by Millipede

Eventually, the church building materialized. At first, we had a larger group. Soon however, there was a falling out with a group which had comprised most of those from the Patriot group. Part of it was personality and some of it was viewpoint. Some wanted to the place to be a patriot type meeting house while some wanted it to be a church. This belied a rift that plays itself over again and again in this end of the spectrum.

On one hand there are what I would call the “political types”. This is simply for lack of a better term and is not indicative of a lack of Faith. People within this group were most often led into church via ideological means. Their religious views are part of a larger concert of views. I heard a pastor bemoan such people, saying that they simply added Christ onto a long chain of train cars of belief. One car might be their position on gun control, another states’ rights and so on. With the “religious question” answered they move on to continue to build the train. He stated that they needed to make Christ the locomotive, not merely regulate Him along a set of beliefs.

On the other hand you have those for whom Faith is the primary motivation. They often come from a strong Fundamentalist background. Not from in a distant childhood past either, but often having recently come from various conservative churches. for these folks, ideological issues are important, but they are subordinate to questions of faith.

At first both groups over lap in various organizations, but over time, they unwind. As one pastor said, there were the “beans and bullets” types and the “folks who wanted to have church”. Those outside the political spectrum might not notice. At face value, these two groups look identical. In fact they often proclaim identical or closely related viewpoints.

NOTE. This is a socio-cultural observation only, not a measure of sincerity or depth of belief. Both groups view themselves as being both committed Christians and as being sincerely dedicated to various ideological causes.
My husband and I along with our new circle of friends belonged to the “church goers”. In our view, a lot of patriot types liked the high ground that being a Christian presented, but were not really committed to the Faith. for a lot of them having church was really having a group of people sitting around discussing political issues. They had a “to each his own” when it came to theological views. We, on the other hand, were committed to pleasing God, in spirit and deed. If the Bible forbid something, we would abstain from it and would not hesitate to proclaim that truth even if it offended would be allies.

Soon, the church had a split with the more “political” group going off on its own to hold its own version of church. I saw people I considered my friends leave with that group. Even after the split, we remained on friendly terms, but we were not close. Our new circle, however was tight, both a result of personality and of viewpoint.
We enjoyed fellowship not only in church, but as friends. In the first couple of years, I enjoyed our time together. They were friendly people and we spent a lot of time together.

Our faith was a growing thing and with each new turn, we molded our lives around each new truth. My life had changed quite a bit. we went to church regularly and attended various conferences, often traveling hundreds of miles.
I made a great deal of personal changes. I had been dissatisfied with my job in the past and things came to a head when when we were getting heavily involved in our faith. when I told my husband that I was going to look for another job, he suggested that I stay home and we could start a family. When I replied that I was worried about our financial stability, he said that we should step out in faith. So instead of changing jobs, I simply put my two weeks notice in with plans to stay home. Not long after that a fortuitous event occurred that met our financial concerns, a sure sign of a blessing.

So I stayed at home and we tried, without success, to have children. This didn’t concern us. although we didn’t believe in birth control and were for having large and often home schooled families, no one was legalistic about it. It was between a husband and his wife about the number of children they should have. Also, if a woman abstained from having more children due to health concerns, no one looked down upon her. In this respect, I feel that our group was very balanced, there was no pressure or condemnation concerning the bearing of children. Even though I now take issue with other stances, I feel that we as a group had a healthy take on the issue. There was none of this “having children at any cost” or “maternal martyr” mindset. Indeed it was not beyond the pale, if the medical issue was grave enough, for a woman to have her tubes tied.

On the other hand, there were views that we adapted which proved harmful in the long run. They started with little baby steps at first which made it easier to swallow. Little things…

To be continued…

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Part 1

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It had been a year since my spouse had come out to me. It felt like it had been much longer. So much had changed and yet nothing had changed. We still hadn’t decided how Christianity tied in with our changing reality: I was leaning further and further away from the idea of God but my spouse still believed. We felt like there were no real answers anymore. Life was not as black and white as people wanted it to be. My spouse was talking more and more about transitioning and I felt like there was no one-size-fits-all in gender identity. Maybe my spouse would become comfortable living as a man and wouldn’t need to transition, but maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would transition to living as a female someday, but again, maybe he wouldn’t. The idea just wasn’t that scary to me anymore. My spouse was already living as such a feminine person as he had grown more comfortable with who he was, transition would just be a natural next step if it happened.

In fact the only fear that still clung to me was how this would affect our children, and that made me wonder if my spouse should try to put off transition until the kids were grown up. The faith and culture that I had been brought up in told me that children had to have parents of both genders to be happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. Wouldn’t our children resent us for having grown up with two female parents? How would society treat them? Would they always be the kids with the weird dad? Was it even possible to raise kids without a “manly influence?”

Despite my fears and doubts, I couldn’t deny that my spouse was happier than I had ever seen him. He was relaxed and involved. He was dressing more and more femininely at home, and the kids didn’t mind at all. They were starting to figure out that their daddy was a bit different than other daddies, but they were happy to have a peaceful parent who loved them and cared for them, talked with them and snuggled them and listened to them. It was as if a huge burden had been lifted off his shoulders, like he no longer had to spend the majority of his time struggling to constantly tread water and keep his head above the surface and stay alive. Instead, all of the energy that had been consumed in that struggle could be spent on parenting and living. The conversation about transition “someday” started to change into transition being a real option in the near future, and I couldn’t come up with a reason our kids should have to go back to having a depressed repressed parent who lived as a male and struggled to survive with the help of anti-depressants instead of a happy relaxed involved parent who lived as female. A guy as feminine as he was turning out to be was going to out of the ordinary anyway. Why was I questioning this at all? To please a god? Who had played this gender joke on us in the first place? A god I wasn’t even sure existed?

