Hearts of Texas

I’m not naïve. I know that things have been bad for trans people and for, frankly, everyone who is not a cisgender straight white man in some way for most if not all of human history. I’ve watched the rhetoric escalate, but I’ve also seen victory after victory and felt the tide slowly shifting to a more open and inclusive world where, very gradually, more kinds of people are afforded scraps of dignity and peace. It’s clear that certain groups with large amounts of power are not taking this kindly, but if I zoom out far enough in the right situation, like a ship captain watching the mast of a ship disappear over the horizon miles away, I can see the curvature of the moral arc of the universe and have confidence that we continue to bend towards justice. But something about the news out of Texas yesterday has broken something deep inside me.

For the uninitiated, the text of the order is here. The main highlights being that all medical interventions for gender-affirming care for minors are to be treated as child abuse, that all mandatory reporters who have a duty to report suspected abuse have a duty to report suspected gender-affirming care as such, and that child protective services is ordered to investigate all suspected cases. More policy-savvy people than I have done a good job of indicating the performative cruelty of this order, but a few key things are hitting me that I just need to process.

When I was young and privately, silently dealing with questions about why I felt the way I did about gender and presentation, I had the social intelligence to understand that this was not something that could be discussed openly. In my conservative Evangelical circles the most “progressive” stance was to tolerate the existence of LGBT people as long as they spent their whole lives acting and looking as straight as possible in constant repentance for the sickness they threatened to spread to all the good respectable people. Even then, the idea of a ministry or a support group for people with that “struggle” was unconscionable as it was clearly understood that tolerating our existence in your midst was allowing wolves among the flock. On the other side of the spectrum, I’d heard plenty of talks about how sexual “deviance” led to the fall of empires, conversion therapy was in vogue for my teenage years for those who did dare to whisper about the topics, any sort of gender non-conformity that made its way onto the TV in the home was met with audible disgust and often comments about the downfall of society, a quiet scandal where kids in my youth group beat up a gay kid in their school got shoved under the rug and never addressed publicly, and the message was clear - tolerance to the point where you could even discuss the topic without begging to be taken to some church basement and waterboarded until you were properly conforming was something that would place you permanently on the edge of respectable society.

But there’s always part of you that hopes you were exaggerating. I imagined that, had I opened up to someone, that I would have been proven wrong somewhere. Surely there would be a family member or a friend or a church leader that would open their arms with compassion and try to learn what causes this pain and confusion and put their prejudice and presuppositions aside for at least as long as it takes to hear and see me. The cracks in this hope were obvious when people who had previously said they loved me told me to my face that my death by my own hand in the basement of a conversion camp was a preferable outcome to me becoming who I am, and being otherwise goaded by family to look into the remnants of the mostly-disgraced conversion therapy movement. But watching my home state be the ones who take it on themselves to fire the first shot in this war of extermination has shattered any rosy picture I could have hoped to build. The cultural battle lines are clear - they prefer children be orphaned, homeless, or dead than accept the idea the pain that these children experience means anything more complicated than “some people just really want to sin.” People like Dr. Mark Yarhouse and Bridget Eileen Rivera are trying to show that this eradication campaign is cruel and unnecessary, even in a historic orthodox Christian hermeneutic, but the patriarchal culture war has fused itself to the Evangelical church via the Republican Party and it’s unclear if they can be surgically separated without killing them both.

There’s an intellectual commitment in these circles to believe that all of their social anxieties are a result of their supernaturally correct plain sense reading of scripture and that this reading has been universally agreed upon starting with the Apostle Paul (deviating for a bit while the Catholics messed things up then returning to correctness after the Protestant Reformation) and remaining uninterrupted through the line of correct thinkers until everyone got all Woke and Gay in their generation. Since you grew up or had your formative experiences in this context, and this is the environment in which you learned God is good, any threat to your fundamental assumptions are threats to God’s very goodness and your own sense of being a good and righteous person. Your particular hermeneutic, your particular assumptions, your particular instincts of what makes a society good and strong, all of these things become the family idols that your household worships on pain of existential meltdown, and these recent moves make it clear - they will sacrifice children and they would have sacrificed me to these idols before submitting to the humility it would take to think that the pile of corpses at their feet is anything but a sign of how wicked everyone but them is. It’s clear that my instincts were correct - I saved my life by dealing with this myself, and this realization is terrifying and lonely and crushing.

I’m so thankful for the other friends that have grown and learned and cried with me, opening your hearts and homes to hear me; it’s made all this so much less lonely and painful than it could have been. But as my heart breaks for my own experience, it breaks anew as I read what is happening in Texas and Florida, knowing that this is only the beginning. If this goes unchallenged, children are going to be ripped from their families rather than risk a child like me attaining happiness in a way that makes there more than one kind of good person, like a player in Cosmic Encounter that would rather torpedo his own chances than share a victory. Any sort of non-conformity to entrenched gender roles is going to be a “suspicious bruise” that gets a family harassed by CPS. Mandatory reporting means there will definitely be nobody safe to talk to, as a slip of the tongue can lead to harassment or the orphanage. The suffering, misery, and death that is going to come from this is unmeasurable. I suffered alone and in silence as the hatred that permeated our culture for people like me went mostly unsaid; I can’t imagine the psychic suffering that happens when your home is declaring that loving you is a crime. I even see pundits taking the war that’s growing in Ukraine as a chance to ridicule our existence, implying that war itself now is a cause of our country succumbing to the weakness of having compassion for people that exist on the margins. I’ve seen where history goes when a people become the scapegoat for all of society’s ills, and while I have to have hope that we’ve learned some kind of lessons from our past and that allies will rise from somewhere to stand with us, the rhetoric from political and religious leaders makes it clear that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. I know I’ll likely be shielded from the worst of it, but I think of all the kids like me in so much worse positions and my heart shatters again every time. The selfishness, cruelness, pettiness, and arrogance of those I once admired is the greatest betrayal of my life. I’ll stand between them and those they wish to destroy, but this is among the last of the disintegration of goodwill I find myself capable of holding. I wish people would listen. I wish the cries of children did not fall on deaf ears to serve the fragile egos of those in power. I pray that my voice and my talents can do something to make this world a little better. I pray that my home and my resources can offer safety to those who have to flee. I pray that those who claim the name of Christ who still have an inch of their soul not covered in the callouses of petty Nationalism and the arrogance of their own certainty remember the voice of God and let themselves see through God’s eyes for even a second as they count the cost of the world they’re trying to build. I pray for all of us, but it all just hurts so much.

This post is a mess. I have a lot of notes and plans and dreams of getting back to writing thoughts about life, video games, the Bible, and all kinds of other things. But it’s been hard to predict what life would be like in this period, and as we enter calendar year 3 of a pandemic my mental state is… volatile. I hope to find a steady state soon, but I had to put words to the thoughts in my head. I’ve found so much love and life and fulfillment as I’ve been able to serve God and live life in the way I know is right, and I look forward to sharing it with more people. I am just shaken to my core by the lengths that we will go to in order to have kids not grow up to be like me, and I hope this is the last time anyone has to feel as lonely and betrayed as I do, and that this war against the existence of LGBT people will be soundly defeated. I hope every trans person, particularly youth, that read this know that you are loved, you are beautiful, and you deserve to be happy; we’ll get through this, there are people that want to help you; I’m sorry we’ve let it get to this place, I just pray that we quickly help it get better.