By Connor Lālea Hampton, March 25, 2025
I’ve prayed to be something else for a long time now.
I’ve prayed to the alleged honey-soaked walls of my chapel and came up with nothing except for the bitterness in my throat. I think about the different person I could be if I ever succumbed to that sweet, sticky love that is Christian hate for anything queer.
Sunday is when I swallow my self-respect to sing hymns in “too low of an octave for a girl like me” and try to bury down the parts of myself who feel like they’re decaying. During the week, I act like it never happened.
But all I can think about are the other transgender people like me who are still trapped.
I’m not asking for a miracle, ironically, but it’s as if I’m talking to a wall. My family has spent the past year of my gender transition mourning me. I roam the rooms of my house, and I feel like a ghost. My mom turns cold when I can’t hit the notes I used to sing. I feel like a stranger in my own bathroom. I don’t look up when I’m brushing my teeth because I don’t appear in the mirror. I know all I’ll see is the guy pretending to be a girl so his parents don’t feel bad anymore.
“It’s not like I’m going to kill myself or anything,” I told my parents when I finally opened up about starting hormone replacement therapy, a treatment aimed at helping my body achieve more masculine characteristics.
I suppose that was my way of separating myself as one of the “reasonable” transgender people who don’t succumb to their feelings and relies on logic, like we’re so often expected to do.
The truth is, like anyone else, I’m all emotions. I’m sensitive, I get nervous easily and I get angry fast. I talk loud when I’m passionate, and I say rude things bluntly without meaning to. Still, I rejected everything I felt that day to keep my parents from imagining the worst.
The reason for this was my religion.
I grew up as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, previously known as Mormon. I was the sort of devotee who wouldn’t even let myself jaywalk, despite it becoming legal. Coming out as transgender was probably one of the most shocking things my family experienced, but I knew the toughest part wasn’t about their reactions. It would be how my church responded.
I’ve already had certain privileges at church taken away from me, offered only as something to be regained if I detransition. For example, I wasn’t allowed to be a camp counselor in my teen years. More severely, I lost my “temple recommend,” a coveted slip of paper that signifies you’re in good standing with the church and considered spiritually clean. This also bars me from certain religious ceremonies that would be otherwise vital for getting me into the highest parts of heaven.
I’m constantly walking the line between who I am and who my church wishes I could be. Living like this solicits a sense of fear and isolation that weighs down on my daily life.
I fear that eventually my identity could be completely erased. I fear that if I die unexpectedly, my gravestone won’t have my name on it. I fear that as my family learns more about my identity, our relationship will continue to deteriorate, all because of the harmful ideologies pushing us apart.
This isn’t just a personal feeling. It’s the story of so many of us. There are many Christian churches that aren’t like this at all. Still, this is too often how Christianity treats transgender people, and the harm is far too great to justify any positive outcome.
Theological arguments against transgenderism claim their motivations are to solidify the family unit, and yet, it’s just too good at tearing it apart.
There is this idea that by allowing transgender people to exist, families will distort into chaos. Children won’t know what’s up and down, or what it means to be a boy or girl.
However, this idea misses the truth: the diversity of gender identity does not weaken families. It is the exclusion and rejection caused by a rigid and inflexible view of gender that creates harmful standards and large emotional rifts.
Families and churches could provide unconditional support to transgender individuals. Instead, members have to choose between their faith and a loved one’s identity. The walls I pray to are the walls erected between me and the people I love, and in our current political climate, these walls get higher every day.
I ask, and I implore other Christians to ask: “Is this what Jesus would want?”
In many religious communities, there is no space for someone like me. I am constantly sitting in the front pew to the erasure of my identity. It starts with my church’s policies that seek to actively exclude me and tell me I’m committing a grave sin by even changing my name or cutting my hair. It ends with my family too devastated to accept my transition.
Praying to a wall, praying to be something else — that’s what it feels like some days. Transgender people shouldn’t have to fight to be seen. Transgender people shouldn’t have to fight themselves versus who their church wants them to be. Christians, despite any policy or belief, should feel deeply unsettled by our pain as bystanders.
The truth is, I cannot keep praying to a wall. The silence is suffocating. This constant rejection is in no way a sustainable way to live, and I cannot wait for change to happen on its own.
Churches and families must open not only their doors, but their hearts to transgender people. Religious leaders must challenge their perspectives and recognize how much transgender individuals are worth their respect. It’s only through this we can create a world where no one must pray to be something else but can simply be who they are.
Feature image by Connor Lālea Hampton