So, to combat my fear of my children growing up with gay parents, I once again turned to education. I started reading about non-traditional families and one of the stats that startled me was that over 50% of families today did not fit the traditional standard that I had been led to believe was the only healthy family. There were many children being raised by single moms or single dads. Often parents divorced and children spent time living with either parent at different times. Children today are being raised by grandparents, foster parents, and widowed parents. My kids certainly wouldn’t be the only ones with a “different” family. Studies showed that the child’s emotional well-being and healthiness had more to do with how they were respected and loved and cared for as individuals than the exact set-up of their families.

I began reading more and more about LGBTQ parents. I read the stats on how their kids did in school, and how they matured emotionally. I read books written by people who had grown up with gay or lesbian or transgendered parents, and listened to their perspectives. The stats were encouraging, and most of the hardships involved with growing up with LGBTQ parents seemed to come from the pressure from society to conform and the prejudice that created, not the parents themselves. In fact, the divorce that commonly took place after the revelation of sexuality or gender identity questions seemed to have more impact on the children than the sexuality or gender identity questions themselves. The parents and the kids seemed to have the normal range of personality traits and issues that any family would have. Why would our kids be any different? We didn’t hit them, we would accept them and love them whoever they were or whatever they wanted to be. Their emotional health and well being was a top priority for us, and would continue to be so. Did it really matter that their dad would have a unique story? Normally, if a parent had a medical condition that hampered their ability to be happy and productive, society would bless and encourage their seeking treatment. Why should my spouse’s condition be any different?

One of the things I had to consider was that if my spouse did end up completely transitioning to living as female, the medical treatments for gender dysphoria would mean an end to fertility and further genetic children. I had already come to the conclusion that I did not want as large a family as I had grown up in, but the idea of limiting children or being done was still relatively new to me. We now had four beautiful children, whom I loved dearly and who had kept me from getting a full night’s sleep for five years straight. I knew I needed a break and I did not want to become pregnant again in the near future. I also knew I wanted to have the time and energy to be there for each one of my children. But because I had spent most of my life believing that my main purpose in life was to produce children it was hard for me to imagine any other reality.

I kept thinking about it, determined to get to the bottom of my feelings and make sure that I really was OK with a future with fertility limitations. Slowly I started to see that I had value outside of my fertility. I asked myself if my spouse had any other medical condition, would I demand that he refuse treatment because it could affect his fertility? I also learned more about the range of options available for people who are undergoing treatment that may compromise fertility, including sperm banking. And I wondered if perhaps there could be a space in our family for adoption or fostering children someday, a dream which seemed so impossible back in our Quiverfull days of having a baby every 18 months.

As the idea of transition in the near future became more real, we talked at length about our children and our marriage. We asked ourselves if was divorce something that needed to happen? My spouse wanted to make sure I was really OK with him going ahead with gender transition. He insisted that he would understand completely even if we needed to part ways, and that he would continue to provide us financial support regardless. We talked about our children, and asked ourselves if they would they be better off if we separated? But divorce still didn’t make sense to me. I was happy with our relationship and thrilled with my spouse’s new involvement in our children’s lives. Even if for some reason we decided that our relationship wasn’t going to work out, I knew I would still want him involved with parenting our children. I was attracted to him now, and I couldn’t see that changing. He had been the first person to love me unconditionally, and had been there for me all along my journey of questioning and healing from my past. He was a caring, empathic, patient and passionate person, and I wanted to continue my life-story with him. And as I’d begun to unwrap my own sexuality for the first time, I was starting to feel that if we were to separate for some reason, or if my spouse were to die, I would be romantically interested in women anyway, so I had nothing to lose by staying together.

It was better for our kids for our family to stay intact,
and it was better for us,
even if that meant going through transition together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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Even though we had hoped that it would be enough for my spouse to simply be more authentic to his feminine self, it seemed that the idea of transition was coming up more and more. My spouse talked about how frustrating it was to have this battle raging in his head every single day, his brain telling him again and again that he was really a woman. He told me how the idea of becoming an old man terrified him. It was bad enough being trapped in the body of a young man, but to be old and helpless and cared for by people who would treat him as a guy was dreadful to him. Sometimes he cried, all of the bottled up fear from the years gone by pouring out along with fears of the future and living life day after day fighting this never ending battle.

When the talk of transition initially came up, my heart sank. Were we losing the battle? Was I wrong to have let the conversation continue this long? Should I have told him to be quiet and put his head down and fight it alone? I told my spouse again and again that he didn’t need to change anything, that he had me in his life, and I loved him exactly the way he was. Except that as time went on I realized that I was contradicting myself in that very statement. Transgender WAS exactly the way he was, and if I really loved him regardless, transition wasn’t going to change that.

Talk of transition was a natural progression of the ongoing discussion we’d been having. Right alongside the growing contentment and happiness, my spouse would have periods of days or weeks where he slipped back into despair. It was usually triggered by some conversation where we discussed the future and how we were going to continue to handle this question of gender.

The societal pressure was so intense, usually he would talk about what a horrible person he was to be “putting us through all this” and that surely he could figure out some way to make it through life as a man. And then he would get quiet and moody again, and go back to wearing the old polo shirts I now knew he hated. It scared me seeing him like that, I knew he was trying to spare us from the prospect of gender transition, but also I knew how happy and carefree he could be, and it was hard to see him so miserable. We seemed to be going in a slowly recurring cycle. He would push himself to be more “manly” and get more and more depressed to the point of saying that “would all be better off without him”, and then I would tell him that he needed to get help, and he would start talking about getting on an anti-depressant to help him cope. And then we would talk again about self-respect and self-acceptance, and just letting go and being ourselves and seeing where life took us. And things would get better again. It was almost magical, how putting aside the guilt and shame would free him up, suddenly becoming the open, peaceful, lighthearted person I knew he was. The more we relaxed and stopped stressing about who we were “supposed” to be, the less frequent the down times were. Slowly, the conversation started to change.

Maybe he should get involved with a support group, with other people like him. Maybe we could go out shopping sometime with him dressed as a woman, just us together as a treat. Maybe someday when the kids were grown up, we could go on vacation together as two women in a place where no one who knew us would see us. Maybe after the kids were grown up and living their own lives he could transition to living as a woman full-time. Maybe someday he wouldn’t have to fight this battle every day.

