God’s Plan for Me: Embracing My True Identity as a Transgender Man

Throughout my entire life, I have always been Catholic and transgender. From my earliest memories to the stories my family told about me growing up, I have had a persistent male identity despite being assigned female at birth. Reconciling my faith with my gender identity has been a long and challenging journey, but not because I experience any innate conflict between the two. 

On the contrary, the spiritual journey of transition has deepened my faith, opened me up to deeper and more meaningful relationships, and broadened my view of the world. Though it hasn't been easy in a queerphobic society to come out as my true self, it has brought me great happiness, closeness to God, and for the first time in my life, true peace.

Growing up in the early 90’s, I was a child who didn't have any access to information about the LGBTQ community, yet I still knew from a very young age that I was male. In daycare, when blue and pink blankets were handed out (to boys and girls respectively), I told them I wanted a blue blanket. I didn't know the word “transgender,” yet I was still capable of understanding and communicating about my gender. 

At one of my earliest experiences of confession, the elderly priest did not notice my assigned sex and instead spoke to me as male, telling me that one day I would grow up to be a father and connecting that to a lesson in response to the issues I'd spoken with him about.

My family went to mass every Sunday, and I was very unhappy about the required attire. Once, I even tore a dress I didn't want to wear. And another time, my parents even got one of my female cousins on the phone to try and reason with me about putting a dress on without a fight. But my family misunderstood my dress aversion as a kind of tomboy-fueled, wild-child resistance to the trappings of formality rather than receiving it as a child's communication about something much deeper. 

Whether they were aware of it or not, my family was operating from a very gender essentialist view of the world. They saw sex, gender, and the associated binary social roles as something intrinsic and immutable. Those who hold this belief often characterize it as biologically fundamental and natural, yet ignore the history of gender variance and non-conforming roles present across cultures, and the true diversity of nature, including the complexity of chromosomal science and the very real existence of intersex people. Tragically, gender essentialist beliefs are often used to justify great personal harm to LGBTQ and other vulnerable groups, including attacks on the rights and freedoms of women. 

This fundamentalist playbook was very present in the first two and a half decades of my life. There were strict and rigid rules that affected every area of my life and prevented me from living fully and authentically until I was almost 30.

In my teenage years, my family got a reliable Internet connection, and I began to use it for research, though I always looked for Catholic sources of information or included Catholic terms in my queries. On YouTube, I came across video blogs made by FTM, (female-to-male) transgender men discussing their experiences and chronicling the journey of transition. I was fascinated by these videos both because of the ways I related to their experiences, but also because the idea of transitioning and claiming a transgender identity felt so out of reach to me that I once said to my mom, “if I didn't care about church teaching, I would move to California, become a man, and marry a woman.” 

I felt restricted by the rules I had been taught about religion and the world and knew that exploring the true depth of my identity was not possible under these conditions. A major shakeup, (such as moving to California), would be required for me to break free from the fundamentalist restrictions.

Although I struggled as a child not being able to directly express my identity and then as an adolescent unable to freely pursue what resonated with me, there were flashes of light, spiritual experiences that resonated with me in ways I wouldn't understand until much later. 

One of these was the way my dad would always encourage me by saying that once I found what I wanted to pursue in life, I would “set the world on fire.” Another flash of light was being prayed over at a high school youth group retreat where someone said I would be an important and prophetic voice in the future. This group disavowed me after my transition, which was certainly quite painful, but their words came true as I found a voice for LGBTQ and trans advocacy and had the opportunity to share my story of finding happiness and freedom, along with a deeper connection to God in newspapers and conferences across the country and world, including the unlikely opportunity to meet Pope Francis and tell him I am a transgender man. 

Today, my advocacy work is motivated by thinking of a younger version of me. LGBTQ youth who are also Catholic need positive examples and representations of happy, well-adjusted LGBTQ Catholic adults to counter the false and ignorant narratives that arise out of conservative fundamentalism. In this way, I hope my life and story can be a witness for the next generation of LGBTQ people to see a model of living true to both their Catholic and LGBTQ identity. 

If Catholic truly means universal, then we all have a place in the church. God's house is big enough to include space for everyone. For myself and countless other LGBTQ adults, we remain in the pews as a statement about the diversity and inclusion that the hierarchy would do well to model, welcome, and respect.