if not rendered into cisgender terms. We are the lost and the least, and as such it is fair for those who intend to save us to demand our anguish.

Like any trans person with a pulse, I reacted with entirely unveiled indignance.  

Yet I still helped him out. I didn’t just say no. I stayed up until midnight to write this asshole back, not only to correct his presumption, arrogance, and entitlement. I also offered him websites, books, and videos. I gave him his fucking analogy.  

I did this because I was still living in the space between being my father’s source of shame and being my father’s beloved little girl. How deeply has this affected my Christian faith and my scholarship? I don’t know, but even just over a year removed from this conversation I notice how much theological weight I placed in a trans narrative that distanced trans folks from the pain of dysphoria.

What was that about? Was it my way of making myself acceptable to a cis-het world? Of making myself acceptable to God? Can we not have our pain apart from cis-het people’s pathologizing? 

I think about this conversation with Justin often, especially about what it felt like to sit in that empty space between shamefulness and belovedness. And I think about how in recent months I have been praying to God not only that I’d find a way to get top surgery, but that God would ease my emotional and physical pain in the meantime. I’m glad to have journeyed with God in this way, but I still wonder what would have happened, how I would have felt, and what good it might have done my heart to simply tell Justin, “no.”