Coming out has been a
long, painful, cathartic and ultimately very rewarding process. I will start
with my conversion – itself a process with full of coincidence and comedy, and
in the end God “got me” with his sense of humor.
Several times in my
youth people shared the Gospel with me using the old standard Billy Graham
“Steps to Peace with God” tract and I remember each one very clearly from 8
years old at a friend’s home up to and including the time I was riding with a
friend in a loaner car while his new Toyota truck was in for repair and we
found a copy of said tract in the glove box. We, being college-age smart-alecs,
made a mockery of it by crossing out “God” and putting in “Toyota”, references
to Jesus we changed to “your Toyota dealer” and several other things that made
it hilarious and over the years we have laughed about it heartily. Sometimes I
still do because this is how God woke me up to his existence in my life, all my
life, all the way back through all those encounters with godly people and that
little booklet – and may I say that it is still God’s sense of humor that
endears me to him the most because we can laugh together – me with God. Go
figure, laughing like school-children together hand-in-hand with God instead of
at Him.
I would never have
believed it possible until one Saturday afternoon in April of 1980 I was sitting alone in my
apartment recovering from the previous day’s extreme drug abuse. I was a person
deeply troubled by many issues that have only in the last few years become
clear and some diagnosed and treated. I was severely ADHD and also it turns out
transgender. In my struggles to cope I had turned to drugs for escape, to feel
like I could be someone else, someone with some inner peace. Though the drugs
always fell short of that goal it was the best I could do on my own to cope
with being female on the inside and so obviously male on the outside and so
screwed up in life; that inner turmoil never giving me any peace and always
messing up my life at just the wrong moments – what a wretch I was. That
Saturday I knew that without a doubt I was lost and without hope in the world
after the bender I had been on, and then…
>knock,knock,knock<
Two people at my door
with a survey. It turned out to be a Campus Crusade for Christ survey being
used by a local home based Church near my home. I invited them in and got them
cokes to drink because it was a very warm So. Calif. day and they looked kind
of worn out. We sat and I took the survey and we became friends as we laughed
about stuff and made small-talk too. Just as they were getting ready to leave –
Sandra asked if she could share a little book about the Gospel with me and out
came that little Billy Graham booklet!
…Oh
no! It couldn't be...
You know that sinking
kinda feeling you get when you are busted with your hand in the cookie jar or
when you know you are really caught in something wrong? Well, it was in that
moment that God got me and I knew it. In that same instant I knew God and Jesus
were real and in my life and had always been there just waiting for me to look
them in the eye and believe, and I could feel them laughing and saying
“gotcha!” So I promised to come to the Church meeting the following weekend, I
did and I met lots of nice folks and made some friends and I seemed to fit in.
Then a few weeks later I went to their big service, called the Rally, where all
the home churches met and heard the Pastor preach and during that message I was
convinced of my sin and need for salvation. I wanted to belong to Jesus with
all my heart so I rushed forward and that night I put my trust in the Lord –
that was May 4th 1980. I still have the recording of that sermon and
I listen to it from time to time.
As a newbie I got
involved in lots of stuff in the Church and continued to feel welcome and
wanted, after a few years I even got married to a girl I met there and had 2
sons (who I was just reunited with earlier this year after being apart for many
years). But as the euphoria of being newly saved wore off I became more and
more aware of my old inner gender turmoil and the struggle with what I now know
to be ADHD. Being unable to stay focused in times of stress and feeling like I
was holding on to and keeping down a big dark blob in my soul pressed on me to
the point I felt like maybe I wasn’t really “saved”. During that time my gay
brother passed away from complications of AIDS – Kaposi’s lesions all the way
into his lungs – it was an ugly death and the only “comfort” I got from the
Pastor was being told (I paraphrase but this is the very gist of it) “Don’t
feel too bad because you know he chose that lifestyle, so why don’t you pass
out Gospel tracts at the funeral” (And I even did it – what a snot I was in
those days).