Maybe, someday, he could just live.

One interesting development was realizing that the actual thought of him becoming a woman someday did not scare me. I had always known I was sexually attracted to women, but I kept asking myself “shouldn’t I be a little more freaked out about the idea of my spouse changing sexes?” The fact is, I wasn’t. The theoretical transition was still years away in my mind and my spouse was still my spouse. Throughout this whole process he had only gotten healthier and happier overall. We loved each other and we were a good team.

I started to talk about my own journey a bit, talking for the first time about the girl I had had a crush on in my early teens, saving a sticker she had given me in my jewelry box after she moved away. The times I had fought the sudden urge to kiss several different girls I knew, totally confused as to where the strong feelings had come from. How I had watched as friends talked about this or that cute actor and felt that they all looked alike to me, so I picked the hairiest and “manliest” actors I could to hide the real truth. How I had asked my mom what she had found attractive about dad, and when she said it was his broad shoulders, that became what I told people when they asked what “my type” was. How I had asked my parents about same-sex attraction and received answers that made me feel even more alone. How I had patted myself on the back with purity culture pride for being so completely in control of my interactions with and feelings for men. I knew that the only path that was acceptable was to get married to a conservative homeschooling Christian man and have his children, and I had felt so despairing of all the young men I met, none of them seemed right for me. But somehow my spouse and I had forged a relationship despite it all.

The more we talked, the more we realized how our secrets had affected our marriage as well. The evangelical marriage books I had read about how to serve my husband best and discover “what he truly wanted” had completely backfired since he was nothing like these books insisted men were. All of the behaviors and mannerisms he had tried to keep up because he had been told they were manly were now gratefully dropped. We started communicating about what we liked and who we were and longtime sexual hang-ups in the bedroom began to collapse. We laughed about the times I had pointed out an attractive girl to my spouse in the past, and times I thought he had been being silly when he put on an article of my clothing and asked how he looked. How had we not realized these things about each other sooner?

Despite all the new questions
our relationship was closer than ever.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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It was the end of 2010. I was starting to question the existence of God while my spouse was as Christian as ever. Sometimes I did not understand how he could keep believing in a God who had made him this way and then said that he couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t understand how it was god-honoring for a person to live their life “the way god wanted them too” while being miserable and secretly hoping that they would get into an accident somehow that would force the removal of the hormone producing organs that caused them so much mental anguish. The thought reminded me of some Quiverfull women I had encountered who in their exhaustion wished that a horrible labour and childbirth would cause a uterine rupture or something, nothing too drastic, but enough to cause the removal of their reproductive organs and the reassurance that they would be done having kids without ever having to “disobey” God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. But the idea of limiting children through artificial means to save their life or their sanity wasn’t acceptable? It was better to live life trying to glorify God with the lot he had given you? I used to think that people like that just had a bad attitude and needed to find a way to be happy with whatever God had decreed for them, now I was starting to wonder if they were just stuck in a sick system.

My spouse often asked if he should stop talking about transgender questions and issues. He worried that maybe this was too much for me and that he should just fight this alone. But I had seen how healing it was for me to talk about my own issues and to let my kids express their feelings, and I didn’t want him to have to go back to bottling it all up. So I encouraged him to continue processing as much as he needed too, and told him I would always be here to listen. Now instead of being distant or depressed on a regular basis he tried to talk about the overwhelming gender dysphoria, trying to sort out who he was and where he fit.

He had begun to relax and be himself more. He started letting down his guard and not double checking how he was moving his hands when he talked or worrying that the way he crossed his legs was “too feminine.” He started buying his own clothes, choosing colors and styles that were closer to his sense of self than the pants and polo ensemble he had been letting me buy for him. We joked that he had enough style for both of us; I tended to be very practical in my clothing choices, comfort being my highest priority, but he actually cared about how he looked and that began to be reflected in his sense of style.

The dad who used to come home and usually disappeared into the basement to play video games had turned into a parent who played on the floor with the kids every day. He wanted to be involved in their day to day lives. He was learning how to feed them and dress them, he started taking them for bedtime walks bundled up in the wagon in the pajama’s each clutching a bedtime snack and their blankies. He would talk about how 3 babies seemed to be more work than 2, and I would laugh at him and explain that to me this was the easiest parenting period yet, because he was parenting them alongside me for the first time. He stopped complaining that grocery shopping was women’s work and began going with us to the store on his day off, I didn’t have to shop alone with multiple babies and toddlers anymore.

Genuine smiles had been few and far between during the last few years, I used to have to tickle him to get him to give a real smile for pictures. Now he was smiling all the time, and laughing. Instead of shrugging and vaguely referencing a life led by whatever ministry dictated, he was dreaming about the future again. Crazy loopy dreams, like driving out to Alaska or teaching English abroad or becoming a makeup artist in the movie industry. He was getting piles of books out of the library and reading sections of them aloud after years of saying he was too busy reading theology to check out anything else. It was as if his world had become more 3-dimensional. He was swimming regularly and had lost a lot of excess weight and had started letting his hair grow longer. Sometimes I caught him in front of the mirror, he would look at his reflection and say in wonder “For the first time I am starting to like what I see.”

It seemed so natural for him, that it didn’t feel strange to see him painting the kids toenails and then painting his own. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see him in a bubble bath at the end of the day, I laughed at how happy it made him. Choosing anniversary cards and birthday cards was easier. For the first time I felt like I knew how to really love him. A flower left on his desk or watching a movie while playing with his hair meant more to him then the silly sex ambushes all the marriage books recommended. After being married to someone who had kept part of themselves so mysterious for so long, it was a relief to be getting to know all of him. I didn’t want to lose that ever again.

That Christmas was the best we’d ever had. For the first five years of our married life I had wracked my brain every Christmas and birthday, trying to figure out what to get him. It was always bewildering to try and pinpoint what he would enjoy, and when I asked him what he wanted he couldn’t really come up with anything that sounded cool. I usually went with a book or some article of clothing in the end, but this year for the first time, I knew exactly what he wanted. I knew what he liked for the first time. I bought him a hair dryer and curling iron, tools for a trade that he told me he had always been interested in. We had hopes that going into cosmetology would get him involved in enough feminine things that he would be happy living as a male. He had experimented with some of my eye shadow, so I bought him a kit of his own to have fun with. And the pink fuzzy socks I threw in his stocking became something he wore almost every day they were clean.

