A note before you read: this exchange is raw, and I've made a couple of minor edits to remove identifying details. I've also renamed the person I was corresponding with — I'll call her Ella. But this is a good example of the kinds of conversations I was having in the weeks after I came out, as I and my family and friends were all working through what this meant. Not every hard conversation came from a place of hostility. Some of the hardest ones came from people who loved me.
A few weeks after I came out publicly, I got a letter from Ella — someone connected to my family, someone who had sent me a genuinely kind message of support when I first came out. I had written to thank her. And then she wrote back.
She had just returned from a charismatic healing conference in the midwest. She'd seen things there she described as miraculous. And she wanted to ask me something, carefully, hoping it wouldn't offend.
Hi, Maddie,
Since you have been so open about your process I'm hoping the following will not be offensive to you. If it is, please forgive me.
Just came back from an Inner Healing conference where the Holy Spirit was doing a miraculous work of restoration in people. Did you ever come in contact with anyone who was involved in a charismatic teaching and prayer ministry like that? The foundational thought is that if God is the Creator, nothing is impossible for Him; He can re-order and bring integration between our inner and outer being. I do remember that you said you had prayed to God from when you were little asking Him for help. What I'm talking about is something altogether different than anything I was taught about praying.
All the best of everything to you,
Ella
I want to be fair to Ella here. She was not being cruel. She genuinely believed she was offering me something. And she was right that I had prayed to God from the time I was little — desperately, consistently, for years. She just had a different theory about what the answer to that prayer might look like.
Here is what I wrote back.
Hi Ella,
I think maybe what you're talking about is that there might be a kind of prayer that might bring healing to me and help me to be comfortable having a male body. Am I right?
I don't deny that perhaps that's possible, although I'm not sure this would be my preferred approach now because this is really no longer my objective. I don't think there's anything wrong with being trans anymore.
I've now come to the point actually where I believe God has answered my childhood (and lifelong) prayer, perhaps just not in the way I might have expected. He has given me a loving life partner, a completely supportive family, an overwhelmingly supportive community, access to some of the best health care available to people like me, and the opportunity to live in one of the best places in the world when it comes to people accepting and loving people like me.
He has provided a path for me, and brought me out of despair. I feel like it's possible I'm just starting to live the life I am destined to live.
In any case I'm definitely interested in hearing more about your experiences. Please tell me more about this.
Best,
Maddie
Ella responded graciously, and made clear she wasn't judging. But she pressed a little. She described a God who could "make a shorter leg grow to be as long as the other." She said she just wanted me to be happy.
I wrote back again. And this is where I had a harder time staying gentle.
Hi Ella,
I guess what's hard for me is just that you're not the only one that has suggested that maybe if I just pray harder, or in a different way, I could be healed miraculously. That perhaps I was just doing something wrong for all those years, and that if I just prayed in a certain way using special words, or invoked a special feeling or spiritual focus, it would work for real this time.
To be honest, if I could be miraculously healed it would be the same prayer as any girl in my situation. To bring my body in alignment with my spirit rather than bring my mind into alignment with my body. This is a body thing for me, not a mind thing. I have always felt my body as not doing what should be normal for me.
It's as if we are saying God created someone born with a cleft palate and that the problem isn't the palate — it's that the mind of the person needs to be corrected to just accept it. That's really easy for those of us without a cleft palate to say when our own face is as we expect it to be. Nobody tells that person to pray harder to accept the face they were born with instead of seek a safe and well proven path to correct it medically. They go to the doctor, and they live a happier life for it.
I know you mean well and truly want to help. I guess I don't feel I need prayerful help in accepting myself as a man. But I would welcome prayer that others might be able to see past the man they think I'm supposed to be, and that I'd have patience in dealing with that.
This is a topic I clearly have a hard time with.
Maddie
Ella's last reply was short. She said she had no judgment one way or the other. That she just wanted me to be happy, whatever that looked like.
I believed her. I still do.
What I didn't know how to say to her then, and what I understand better now, is that "just pray harder" is its own kind of answer, and it's an answer that places the burden entirely on the person already carrying the most weight. It says: the problem is not what you think it is. The problem is how you're thinking about the problem.
I had done that for thirty-some years. I had prayed to be different. I had prayed to be easier for everyone around me. I had prayed to want what I was supposed to want.
God didn't answer those prayers. I think now that's because they were the wrong prayers. Not prayers for me — prayers against me, on behalf of everyone else's comfort.
What I think we need more of is people willing to pray that God bring their own minds to a place of believing trans people. Of accepting them for who they are.
As I now believe God already does.