They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name, Volume 3 - A Better Me

Side A: Building a Better Me // Side B: Queen of Oklahoma

Volume 3 - A Better Me

This post is Volume 3 in my memoir project They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name. Basically I’m using my trans woman transition mixtape as a framework to write memoir. Read the Liner Notes here. My mixtape is on Spotify.

Side A: Building a Better Me

It's what you're meant to be, / Your name and number. / Be all that you should be. / You will recover things you haven't lost, / Because they don't see you like you think they do. / Please just become you. -from “Building a Better Me” by Dogwood

Maybe it’s fitting that I’m publishing this on Palm Sunday. I spent almost 20 years of my life being highly religious, but this Holy Week approaching has been a Holy Hell for me.

Growing up, I attended my great grandma’s Southern Baptist Church semi-regularly. That’s where I was taught original sin, the depravity of mankind, and that I wasn’t man enough. I learned there—and at school and on sports fields/courts and elsewhere—that my persistent feelings of wishing I could be a girl were wrong, gross, sinful, shameful, etc.

When I was 15, I started attending another church (a charismatic one, i.e. speaking in tongues and “miracles” and that sort of thing) independently from my family. It was in that environment that I got saved and baptized, almost groomed by a pastor (“Against the Grain”), and became “on fire for Jesus.”

In that paradigm, I learned to see my trans identity—my true self—as my original sin, as a test of faith, as a thorn in my side that only G-d could deliver me from. These feelings, which I remembered going back to my earliest formative memories (“Selfies in a Rearview Mirror”), were something wrong with me.

Since I came out a transgender woman, Christians have come up with plenty of rationale to explain away my years in the church—and my faith. They say that I was never a real Christian. They say that G-d would have delivered me from “transgenderism” if my faith were genuine. They say that I am either possessed by a demon or that I just am a demon. They say I am no longer made in the image of G-d.

I genuinely don’t understand their cruelty. And they are cruel. Like I’ve said before (“Christmas 2024”), Christians mistreat and threaten me more than anyone else.

It’s Christians who tell me to kill myself. It’s Christians who bear false witness and say that me being transgender means that I’m a pervert or pedo (and then turn around and threaten to rape me). It’s Christians that push laws—by the hundreds—to criminalize my existence. It’s Christians who have threatened me at gas stations, coffee shops, and grocery stores.

I hope they someday repent for how they’ve treated the queer community, but I don’t expect to live long enough to see it.

I told my wife that I was thinking about praying for a Holy Week miracle: that Christians would take the full week off from threatening me. I don’t expect them to, though, and, if they did, it would be my first week without direct harassment since coming out more than a year and a half ago.

Is it worth it to even vocalize that prayer? I’m not sure I have the faith.

Side B: Queen of Oklahoma

Me on my dust bowl throne / In the land where the buffalo roam / When the waving wheat would be always waving to me / And the sun would set in my backyard / I’d have tons of red dirt to match my red boots / And my red heart -from “Queen of Oklahoma” by Carter Sampson

My wife and I went on a creativity date last night—time together that allowed each of us to work on our arts. We went to see the sunset at one of the several mountain views in this state called Panorama Point. This view looks west toward peaks that make up part of the Continental Divide. I love living such a short drive from the mountains. We all do (maybe the 16-year-old a little less because they get carsick easily).

Still, I miss Oklahoma.

It’s where I grew up. It’s where I met my wife. It’s where we got married, had children, and bought a modest home. I spent most of 40 years (less a few years in Kansas City for grad school) living in Oklahoma before we had to move.

Last June, we sold our home in Tulsa and moved.

Oklahoma politicians were (and still are) targeting trans rights. The good Christian folk of my home state threatened me in-person multiple times. It felt like only a matter of time before one them acted on their hatred. Our kids were bullied at school for their queer identities. Their Principal told us that he couldn’t do anything about bias-based bullying because of state policies forbidding affirmation of LGBTQ+ identities and suggested that they wouldn’t be bullied “if they would just act normal.”

We had been talking about the possibility of moving for months because of the above issues. Then local two-spirit teen Nex Benedict died the day after being assaulted in a school restroom. Seeing pictures of Nex circulate that looked so much like our own nonbinary teen sealed the deal.

We became political refugees and moved to a blue state. With Trump’s anti-trans actions starting on day 1 of his new term, I wonder if that was enough.