It was a good Christmas.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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I had always been under the impression that LGBTQ people were a new phenomenon. That the population of gay and transgender people had really taken off during the modern age those “godless” sixties. And that before it had become “cool” to be gay, virtually no one was. But that wasn’t making sense anymore. Even today, being queer continues to unleash considerable bias and discrimination. Kids are still routinely getting kicked out of their homes for admitting they are gay or trans. I couldn’t see any benefit to coming out as LGBTQ unless that really was who that person was.

In my research I had begun to uncover stories of gay people throughout history, and not only that, transgender people were around too. Throughout history is a whole list of people who upon their deaths were discovered to have anatomy which did not conform with the gender they had publicly lived as. Some of these persons were quite famous such as Chevalier d’Eon, a French diplomat during the 18th century; but most of them were ordinary people who knew that the gender assigned at birth did not match them. Growing up I had read some stories about women who disguised themselves as men to serve in the military such as during the Civil War, but what I hadn’t picked up on then but discovered later is how many of them continued to live as men after the war ended. Without the help of any of the medical advances of today, these people transitioned to living authentic lives in the gender that they felt fit them. My research was starting to point towards gender variant people as being a part of the diversity of the human family whose source was from antiquity. The myth of transgender persons being new or a radical experiment of the psychological community didn’t add up.

Because the Catholic church took a different position on LGBTQ issues than did the conservative Protestants among whom I had been raised, I talked about transsexuals with a man studying to be a catholic priest. I had hoped that he might be able to give me some knowledge, some wisdom, some word from god, but his recent and ongoing education seemed really out of date. He tried to be kind and considerate, but seemed convinced that transsexuals were either homosexuals trying to attract men who wanted to change their bodies to achieve that goal, or they were an autogynephiliac, meaning that they were “sexually aroused by the idea of having female body parts to play with.”

Neither of these sexually charged explanations made any sense to me. First off, from what I had read, many transsexuals (including my spouse) were very attracted to women, and they had no interest in changing their body to attract male attention. Any physical changes they made seemed to be made for themselves, not anyone else. And how did this theory on transsexuality apply to female-born persons who transitioned to living as men? Were they changing their bodies to be more attractive to men? The second explanation he offered wasn’t any better: my spouse did not have an obsession with having female parts to masturbate with. A transgender person who seeks to make physical changes, is willing to accept a variety of outcomes, including unforeseeable changes to sexual function. I could hardly see how someone with a sexual obsession would be willing to take those risks and make those sacrifices. And again, how did these explanations apply to transgendered people throughout history who had lived for years in the gender opposite that assigned to them at birth? This was centuries before the modern therapy options had become available, and they would not have been able to change much about their bodies. Many of them lived completely celibate lives, so that their secret would never be found out. This did not sound like a sexual obsession to me. Even today there are trans people who are happy living in their chosen gender without doing any modification to their bodies. The theories the priestly candidate gave me seemed full of holes. I started to feel more and more frustrated. People weren’t fitting into my nice little religious boxes anymore.

Furthermore, in my reading I had started to realize that LGBTQ people were denied many of the legal rights I took for granted. Growing up as a conservative Christian I was always under the impression that our rights were being snatched away one by one by the liberal and secular government. Now I was starting to realize how many U.S laws were based on religion. A straight person was free to marry who they fell in love with, but if a gay person fell in love and wanted to make a commitment to that person and have the legal rights that such a union provided they were not allowed to. Parents who came out as gay or lesbian persons often lost custody of their children to the straight parent in a divorce, and in many states LGBT people could be fired or even denied housing based on their sexual orientation or gender identity, real or perceived. I could not come up with a reason these laws existed other than religious understandings of the legal contract of marriage and sexuality, and the religious bias that made employers and landlords want the right to discriminate.

At this point I still believed that God was not OK with people “acting on unnatural desires,” but if people really were just born with these issues, and did not get them through any desire or action on their part, then why were religious people trying so hard to make life difficult for them regardless of the religion these people were a part of? And how was it alright for a government to be enforcing laws based on any religion? I thought about how scary it would be if an employer decided my spouse was too feminine and fired him and we had no legal recourse. How was this an OK law? I was horrified that people could have their children taken away from them simply because they didn’t fit into a nice little religious box and play up what society had decided was the “norm.” How did that have anything to do with their ability to love and care for their child?

When I tried to talk about this new understanding with people I knew, they were shocked. Some of them became visibly angry and accused me of abandoning my religious beliefs. In one conversation with one person, I tried to explain why I felt it was wrong for landlords to be able to deny people housing based on their sexual orientation, the reply I received was this:

“Melissa, think about it. If you could only afford to live in one apartment complex in town, and there were gay people living there, would you really want your children exposed to that?”

My heart sank into my gut. To this person LGBTQ people were perverts, a menace to society and a danger to children. If this person knew my spouse’s secret, or even my own same-sex attraction, would they feel safe having us around their children? Would this person feel we were unfit to have children ourselves? To most of the religious people I spoke with, giving all people equal rights meant that they were giving up religious rights somehow.

They simply could not put themselves in a gay person’s shoes, even for a moment, and I was ashamed to realize that
I had never tried to think about it myself until I recognized
the issue in my life.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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Before I go any further I just want to make it clear that my spouse has participated in the writing and editing of this series, and has given their full support and approval of it’s publication.

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

Over the next number of months it seemed that we talked about transgender questions and issues constantly. My spouse had been unable to talk about this for so long and now it was like a floodgate had opened. He told me about how he had always felt different, that even as a small child he wished he could play with some of the girls’ toys and wondered why he couldn’t have long hair like his sisters. He remembered feeling sad when he figured out that he wouldn’t ever be a mother. But he learned early on to behave in the manner expected of him and he didn’t have a name to put to the feelings he had.

