I don’t post a lot of personal stuff, but I want to put this out there.
Hi. My name is Ellis. I use they/them pronouns. I’m genderfluid and transmasc and oriented aroace. I like to joke that my gender is yeah and my sexuality is maybe. I was born and raised Mormon.
All growing up my religion, and my relationship with God was incredibly important to me. If you aren’t religious it’s probably hard to understand how important it was. But it was everything to me. It was my community. It was the foundation of my beliefs, and my morality. It was my identity. It was my friends. It was my family. It was doing activities during the week and having fun practicing with the ward choir and getting up at 5:30 am for early morning seminary and reading the Book of Mormon every night with my family. It was following certain dietary rules because it was healthier, but also because it symbolized my relationship to God. It was praying, asking questions and getting answers, and more than anything, it was feeling God’s love for me.
When I realized I was queer, it was praying to God, and knowing that he loves me as I am. It was finding the queerstake community, and working through my internalized homophobia. It was believing with every fiber of my being that President Nelson was going to change things so that queer people could live happily with the church, that first general conference after I came out to myself.
When I came out to my parents, it was the thing I clung to desperately, as I was met with unacceptance, and the insistence that I had been led astray by the world.
When I told them that I wanted to transition, my faith is what they shattered.
I told them that I was certain that this is what God wanted for me. That I had felt the spirit, and received personal revelation that it is what I’m meant to do.
They told me that what I felt was not of God. That it was Satan deceiving me. And that broke me. Because if what I felt wasn’t of God, neither was anything else, from the day I attended my cousin’s baptism, and at 7 years old decided I wanted to be a member of the church.
Maybe it seems silly, that that was what broke everything. I think it just might’ve been a long time coming from the way they treated me.
When I came out to them, they sent me to an lds therapist they thought would fix me. They asked questions about my identity to try to prove me wrong. They called me an apostate for trying to wear pants to church. They keep my identity a secret from my siblings. They asked my little sister to spy on me. They have gone behind my back to see if my friends are queer. They interrogate me whenever I don’t behave the way they want me to. I think it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
When they shattered my faith….I’ve never been in as much pain as that caused me. I didn’t know anything at all. I was living in constant fear. I felt like I was dying. I almost killed myself. They had destroyed my very foundation. A huge part of my identity. Gone, in an instant. It felt like the emotional equivalent of losing a limb. Something important, that’s always been there suddenly and painfully removed, and never coming back.
I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive them.
There isn’t really a happy ending to this story. It’s started to get better. I’ve moved out. I’m finding spiritual fulfillment in other places. But I’m still mourning my old faith. It still hurts, that the religion that meant so much to me, the place that gave me so much joy and comfort, only gives me feelings of pain and loss now. That they took that from me.
I wish there was less of an all or nothing mentality with the church. Either it’s fake and you hate it and you were brainwashed into believing it, or it is the one true church and if you don’t believe you’re either wrong or of the devil. I wish there was more space for people like me. Who believed with all their hearts, and who acknowledge that it was incredibly important to them, but for one reason or another, have stepped away, or no longer believe.
So I’m making that space. If you want to talk about it, I’m all ears <3