As a result there was
a lot of inner turmoil, doubt, self-hatred and self-loathing in my life and
drugs started to become an escape from feeling again because I could no longer
find help or understanding in the Church where, for a while I had even been the
poster-child of “salvation from the evils of cross-dressing”. But still I towed
the line of the Church and stayed very busy with the work and even participated
in the Church’s reparative therapy sessions to no avail. But there came a day
that I was thrown out of that church for disagreeing with the Pastor on a point
of scripture – at least this was the proverbial last-straw – he wanted to sue
another Church because some people had left our Church and started going to
that other one and then started bad-mouthing us as being a cult and stuff like
that. (Sadly much of what they said was true but I never mentioned I harbored
such thoughts to anyone in those days but it weighed on my soul because I felt
conflicted by it). I said we should not sue them but the Pastor twisted the
words in Corinthians to imply that because they left us they were lost and not
truly Christians or truly a Church and therefore they could be sued without
violating Scripture. I disagreed, saying that we ought to be able to turn the
other cheek and not air our dirty laundry in the courts. And it was about a
week later I got a letter from the Church’s Associate Pastor dropping me from
the Church and barring me from ever attending there again. That was the very same
day my father died from Alzheimer’s disease and Lung Cancer. The Pastors knew I
was struggling with this but cut me loose after 14 years of my faithful,
obedient and zealous service without mercy or compassion.
I discovered that the
love of God was no longer there in that place and that hurt to the core of my
being. I felt so used and abused. My life hit the skids then because I lost any
and all of my spiritual moorings, though somehow God kept hold of me even through
the very depths of depravity to which I sank, and it was a very long and deep
darkness.
Crash and burn.
Over the next decade,
among many other disasters, I got busted for drug possession, my marriage
failed, my children were taken away out of state in contempt of court and I
could not afford the lawyers to stop it over the Christmas holiday. So I died
another death in my soul, and my life became more and more riddled with drug
abuse to the point of destitution and homelessness.
I learned to hate the
Church and hate people who proclaimed the gospel but showed no mercy to people
they didn’t know or understand – like I myself had done for many years in that
Church preaching on the streets of Los Angeles, Hollywood and West Hollywood –
preaching fire and brimstone messages in front of the clubs and sex shops even
while knowing that I might be hurting some of the hearers. I learned to openly
hate myself and everything about my life because I felt I was living a total
lie. And yet there in my deepest despair was God trying to love me – He never
did let go of me – while I was yet sinning and ruining my life more and more.
Then finally I got
help for my mental disorder – a demonstrably life-long Christian relative (I
call her my Catholic angel – the only person in my life who did not simply
write me off) got me to see a therapist and that is how I found out that I
wasn’t crazy or just cursed by God but had a diagnosable condition, severe
adult ADHD that was to some extent treatable and I got the help I needed for
the anxiety and depressions and panic I suffered with. Then with some clarity
of mind I was finally able to address my gender dysphoria. Knowing that I
wasn’t crazy allowed me to understand that in being Transgender God had given
me a gift and not a curse.
It took many years
after this for me to heal enough and forgive enough – myself and others – to
get back to Church, to trust a Pastor, or a congregation, and I must say I
still distrust many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, especially those who run
large, I call them “industrial strength”, super-churches because they leave so
many people with so many wrong ideas about God and Love and mercy and
compassion. But I have found my way back into a Church and a congregation that
has fully embraced me. Finding my way back to faith enabled me to come out
fully to the world around me and begin my transition in earnest.
Being transgender is
how I was lovingly formed in the womb with the full intentions of my loving
God. God does not make mistakes and does everything because he is Love.
Therefore I was not and am not a mistake!! God loves me the way He made me! I
am very much made in the image of God! Accepting myself this way was like being
born-again a second time.
