I wasn’t really asking the right question the other day, I think. My real question was am I inevitably damned if I come out and transition and be gay instead of settling into the straight cis marriage-and-kids like the church wants?
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You’re not inevitably damned for choosing truth over a lie, for embracing the wonder and complexity of God’s creation over repression. I know intimately that reconciling any sort of gay or trans identity with church teachings is such a hard and painful process, and I’m so sorry you’re wrestling with that right now.
One of my favorite verses, one that I come back to a lot, and one that i think is relevant in thinking through stuff like this is Micah 6:8: “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
“Do justice” — does living in a state of constant repression, unable to express core parts of your being, forcing yourself to inhabit a social position that is toxic to you, do these things do justice to yourself? do they do justice to those around you? Would it not be more just to accept and live into the uniqueness in which God made you?
“Love kindness” — Forcing yourself to inhabit a particular position in a sexual or gendered system is as profoundly unkind as it is unjust, both to yourself and to those around you. You are animated by the breath of the Divine, and no less than anybody else you deserve kindness, from yourself as well as from others. Would it be kind to somebody else if you were to force them to live as something that they fundamentally are not? Would it be kindness to seek to destroy the spark of individuality within them? You have this obligation to yourself no less than to them. And those in authority positions have that obligation to you, and they are failing it. They are rejecting both kindness and justice when they portray this social arrangement as the only righteous one.
“Walk humbly with your God” — They are also rejecting humility. To approach the Divine with nothing but that which you are, in all the complexities of your self, is the only way to truly walk humbly with God. It is not humility but rather presumptuousness to approach God having already decided what parts of creation should be rejected, having projected certain social arrangements onto God. They are demanding that you walk subserviently with them; your responsibility is to walk humbly with God.
God knows you. Not through the mediation of identities and social arrangements, but directly, better than anybody else could know you, better than you can know yourself. And when God says that God loves you — when God says God loves any of us! — that love is not the advance love of a finished product, a love that will materialize as soon as we become something lovable. God knows you, and God loves what God knows.
You’re allowed to live as the person God knows you to be, the person God loves.