I realized my attraction to females (I’m AFAB, or “assigned female at birth”) when I was 16 years old, and then realized I was FTM transgender when I was 19 years old. I was raised Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, so I believed that being LGBTQ+ was a choice and a sin, and that if someone was LGBTQ+, they were living in sin until they had enough faith in God to repent and change.

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I’ve known that there was something “different” about me ever since kindergarten. But it wasn’t until my sophomore year of college (at a conservative Evangelical university) that I finally looked in a mirror and said the words “I’m gay” out loud.

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I first put the pieces together during my senior spring at Wheaton College. There had been a lot of pieces I'd been thoroughly ignoring because I had been maliciously identified as "the gay kid" in middle school well before I was ready to embrace being different. The other boys had essentially said "Peter is different from us, therefore he is gay, therefore he is worthless", so I made it my mission to prove they were wrong.

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Picture this: A studious, driven Christian girl spends 18 years studying to get into Ivy League schools. She not only gets in, but also thrives within rigorous academic environments, and earns engineering and law degrees. She cultivates a strong faith and leads praise dance ministry and church Bible study groups…But when this 29-year-old Jesus-loving virgin, anxiously awaiting Christian Prince Charming, instead meets a sporty and funny Jewish girl, falls accidentally in love and comes out to her family, everyone really gets thrown for a loop… 

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“Lauren, you’re not a lesbian.” My friend finished her sentence and I stared into my hands to avoid her eyes. I knew if I looked up, her gaze would be kind and compassionate, but I felt my own eyes sting as the blood rushed to my cheeks. My face turned crimson with the deep shame and embarrassment that I felt knowing that she knew what I was hiding. “You’re not a lesbian,” she repeated. She was right. I wasn’t a lesbian. I was actually bisexual, but didn’t have the vocabulary or anyone in my life who fit that description to explain my “conflicting” feelings.

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