The following is an excerpt from a new post I’ve published on substack, which is complete with an audio version you can listen to. Check it out here.

As a white transgender man, there have definitely been times where I have wondered if I truly even want this inheritance of manliness. If all that’s for sale is violence, dominance, aggression, mockery, and cruelty, I’m not interested. 

My doubt and self-questioning (totally normal parts of the discernment process by the way), are precisely what some people latch on to immediately when trying to tear down or deny my transgender identity. They tell me that “real” men don’t question masculinity this way. They tell me I’ll never be a man. And of course, there’s the tired idea that “real” men don’t cry. Yet it is precisely the spiritual dimension of my transgender identity that allows me to profoundly experience and understand masculinity.  

Transition is fundamentally a spiritual journey. For transgender people, questions about who we are that we contemplate in the mind actually originate in and lead us back to the body: we possess the spiritual gift of embodiment, which allows us to uniquely connect to core themes in the faith such as the incarnation and resurrection. It is in and through the body that we experience our gender identity, on a level far deeper than hair length or clothing preference. 

To read more, please go to my Substack (and please subscribe while you’re at it!)