As a little Christian homeschooled boy, there wasn’t much available information on LGBTQ people, but one day at about 11 years of age, he was reading a large illustrated history of the 20th century when a small paragraph near the bottom of the page caught his eye. The title of the section was “Man becomes Woman” and reading it with his heart thumping wildly, he realized that there were other people like him. The short story was about one of the first transsexual women who went public with their story, her name was Christine Jorgensen and she had transitioned back in the 1950s. Several times a week he would pull the heavy book from the shelf and open to the page with the story, to read again and again about Christine. He was not alone.

He brought up gay or trans people up in conversations here and there with the people in his life, looking for clues as to how they felt about the issue. Having repeatedly heard the common Christian attitude on these topics, he quickly started to believe that talking about how he felt would be sure to bring rejection from those he loved most, and maybe even subjection to painful therapeutic procedures pushed by Christian ministries to “fix” him. He desperately wanted to please his relatives and his community, he prayed fervently for the misgendered feelings to go away, but they remained. He wished that it would be discovered that he was physically intersexed in some way, because if his body was somehow both male and female perhaps it would become acceptable for him to live as a girl. But puberty hit right on time, and the torment got worse. His body was maturing further into what his brain told him was the wrong gender. There was nothing he could do to change it, and waking up each day to the body he hated got more and more difficult.

He immersed himself in school, studied hard and started on a track towards becoming a minister, but the feelings were still there. Now that he was in junior college he had access to public computers and he took the chance to read anything he could on the condition he knew he had. I started to realize that despite my hours upon hours of research, I had merely scratched the surface of the extent of reading my spouse had done over the last number of years. He studied the treatments and surgeries and read about the side effects and problems. But all the while he had such shame believing that God condemned him for having those feelings. He wondered why God would give him such a heavy cross to bear, what had he done to deserve this? He knew all the “right” things to say on the LGBTQ issues if questioned, but inside he was afraid of his secret ever being discovered.

Gender dysphoria was always lurking under the surface, sometimes spiraling into bouts of depression. On dark days, wild ideas screamed through his mind, maybe he should run away from home and spare everyone the pain of having such a child in the family, maybe he could somehow cut off the source of the hormones wreaking such havoc on his body, maybe it would be better if he was ended his life and with it the possibility of his condition causing pain to those he loved. But in the end the only real option seemed to be to numb the pain as best he could. Suppressing, denying, and keeping as busy as possible. He had grown up with many of the trappings of an American childhood, the friends, the vacations, the hobbies. Yet under the surface the gender dysphoria was always there, it never went away.

He fell in love and we got married. His hopes were high that this issue was going to leave once he was safely in a god-sanctioned relationship where he would have the role of a husband and father to fill. Feelings of despair hit hard when soon after marriage he realized the gender dysphoria was still there. So many of his low periods during our marriage made more sense now that I knew what he had been struggling with.

Hearing more of the story was heartbreaking for me, and realizing how hard he had fought this his whole life made me start worry that my efforts to help him would just be a drop in the bucket. He had done his best to be “who God wanted him to be”.

He had denied himself everything,
prayed and begged God to heal him,
but he was still wrestling with it now, years later.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Permission to Live

This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.

As many of you know, my spouse and I got married young after a short parent-supervised courtship. We began our marriage “the right way” according to everything we believed. We had obeyed our parents and stayed pure from emotional relationships or sexual activity, so when we got married neither of us had ever been intimate with any other person. We were wholeheartedly committed to our Christian beliefs at that time, feeling certain that birth control was wrong in almost any circumstance and that men should be the family leaders and women should be submissive. My husband was in seminary to be a Christian minister and I was a stay-at-home wife. We worked together to start a church for homeschool families with a strong emphasis on faith practices in the home and we used our experience growing up in conservative homeschool families to encourage them. We talked about how homeschooling had protected us from the world, and how well courtship worked to keep young people pure and got them into solid god-honouring marriage. We prayed together, read our bibles together, and sought to follow God’s will in everything.

But none of this changed the secret that we never really spoke of.

We had only been married a few months when my spouse confessed that he had “seen some bad stuff on the internet.” I had been raised believing that men were sexually-driven pigs, so I assumed this meant he was looking at porn, and I was too afraid to ask for detail, so even though I was frustrated by the thought of him having an affinity for porn I forgave him, prayed with him, and tried as best I could to help him fight this “spiritual battle.” We didn’t talk about it much. Every couple of months he would make another vague confession and we would lather, rinse and repeat. I believed that most couples had something like this they were dealing with, and I loved my spouse and believed that he was doing everything in his power to fight this temptation, whatever it was.

One day we were flipping through the channels on the TV (TV was still pretty new to me at the time) and we happened onto a Tyra Banks show where there were Transsexual people talking and competing in a fashion show. I knew hardly anything about transsexual people. As we watched the tall thin women on the screen talk about how they used to be men, I felt uncomfortable. But I could tell that my spouse was very interested in the show and even seemed to know a lot more about what was going on than I did. When I asked him how he knew so much about transsexuals he said that he had read some about them on the internet. I began to worry that perhaps his struggle on the internet involved transsexual porn. But we continued our little tradition of confession, contrition, and prayer in reference to the periodic slips into “sin” on the internet, and I never asked for more detail.

Life went on – we had two children now – and my spouse finished seminary and simultaneously became interested in the Catholic church. We read through the entire catechism together and felt a strong pull to be in a religious system that had such firm beliefs, strong structure and accountability. But so many factors had set us up for a life in ministry, and we now had the qualifications and training needed. We took a call to a church, excited to be taking a step to serve and encourage a community of Christians.

We were both relieved to be done with graduate school. We were exhausted from juggling two children, long school hours, and a difficult church plant. Our family life got better right away. Instead of long hours away working, my spouse was able to get his work done and be home more often. He began getting involved with the kids for the first time and was becoming a better parent. We had our third baby together and he learned how to change a diaper and even began cleaning up some around the house. Living a thousand miles away from family with our many small children was challenging. We only had each other for support and our relationship became closer and more intimate than ever before. I truly felt like we were best friends, able to share anything with each other.

