Born Again: Transgender Insights on Spiritual Rebirth

Mormon scripture and theology are replete with exhortations to be born again, but until I came out as transgender, I had no idea what that might actually feel like. I grew up a devoted, practicing Mormon and, as an introverted intellectual, I devoured the Latter-day Saint scriptures. I read about Alma the Younger and Paul and felt a vague unease — nothing like that had ever happened to me. I had no idea what they were even talking about. Sure, I knew the correct theological definitions and interpretations of these stories, but the actual, lived experiences of Alma and Paul felt further from mine than the dark side of the moon. Worse, my greatest hero of all, Jesus, was utterly unsparing — unless you are born again, you will not even be able to see the kingdom of God, much less experience its fullness. I longed to experience a rebirth like the characters I read about in the scriptures, to touch Jesus’ words with more than my mind. 

Be careful what you wish for, as they say.

Prior to coming out, I was, by most external metrics, a highly productive young man who seemed well on his way to success (whatever that means). I spent my adolescence and young adulthood racking up a resumé that could make someone blush. I earned enviable grades and impressive test scores, received undergraduate and graduate degrees from prestigious universities, and landed postdoctoral research positions at elite labs.

Yet despite all this privilege, opportunity, and academic success, it was clear to me there was something deeply wrong. My attempts at dating, romance, and intimacy were few, fleeting, and ended in flames. My female peers couldn’t understand me; neither could my male roommates. Worst of all, I couldn’t understand myself. Friends suggested I might be gay, but I wasn’t attracted to men, either. For a long time I identified as asexual, but I intuitively knew this was a consequence of my malaise, not the cause. I felt like I literally didn’t know how to be in the world — I didn’t know who I was, how to act, relate to others, or what I wanted. I craved intimacy and connection, but each time I tried, it ended horribly. Before long I was a wallflower — invisible, ignored, friendless, and brutally lonely.

All the while I threw myself into church participation, hoping it would save me.

All the while I threw myself into church participation, hoping it would save me. I served in more elders quorum presidencies than I care to recall. I attended institute religiously and never missed a “linger longer,” even though the experience felt like something from a horror film, the kind where you aren’t even sure what’s wrong, or who the villain is. But despite my dedication, I couldn’t shake the feeling — like the rich young man from the parable in Matthew 19 — that I was lacking something crucial; I had all the trappings, but none of the substance. Or, like the prodigal son, I felt that I should be happy but, despite all my efforts, felt only emptiness and hunger.

Eventually, I hit rock bottom. The many sacrifices I had made in the name of career success had moved me around the country at a frenetic pace. I had lived in eight different cities, all within a dozen years. After the most recent move I found myself alone once more — friendless, emotionally and spiritually exhausted, and deeply depressed. Then my academic career prospects dried up as well, and with them the last pillar propping up the sad, sagging structure of my life collapsed.

The few friends I had managed to hold onto (nearly all of them queer), urged me to get to the bottom of my despondency. After a long, dark winter of soul searching, I concluded the impossible: my life didn’t make sense to me because I was, in fact, a woman.

While this explained a great deal, at first it was simply too incredible for me to accept on anything but an intellectual level. Gradually, though, the support of loved ones, the wise guidance of my therapist, and my decision to seek gender-affirming medical care all helped me get to the point where I could just begin to imagine that my gender identity could possibly be true outside of my mind, too — in the living, breathing world of human bodies and relationships. I started dressing differently, using different pronouns, and picked a new name (I chose “Dani” because it was a cute, feminine version of my birth name, “Daniel”). 

Over the course of several months, things got steadily better. I felt myself coming alive — singing along in the car on the way to work, dancing while doing the dishes in the evening, looking forward to weekends. Then, all at once and without warning, it happened — the world-shattering experience of being “born again” that I had long sought, though it didn’t at all go the way my younger self had imagined it might.

I had been feeling unwell at work all day in that heavy, melancholy sort of way that I have come to associate with a tug-of-war deep inside me between opposing subconscious forces — one side seeking to reveal, and the other to suppress, something critically important that my conscious mind has yet to realize. By late afternoon I was unable to focus on anything, and a wise inner voice told me to go home. While making dinner for myself in my perennially empty apartment, I recognized some of my subconscious coping mechanisms activate — the ones I developed as a child to hide my gender identity from myself so that I could remain acceptable to the world around me. As my therapist had taught me to do, I thanked these parts of my psyche for their hard work keeping me safe all these years and gently switched them off, choosing instead to be fully present, however painful.

