Ginger HawthorneDon’t start here! Start at the beginning!
CONTENT WARNING: Religion, religious trauma, self-hatred and thoughts of death
Free two-day shipping is, in many ways, a modern miracle. It builds on infrastructure that took centuries to build, paired with the exploitation of human labor that’s been going on far longer than that. It depends on incredibly complicated inventory management software, running on systems custom-built for this purpose, which drain the water supplies of entire communities. It requires a network of warehouses that employ entire towns, staffed with employees that are worked beyond the bone, in conditions that we wouldn’t leave our pets in. It saves us time and money, while also further enriching a billionaire who controls more wealth than the majority of the world’s population. It’s a complicated system that certainly embodies the notion that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism.
It’s also a really long time to wait.
Two days gave me a lot of time to think about what I was doing. To talk myself into it, and also talk myself out of it. To hype myself up and tear myself down. To marinate in a stew of contradictions and self-loathing. Self-loating is a special kind of hell, and confronting it is perhaps even worse. There are lots of ways to experience this and lots of reasons for it, so I’m going to explain a bit about my own background to help convey what I was fighting with. What I still fight with.
Don’t act so surprised; you knew this was coming.
I often say that I was raised six days a week in a Baptist church. I say it with a joking tone, but it’s not wrong. My family attended a Baptist church in rural Michigan, attending services since long before I was born. It was as certain and universal to me as gravity. It’s not hyperbole to say that for my earliest years, literally everyone I knew attended this church. We attended religiously (ha!), including Sunday school programs and evening service
Some years prior, the church had expanded to include a full K-12 private school using a cirriculum from Bob Jones University. It was small enough that some classrooms hosted three grades a time, under a single teacher. My mom taught one of those classrooms during the week. And that’s on top of her mom teaching religion to 2nd graders in another classroom on Sunday mornings.
In case that wasn’t enough, the church also hosted an Awana program during the school year, providing additional religious instruction on Wednesday nights for kids from pre-school through 6th grade. (It later expanded up to 12th grade as well.) The program also included physical activities and didn’t require parents to attend alongside their children, so it was a popular offering for kids outside the church as well, to get a couple hours to themselves every week. Oh, and my mom was in charge of the K-2 portion of it, while my dad was in charge of the entire program for all grades.
3 hours on Sunday morning, another hour on Sunday night, probably 6-7 hours every weekday, plus another 2 hours on Wednesday nights. I spent roughly 40 hours a week &emdash; a literal full-time job’s worth of time &emdash; inside this church building, from kindergarten through 3rd grade. I lay all this out to explain how pervasive their views were, before I get into exactly what those views were and why they’re important to the process of my transition.
This will be hard to describe, and it’ll be hard to understand for anyone who didn’t grow up with these ideas. But underneath the “God is love” message is a series of teachings that, when taken together, took me to an extremely dark place as a child. I’m writing this on my 44th birthday, and I’ve spent over 40 of those years dealing with the fallout from this doctrine. I think it’s easiest to list of the ideas that laid the groundwork for my own trauma. There were many more than this, but I’m trying to keep this concise.
Most of the people who hear this and internalize it will find hope in its message. But my childhood mind combined these ideas into a particular mindset that permeated the very fabric of my being:
You can already see how this might be… problematic. But all this was happening in my own mind, my own thoughts. I never talked to anyone about it, and nobody else talked about it either. So I just assumed everybody did the same thing. I seemed like the only logical conclusion to draw, and remember that this was repeatedly being drilled into my head, 40 hours a week, for years.
But it gets worse, because I still had one last piece of doctrine to incorporate into my worldview: salvation brings joy and peace. Nothing I was feeling felt peaceful or joyful. So I went back to be “saved” again and again and again. I went up for probably a dozen altar calls over the course of a few years, desperately wanting that feeling that everyone around me kept talking about. But it never came.
When I combined this with my logical interpretation of the rest of the theology, I could only come to one obvious conclusion: I didn’t hate myself enough. God wouldn’t love me because I loved myself too much. Every time I asked for salvation and never felt any change, I kept hating myself more and more and more. This was probably made a bit easier to do because of all the internalized transphobia, though of course I had no way to understand that at the time.
In high school, I left that church for a series of “non-denominational” churches that mostly still maintained the same basic theology, further reinforcing that it was the “right” way to be. I was increasingly distancing myself from church for the next 20 years, but I didn’t fully walk away until 2024, well into my transition.
Anyway, all of this was affecting my state of mind as I waited for the skirt to arrive. After all, I had committed myself to a behavior that was absolutely considered a sin by every church I had ever attended, and that’s hard enough to shake on its own. I was also doing it in hopes that I might feel better about myself and my body, and that kind of self-worth was a form of selfishness in my mind, which had been in direct opposition to my idea of salvation for nearly 40 years.
I tried to counter this by repeatedly pulling up that picture of Billy Porter at the Oscars. It almost became a mantra of sorts. I needed to continually remind myself what a destination could look like in order to maintain the journey, especially in spite of the ever-growing self-hatred. If I stopped to focus on what was right in front of me, I wouldn’t see anything of value.
But ultimately, the only thing that kept me going at this stage was E and my promise to show them that they don’t need to live their life for other people. I was already used to hating myself, and I could tolerate making it worse if it meant I could improve my child’s wellbeing. So I was still committed to moving forward, despite knowing the toll it was likely to take on my state of mind.
But you can already see some of the major conflicts I would face for the entirety of my journey.