As I looked out at the desert, hundreds of thousands of people just like me in complete silence as the sun was setting. We all wore brown parkas, hoodies over our heads and our heads were pointed down towards the sand. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop, you could hear the rustling of the sand in the wind. Everyone standing silently, suffering in desperate and quiet shame and guilt. No one dare speak to another yet we were all huddled together. You could not see anyone’s face, all were hanging low. All were facing away from the setting sun, all of us standing eastward toward the darkness of the night. We were all there because of the same reason.
I lifted my head, the sand that gathered on my hoodie fell to my shoulders and back to the desert floor. I turned around to witness the sea of silent desperation. Hundreds of thousands of transgender people all with their heads hung low wearing brown parkas, silently suffering.
I know their pain. I am one of them.
Next to me was a small tree stump, I climbed onto it, then turned back to face the countless number of people. Then at the top of my lungs screamed “God, my God, why have you not heard their prayers to take this away from them? My prayers? You have seen them suffer, why do you not even speak a single word of healing over even one of them? Why have you forsaken all of us?”
With that I woke up.
This dream I had a few years ago was a visual illustration of what I had experienced and noticed from the countless stories I read of others: they were trapped. Being trapped, meant being scared, being filled with silent low-level anger and attempting to cope with each day…each hour…of the unspoken, internal misery.
We tried to pray it away. As you can see, God never answered our prayers. Never. Not one single prayer.
We tried to cast out demons in prayer groups. No demons were ever cast out because there are no demons to be cast out. It was a folly of human belief to think demons needed to be cast out of a person when there are no demons in the equation.
We tried alcohol to numb the pain. It worked for a few hours. But more alcohol was needed to kill the ever-increasing pain. Then one day, even a half a bottle of whisky didn’t make a dent in the pain of the internal, silent hell.
We tried everything to deny who we really are to avoid the public exhuming of our souls if we ever admitted the truth.
We are not delusional, we are not anyone’s agenda, we are people with hearts and minds just like anyone else.
We transitioned to live. Finally live. Finally thrive.
But when we suddenly find our quiet and attempting-to-blend-in-to-society lives being used against us as political pawns for someone else’s fear-based gain, we fight back. We stand up. We say “enough”.
Do you expect us to roll over and be quiet as a small number of powerful religious and political groups attempt to erase our lives and contributions as citizens from our beloved United States of America? No.
Hell no.
Yes there is a gender revolution, we choose life over death. THAT is the “revolution”.
We choose to live. We choose to thrive.
God wanted us to live to be our real selves, that’s why He didn’t answer our prayers to remove the transgender from us. He wanted us to live the life He authored authentically. He wants us to thrive.
He made us transgender, that’s why He never answered our prayers to “cast away” being this way.
He accepts us as the very person He formed in the womb. Can you accept us all the same?
#GenderRevolution