As if on cue, I felt a deep turmoil surge upward, enveloping me. It felt like a battle going on inside, my new female self struggling for air against the suffocating omnipresence of my older, well-practiced male identity that, while stifling, fit like an old pair of shoes.

But I quickly sensed that I was witnessing not an inner battle scene, but childbirth. I both saw in my mind’s eye and felt in the deepest corners of my heart as Dani tried in vain to emerge from Daniel. I intuitively knew that only one could survive. If I didn’t let go of Daniel, Dani would suffocate, would never be able to draw breath with her own lungs. If I chose to deliver Dani, Daniel would have to die. 

I knew in an instant whom I would choose, and the decision ripped me apart.

No sooner had my heart made its choice than an ocean of anguish, grief, and guilt surged out of me. It was so intense I could only breathe in ragged sobs as memory after painful memory, long buried and suppressed — sectioned off in the “don’t touch at any cost” portion of my heart — rose unbidden into my conscious mind. 

Night after lonely night, I saw, on the floor of a featureless apartment bedroom in city after city, Daniel, arms wrapped around his knees, quietly weeping, asking the darkness why he was so alone, desperately wondering what was wrong with him.

I saw Daniel seated on a sofa as one of his dearest friends — a beautiful, intelligent, courageous young woman — urged him to open up to her, pleading, “If you don’t tell me what’s wrong, I can’t help you.” I watched her leave and felt the pain of losing her clench my throat until I couldn’t breathe. Daniel didn’t move, but I felt the hopeless scream and bitter tears held just barely beneath the surface.

I saw — no, I felt — years pass for Daniel as though they were seconds, as though no one was really there to experience them, as though he were living his life in the third person. As though he were waiting for something to happen, for his life to finally begin. I watched his twenties disappear, his thirties mostly evaporate, only to die here, in this moment, so that Dani could finally live.

The immensity of it overwhelmed me, threatened to drown me. For a long time — was it minutes, hours, an eternity? — I rocked back and forth on my knees, tears streaming down my face, howls of guilt and grief clawing their way out of my miserable, tortured soul. I had failed him. I had left him alone to survive in a ruthless, desolate desert for decades, and now I had to let him go? 

I felt him drifting away from me. Where at first he had been inside me, then next to me, now he stood at the far side of the room. Hesitant, still racked with guilt and grief at having failed him for so long, I asked Daniel if he wanted to say anything before he left. He said only that he was at peace. That what he wanted was for Dani to truly live

Then he disappeared forever, leaving his clothes and memories all around me. 

In his place, seated next to me on the sofa, sat Dani. She felt new, shy, and unsure of herself. But her heart fluttered and beat in ways Daniel’s never had. I felt her aliveness keenly, like a new pain. I put my hand tentatively over hers and said, “Well, I guess it’s just you and me now, Dani.” 

The days and months since my rebirth have been utterly unlike those that came before. In ways that I doubt I will ever be able to put into words, I feel alive — terribly, wonderfully, vulnerably alive. My life isn’t suddenly perfect, all peaches and cream. Rather, I finally feel that I’m actually living it — with all of the good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, that comes with that — rather than watching it pass me by, filtered through a haze of dissociation and depression.

I intuitively understood what I had experienced as a spiritual rebirth. Like Alma and Paul, I was racked with torment and harrowed up by memory, tortured with bitter guilt at the consequences of my actions. But beyond that, the similarity was surprising. Unlike them, I hadn’t committed any serious sins (at least nothing that orthodox Mormonism would understand as such). On the contrary, I had lived as a devout, faithful Mormon all my life, trusting this would save me. Why, then, had I felt like I was walking in the dark, to be shown the light only when I came out as transgender? What’s more, I struggled to understand how coming out as trans could ever be an instance of Christian rebirth if the whole concept of transgender identity is considered a violation of Mormon orthodoxy.

Wrestling with these questions has profoundly altered my understanding of the plan of salvation. What my story shares with Alma’s and Paul’s is that, through rebirth, each of us became a better version of ourselves. I feel the grief and regret of lost years every day, a sentiment both Alma and Paul echo. We spent years living like the dead, our true selves fast asleep, until we “put off [the] old self,” and were “made new in the attitude of [our] minds.”1

Thanks to my experience of being born again, I now understand that what our Heavenly Parents want for Their children is to thrive. To truly live. To make choices and mistakes, to learn from everything and everyone and to grow kinder, wiser, softer, and stronger along the way. God wants us to develop into the best versions of ourselves — the person They see we can become. Jesus taught that those who follow Him will not walk in darkness, but enjoy the light of life. Everything that guides us out of darkness and toward a fuller degree of wholeness and life is a step along our individual paths toward Christ and the kind of eternal life our Heavenly Parents want for us.