So one night in the early spring of 2010 when he confessed to me that he had once again seen “bad stuff” on the internet, I decided to ask for more detail.

“When you talk about seeing stuff on the internet, is it about transsexuals like we saw on the Tyra Banks show that one time?”

I wasn’t sure when I had ever seen him this uncomfortable, but he had always been such a terrible liar, I think he knew it would be pointless to try and dodge the question.

“Um, yeah. Actually that is what I am talking about. I try to stay away from it, but eventually after a few months I find myself reading about them again.”

I felt sort of bewildered.

“Wait, so you aren’t looking at porn on the internet?” I asked. He looked confused.

“What? No! I mean, I’ve come across porn before, but only a couple times, I never look for it. I read about transsexuals, like their stories and their treatments, and their journey’s through transition.”

He fidgeted in his seat, looking down at piece of paper he was slowly shredding in his hands. I felt silly over my long time assumption that he had a porn problem, and confused by the new term.

“What is transition?” I asked. He looked at me cautiously.

“Well, a transsexual feels like they do not belong in the body they were born in, and sometimes they start to live life as the opposite gender, that’s called gender transition.”

My heart was pounding in my ears, but I plowed ahead.

“Why are you so interested in transsexuals? Is it because you wish you could be with a transsexual? Or because you wish you were one?”

He hesitated a moment, then he breathed in and took the plunge.

“I think it’s that I could be one. I’ve felt like my gender doesn’t match me for a very long time.”

I was surprised by how calmly I was hearing this, and yet at the same time I was freaking out. What did this mean? How could my spouse be saying he was a transsexual? He had never said anything about this to me! I had hardly any idea of what being transsexual even meant. In my sheltered upbringing the closest my parents had come to the topic was a veiled reference “transvestites” and how they were confused messed up people who refused to accept the way God had made them and were usually sexually abusive and predatory. But this explanation did not add up to my sweetheart sitting on the couch with me. My spouse was an intelligent, loving, creative person. He was gentle and caring. I could trust him with anything. He was a devoted spouse and parent. He was a pastor who spent hours every week researching and writing for heartfelt sermons and visiting and encouraging the elderly and sick in our congregation. And I knew I loved him.

That night, I think the most prominent emotion for both of us was fear. I was afraid of the vast unknown ahead. He was afraid that I would despise him. We were both afraid of God’s anger and being misunderstood by practically every single person we knew.

We held each other and cried together.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.

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by Latebloomer

I was not the type of daughter that my mother wanted. I was a tomboy.

My hair was very short and I preferred blue clothes. I wanted to run faster and climb higher than anyone. I wasn’t afraid of slimy frogs and worms, and I could kill a spider without batting an eye. I looked with confusion and disdain at the passive little girls with their hair-bows, sitting and talking about clothes and boys. If I had known the term “badass” back then, I would have applied it to myself with pride.

When I was young, my mom was more tolerant of this. After all, in the early days, there were mostly boys in my age group in our small homeschooling community. So I was free to run wild with the boys and join their sports games during our weekly park days.

However, puberty was looming, and it signaled the end of my adventurous life. It was time for me to learn to act like a “lady”, and the means of teaching was through one sentence: “That’s not very ladylike”.

I was a difficult student; after all, the rules seemed very arbitrary and I couldn’t see any advantages that compensated for the extra restrictions. The heart of the message seemed to be that I had to become extremely aware of my body in order to keep other people from being aware of it. A lady did not run. A lady did not sit with her knees apart. A lady did not lie down in public. A lady did not make random bodily noises or find them amusing. A lady did not use crude language like the word “crap” or “fart.” A lady did not wear tight or revealing clothing–for awhile, that meant no shorts or sleeveless shirts. A lady never pointed to or discussed her own body in public. And most of all, a lady never called boys or invited them into her bedroom (not even when I was 23, in a group, with my family home and my door open! WHAT did my mom think I was going to do, have a blatant daytime orgy before my first kiss??).

And besides the extra restrictions, there were also extra responsibilities. I had to learn to sew and cook, things that my brother was exempt from. I tried and tried, but I was never able to enjoy these womanly skills. Eventually my mom gave up on me and moved on to teaching these skills to other more grateful homeschool girls, leaving me feeling jealous and rejected.

It didn’t help my situation that my sister took naturally to wearing cute dresses, having tea parties, and making crafts. She didn’t even need coaching, while I was unsatisfactory even with coaching. As I watched my brother leave for his many outdoor adventures with other boys, I felt cheated and limited, having been born a girl.

In some ways, I was lucky compared to many other girls in the Christian Patriarchy culture that attended Hope Chapel with us. I was never required to wear only dresses or have long hair. I didn’t have to take care of innumerable younger siblings. But most importantly, I was actively encouraged to go to college.

For many conservative Christians, higher education is seen as suspect because of the so-called “secular liberal bias” of universities and professors. That was the case for my family as well. However, my parents were unusual in our church and homeschooling community because they believed that even a daughter should be educated enough to support herself if necessary. So they encouraged me to attend a very conservative Christian college such as Bob Jones University, Pensacola Christian College, or Moody Bible Institute. They advised me to choose an area of study that would allow me to supplement my future husband’s income by working from home after I had children.

So, why didn’t I head off to college right away? After all, I was completely miserable at home due to the extremely authoritarian parenting style that my church promoted. There were really two reasons: first, my severe social anxiety made the thought of college overwhelming and terrifying. Second, my parents’ pro-college message was drowned out by the sexist anti-college message of my church.

A couple more years of worsening family relationships, of increasing depression, of a sense of purposelessness, of no prospects of a church-approved way out of that mess–that was exactly what I needed to reach my breaking point. My exact thought process at the time was this: “I’ve been praying for guidance about my future for years, and I haven’t heard anything. I can’t go on like this. I’m going to just start moving and hope that God will steer me if I go the wrong direction.”