God rushed back into
my life because now I could worship Him in Spirit and in TRUTH; the whole,
contiguous me was no longer divided with self-loathing, there was no longer any
dark “evil” blob to keep hidden deep in my soul because that was actually the
very best part of me being kept down by hurtful dogma and tradition. The lie I had
been trying to live all those years was gone. There was just me and God holding
hands and laughing again because I was really free to be me!! I didn’t have to
hide the best part of me from God or anyone anymore. Talk about a revival of
body, soul and spirit.
Eva Unchained!
To be whole and
complete and free before God and man! Even the need for drug abuse faded away –
7 years clean now - because I have nothing to hide and no need to run away from
myself anymore and in the place of the running and hiding I get to celebrate my
freedom with God. In this reconciliation of myself-as-created with the
God-who-never-let-me-go I get to be God’s girl now and I am privileged to share
God’s love with people I meet. In don’t have to judge but only share the love.
Though I am disabled –
in part I am sure from trying to live the wrong life for so long as all the
fear, hiding and shame surely took their toll – now I am a volunteer activist
here in the Riverside, Calif. area for LGBT, civil and human rights for all and
also as an activist for Faith without Prejudice and I get to work and speak out
for justice; I do what I can, when I can and somehow God gets me through the
days when I can’t. This past November at
my Church (First Congregational Church, Riverside – an Open and Affirming UCC
member congregation) I organized our 2nd annual Transgender Day of
Remembrance observance and we will keep it up every year. And I occasionally
get to speak about my life and better still I sometimes get the opportunity to
preach the Gospel and that is my most favorite thing to do because it is so
awesome to know that God’s truth is being spoken through me – me this quirky,
shy, nerdy, sometimes very disoriented and fragmented trans-woman gets to feel
God’s inspiration writing the words and then nervously (because I still have a
lot of anxiety and hypertension) stand up to preach them and feel the Holy Spirit
flow through me as I do. I understand now how Scripture in some places was
inspired because I have experienced it.
I hope one day to be
able to take this message of God’s love for every person he created back to the
Fundamentalists who actually did lead me into my living relationship with God
back in May of 1980. I know the main Church is still there in Downtown LA
because I have walked past it on several occasions while changing buses on a
nearby corner and seen the faces of a few people I used to call friends in that
other life I tried to live.
I don’t know what
their focus or ethos is now, but based on what I know of them from my time there
from May 4th 1980 until June of 1995 this is what I would say to
them (and I believe I hear the Spirit of God saying “Amen”):
Please
keep zealously loving God and each other, but don’t put God in the narrow box
that the old traditions would have you do because it shuts out so much and so
many that God is creating now, new, perfect and complete. God has made the World
and the Universe completely diverse and God is continuing to do so with the Human
Race – there is no gender binary in God’s creation just as there is no binary
in the spectrum of light. There is a whole range of beauty and blessing in
every shade and hue of humanity, so let ALL the people bloom. Each person,
whether straight, gay, lesbian, bi or whatever ones attractions, and
transgender folks – also a whole range of gender diversity and expression unto
themselves – should be accepted openly and fully into the family of God. Every
living soul should be allowed to live openly the way God made them, even if you
don’t understand them or understand how such a one can be ”that” way.
Simply
let God understand them and you pass on His love to them.
Trying
to force someone to change their nature is like trying to force the leopard to
change her spots – it can’t be done without killing the leopard. Be instruments
of God’s love and inclusion to all humans, so that, if they will, they can come
and drink freely of the water of life. Don’t pick and choose among people and don’t
hinder any of these little ones from coming! Don’t choke out the Good News!
That narrow and judgmental view of people and of what is misconstrued as
“choice” that you call “truth” is really only a tool of the Devil used to
spiritually and emotionally clobber people and keep them away from salvation, and
it generates so much anger and confusion, pain and resentment – and results in death
in many cases – in the process. Please let that all go! Rise to a higher level
of spiritual awakening that includes every living soul.
Please
for Christ’s sake let it all go. Let healing and reconciliation take its
place. Please. In Jesus’ name I pray.
Hugs and Blessings,
Eva-Genevieve! Scarborough