Having tasted a greater fullness of joy, I hope to live each day with courage, not fear — in honor of the pain and lost years it took to get to where I am — and to inspire others to do the same.

Life since coming out has given me a new appreciation for Jesus’ teaching that “if your eye be single, your whole body shall be full of light.”2 The Greek word the KJV translates as “single” is “haplous.” It has many possible related meanings in this context, including whole, healthy, sincere, without guile, authentic, true to oneself, and wholehearted. The Master is trying to teach us that living authentically, wholeheartedly — true to the unique, divine identity within us — will fill us with light. And if we continue on this path, that light will “grow brighter and brighter until the perfect day.” It turns out we don’t have to repress core parts of our identity in order to qualify for salvation. The truth is quite the contrary.

My coming-out experience made it abundantly clear that I could not be whole, nor experience a fulness of life, without discovering and wholeheartedly embracing my gender identity. While I do not wish to speak for others, I believe this applies to queerness in general. Jesus came “that [we] might have life, and that [we] might have it more abundantly.”3 Coming out, for many queer Mormons, leads to greater authenticity and wholeness, not less, and is therefore an essential step in the fulfillment of their Heavenly Parents’ plan for their salvation. 

This conclusion stands in stark contrast to orthodox Mormonism today, which views coming out as a step away from “the covenant path.” As a religious community, we urgently need the more expansive, inclusive view of the plan of salvation I have tried to describe. Yet this insight (as with so many others) stems from queer experience and identity. How can we deepen our understanding if the voices we most need to hear are being systematically excluded? 

I long for a Mormon theology that is big enough to accommodate queer Saints, but I feel we need far more than that. We need a theology that not only doesn’t exclude but that actively invites queerness — not as a nuisance to be tolerated but as an essential part of the Restoration of All Things. What strides could we take as a religious community if queer spiritual experiences and perspectives shaped our theology? For instance, what valuable insights into the nature of intimacy and partnership might our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers offer? What truths about gender might our fellow nonbinary and gender fluid Saints see that we, perceiving through gendered eyes, cannot?

Ultimately, if we are to build a Zion community, we will need the contributions of every member of the body of Christ. When we discourage others from living true to themselves, we deprive them and the entire community of their unique gifts. I have often wondered why the third steward in the parable of the talents buried what they had been given rather than making use of it as the other two did. Jesus’ explanation for this steward’s failure to reach their potential was that they were “afraid.” Perhaps their difficulty was not slothfulness, as I was taught to believe as a child. Instead, perhaps it was fear that their contribution would be rejected or condemned. If we wish to benefit from the wealth of gifts that our God has bestowed on each of Their children, we must first liberate ourselves and one another from the fear that we will be rejected for wholeheartedly embracing what we have been given.

Having tasted a greater fullness of joy, I hope to live each day with courage, not fear — in honor of the pain and lost years it took to get to where I am — and to inspire others to do the same. But I also live in the hope that my fellow Saints will recognize the profound life and joy my queerness brings me. One day, perhaps they will feel secure enough to treasure the wisdom of my queer siblings, and we will all walk to Zion together. 

Dani Blatter teaches earth science at a community college in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys playing Dungeons and Dragons in her spare time.

NOTES:
1. Ephesians 4:22-24
2. Matthew 6:22
3. John 10:10

Born Again: Transgender Insights on Spiritual Rebirth

ARTIST STATEMENT

Alis Propiis Volta

Digital Illustration

“Alis Propiis Volta” is the former motto of Oregon, meaning “she [Oregon] flies with her own wings.” I created this piece during a spell of depression incurred by this failed flight of an idea in a strange season of my life when incrementally I turned from “the covert of [God’s] wings” (Psalm 61:4). I put my “trust in man,” I made “flesh [my] arm” (2 Nephi 28:31). In a sense, I tried to fly with my own wings in a direction I should not have gone. I found this flight quickly tangled and strangled. This piece is a portrayal of my putting to rest this idea that I can get anywhere right and true without the help and direction of God. But it also portrays a step in the right direction, a turning back to rejoicing “in the shadow of [God’s] wings” (Psalm 63:7). That with every sunset of failed anythings, there’s a sunrise to meet it to help heal my heart and urge me forward.Jessica Sarah Beach
jessicasarahbeachart.com
@jessicabeach143

“How Do You Say Thank You?” by Cynthia W. Connell

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