As I left home for the first time at age 23, I felt small, weak, timid, and vulnerable, heading out into the great wide world all alone. There was no trace of my former badass self from childhood. So is the Christian Patriarchy right about women after all?

People tend to live up to the expectations of those around them, what others believe they are capable of. The sexist beliefs then become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The women in the church were told over and over that they were easily deceived and easily swayed by their emotions and needed a man’s protection/guidance. But denying women education and experience is what made them that way.

College was a time of transformation for me; I was overcoming my severe social anxiety, discovering my true identity, learning to be comfortable with sexuality, and learning to set boundaries and take responsibility for myself. Marriage has only continued that process, as my husband and I work to maintain an equal partnership–something truly beautiful that I didn’t know existed 7 years ago.

Now I am a feminist stay-at-home mom. I stay at home because I want to, because I love the bond I have with my little one and the adventures we have together as I introduce him to the world. I can understand his excitement as he discovers what he’s capable of….because I’m finally feeling it too.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Latebloomer is on a journey away from the ideals she was raised with in the conservative homeschooling culture. Becoming a wife and mother has prompted her to re-evaluate her childhood experiences in an effort to avoid repeating those mistakes.  Her blog Past Tense Present Progressive is her place for sorting through her thoughts.

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by Incongruous Circumspection

In Part 1c, we learned that men are so fragile, anything a woman does that is not exactly what the bloke is expecting will lead to his demise. Let’s finish looking at the first basic need of a husband.
*****

[Seek your husband’s advice first. A wife should demonstrate loyalty to her husband’s wishes, goals, and standards. Therefore, when a need arises, you should seek your husband’s guidance and counsel first, especially in regard to family issues, rather than seeking advice from other family members and friends.]

When Kristine and I first met, I had swallowed this idea whole. I knew all the answers to life and, better yet, knew how to find them in all of Bill Gothard’s manuals. The Bible was a secondary resource and yet I wielded it with creative gusto. This worked very well for the first few minutes of our relationship. At that point, it became clear that real life was a bit more complicated and could not be mastered by one man.

I had no idea what to do when Kristine had PMS. When she had her monthly menstrual cycle, I was no help. If she bled more than usual, it would have been foolish for her to come to me. I was clueless in the kitchen, only good enough to throw together a pan of canned peas and tuna fish, heated on the stove. If she wanted recipe ideas, why would she come to me? When our first baby cried uncontrollably at night, I had no idea what to do. When she got warts all over her hand, what the heck could I have done? Why is it necessary to come to me first for everything? It makes no sense except that it props up the “man on top” position and, believe me, that gets old after a while, if you catch my drift.

But, let’s not focus on little details, rather, let’s look at Bill’s subtle wording at the end where he tells the worthless woman not to seek advice from family and friends, but rather to the husband. It logically follows that if the husband has no clue, the wife can then move on to the family and friends, right? Wrong.

[If you have questions about spiritual matters, you should first take them to your husband. If the two of you are unable to find the answers, then request help from wiser, more mature believers, such as your pastor, parents, or other mentors.]

You must ask only believers. Believers that are wiser than you because, of course, every decision in life requires so much wisdom. Notice the pastor, then parents, then other “mentors”? You simply cannot ask an expert.

“Pastor, my wife needs me to decide whether we are a tampon or maxi pad family. Oh, and she doesn’t know what foundation is for but has a few bumps on her face she wants to smooth over. What brand should she use? She has oily skin so it can’t dry it out too much. And, pastor, we aren’t seeing eye to eye on salt IN the soup or ON the soup. Which is healthier. But..but…pastor…another thing…she has trouble sleeping at night and has bouts of depression. Being that drugs are evil, according to ole’ lady guru over yonder, and the next person in line to take advice from is my parents and then a trusted mentor (not a doc), we figure you might be able to help us. Should we pray about it?”

Additionally, it always strikes me as quite odd that Bill Gothard has such a high view of parents. Many couples would rather not ask their parents for advice and for good reason. But, Bill has to maintain his “chain of command”.

[Enjoy the privilege of physical intimacy. God grants spouses full access to each other’s bodies for sexual gratification. “Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband. The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife. Defraud ye not one the other . . .” (I Corinthians 7:3-5; see also Ephesians 5:24 and Colossians 3:17-19). Resistance or indifference to your husband’s need for physical intimacy is the unspoken crushing of his spirit.]

This is cute, but weird. Yes, this passage in 1 Corinthians tells a person that it is better to not have sex at all (this point alone caused me to reject all of 1 Corinthians). But if you must, get a wife and then you both belong to one another. No, you don’t just belong to one another, both of you have authority over eachother’s bodies. This is exciting stuff!

But Bill cites this passage that gives a picture of both a husband and wife enjoying sex together even though the spiritual stuff is a tad creepy, and then turns it around to exclusively address the husband’s “need” for lovin’. Unfortunately, I agree with Bill here. If my wife doesn’t give me sex when I need it, my spirit is crushed. I am very fragile in this area. If she withholds herself from me when I demand…er…request the use of my property – her body – I pauperize into a whimpering puppy. Who cares if she doesn’t want it. That’s not important here. All humor aside, the rest of the passages he cites are only addressing the wife. She is to be submissive to the husband in all things. Of course, the husband is supposed to deal tenderly with his wife and we all know what that means.

Bill, by his own admission, has never had sex in his life. He has no idea what it is to be in a relationship or in a marriage with the complex issue of intimacy with your partner. The writers of these Bible passages have no clue either. The only people who intimately understand each others needs, especially in the area of sex, is you or your spouse, if you have confided in them. But, complex discussions don’t go over well with Gothard’s simplistic view of life. He needs to spiritualize everything and force square pegs to fit into his round holes of life.

I say, go discover what the other wants. You can’t get better until you practice. But, I do have one tip: touch something metallic before jumping between the sheets. Static electricity is nobody’s friend.
*****

In Part 2a, we will look at the next basic need of a husband: A man needs a wife who honors his leadership. Haven’t we been over this already? Bill is starting to sound like a broken record. Maybe he needs to get himself a wife and test some of his theory. I’m thinking someone should match him up with Betty White.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

I am a 30 something husband of one and father of 6 dynamic and loud children. My wife and I are still madly in love – at least in my view. My world is exciting, tense, and full of life. I love to write and hope to one day, do it full time. – Incongruous Circumspection

Read all posts by Incongruous Circumspection!

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by Sierra

[Editors' note: At the time of writing, Libby Anne and Sierra were unaware of the controversy surrounding Hugo Schwyzer. The discussion of his critique of emotional incest is not an endorsement of Schwyzer by NLQ.]

My last two posts, and indeed all my thinking on the subject has led me to some conclusions about the ways that Christian Patriarchy and purity culture enable and even celebrate emotional incest. The following are the cliff notes:

Christian patriarchy turns marriage from a relationship to an institution, effectively reversing the historical trend from business partnerships and heir insurance to bonds between two free agents based on love. Evangelical culture says that marriage takes three: you, your spouse, and God. It also promotes self-denial and the sublimation of one’s own desires to those of Christ. Therefore, any two evangelical Christians should be able to marry each other and have a godly, fulfilling marriage, given enough work and prayer. Purity culture says that chemistry and personality don’t matter. What matters is following the Word of God. Husbands and wives should love each other because it’s commanded in God’s Word to do so; loving his wife is a husband’s “first ministry.” Similarly, a wife “ministers” to her husband by submission and love. The core of marriage in Christian patriarchy is the commitment to be loyal to God and to the marriage, not attachment to the person of the spouse. This is why evangelical courtships are more focused on purity than the prospective partners getting to know each other personally; what matters is getting to the altar without regrets. The love in marriage flows from commitment rather than the other way around, mirroring the logic of arranged marriage.(Note: Most evangelical Christians do acknowledge the importance of an emotional bond between the bride and groom that develops before the wedding day. Most evangelical Christians do want their children to marry people whom they find attractive, companionable and fun. If you are one of these Christians, you’re not the one I’m critiquing. (Congratulations! You’re normal!) What I do find problematic is the branch of evangelical-fundamentalist Christianity led by people like Bill Gothard, Matthew Chapman (who famously didn’t ask his wife to marry him), Doug Wilson, Jonathan Lindvall, et al. who expect young people to marry with hardly any knowledge of each other, rigid parental oversight and laundry lists of abstract virtues rather than personality traits in mind.)

The institutionalization of marriage in Christian patriarchy leads to relationships based on order, hierarchy and duty rather than affection. Husbands are commanded to be leaders of their wives. Wives are commanded to submit. Husbands are commanded to love. Wives are commanded to reverence. Marriage is reduced to performance of a gender role. Although individuals frequently subvert this, the ideal is that husband and wife will relate to one another as master and subordinate, with two distinct spheres of duty.

Women who must obey their husbands turn to their sons for more equal partnerships. Most evangelical-fundamentalists do not place the son’s authority higher than the mother’s, though some do. A mother can share interests with her son, disagree with him, choose their mutual activities and challenge her son in ways that she cannot challenge her husband. This promotes emotionally incestuous mother-son relationships in which the son becomes his mother’s main source of emotional support.

Husbands whose wives are constrained with childbearing and homemaking turn to their daughters for emotional affirmation. Wives are required to respect, obey, and love their husbands. Daughters are, too, but their devotion and admiration are more often the natural results of kind parenting than coercion or dogmatic instruction. (I fully acknowledge that many daughters don’t love their fathers, because their fathers are distant, abusive, etc. I am one of those daughters. However, a daughter whose father raises her kindly will usually love him without hesitation.) A daughter’s love is more spontaneous, and hence may feel more genuine than a wife’s love. A daughter is also less inhibited by years of conflicts, submission and moral instruction. She is simply younger and (usually) more enthusiastic. As a child, she is also more inclined to want to please her father – especially as that trait is cultivated in girls. As Libby Anne also points out, a daughter is more susceptible to her father’s influence, and has the potential to be molded into the ideal partner.

Christian patriarchy cultivates father-daughter emotional incest through purity pledges and purity balls, father-daughter dating, stay-at-home daughterhood, “practice” homemaking and the courtship process that gives fathers veto power over a girl’s relationships. Daughters are explicitly taught that they should submit to their fathers as their “heads” until they marry, that the father-daughter relationship is practice for marriage, that fathers should treat their daughters the way they want their future husbands to treat them (as opposed to being an example by treating their wives the way they want their daughters treated). With your father “guarding your heart,” you can hardly form relationships that don’t include, or indeed center on, him.

Purity culture limits young people’s access to one another through courtship and sex-segregated activities.This means that contact between the sexes is extremely formal, and many children of large families form their deepest bonds with their parents and siblings. This can stunt their ability to make friends or find partners on their own, further cementing parental control over spousal choices. It also limits children’s access to other families that could show them alternatives to the kinds of relationships that exist within their own families, leading them to think that their own family dynamic is “normal” even if it isn’t.

Quiverfull families normally rely on the eldest children (usually daughters) to parent younger siblings. This can artificially elevate the eldest children to the status of co-parents or partners for their parents. Normally, emotional incest occurs between a parent and his or her eldest child (though there are undoubtedly exceptions).

This is not to say that only patriarchal Christians are vulnerable to emotional incest. It is, however, to point out that some central tenets of Christian patriarchy and quiverfull enable those relationships to flourish unchecked. The results, when they are terminated, can be devastating for both parents and children. These relationships can have ripple effects that prevent children from forming healthy bonds with their own partners in adulthood. In the case of stay-at-home daughterhood, however, this flaw is considered a benefit. If daughters remain at home, serving their fathers, well into their own adulthood, they are treated as success stories. They shouldn’t be.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

Sierra is a PhD student living in the Midwest. She was raised in a “Message of the Hour” congregation that followed the ministry of William Branham. She left the Message in 2006 and is the author of the blog  the phoenix and the olive branch

We would love to feature your personal story on No Longer Quivering. Please submit what you have to say via our submissions form.

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