I grew up in a very religious home. I know that that’s something that we all say, but when I say religion was family I really do mean it. Mormonism, in the communities it is in, is something that digs in deep, digs in generationally, and makes sure that it has rooted when it spreads. And Mormonism, in particular, is a very hard religion to grow up in when you can sense that you have the wrong body, when you know your attraction and your gender are not the ones you are meant to have.
Mormonism shares a lot with most evangelical or fundamentalist Christianity in the specific ways it terrorizes our bodies: it essentializes gender into patriarchal man and woman, claims ownership over women’s bodies, and seeks to claim gender and sex as the same, as definitive, and as subservient to Man.
People who have a passing pop culture understanding of Mormonism often know about the history of polygamy in the church, and the ways in which it impressed itself upon indigenous people in a similar way to other churches. Many of them, in fact, would even call it a cult, either from hearing ex-mormons talk about it or simply from cultural knowledge, but few are really aware of what it means.
When I return home now, or when I lived there, the images on the wall were not ones of Christ or of any religious leaders - they were of Mormon leaders. When they speak, Mormon leaders do not often refer back to any kind of deity figure, but to each other. Obedience was the primary value that a person could hold, to the point where it is in my old Hawaiian middle name.
Because of all of this, growing up Mormon is a childhood focused around creating an identity of mormonism–to be a good Mormon you must be dependent on the church socially, emotionally, fiscally, and even romantically. Your life is planned for you from the start, and the illusion of “choice” is only given to you at key points to push you more and more into a certain direction. 8 year olds are given a “choice” of whether to be baptized into the church, without any option to say no. Boys at ages 12, 14, and 16 are given the “option” of advancing further into the Mormon priesthood and denied community if they say no. Mormon men are sent on missionary trips at 18 years of age for a full 24 months, with their social, fiscal, and romantic options in their community stunted or even removed.
That last step is as far as I got.
I was raised as a Mormon boy in a family that I hesitate to call a minor cult of its own, true as it may be empirically. After all, as of now I still speak to many of them, and love them as much as I can with the way their beliefs create a wall that can be hard to get past. Hawaiian culture has such a strong focus on family ties already, Mormonism has an easier time rooting itself with its placating and oft-repeated pandering to the concept of “eternal family”: although many religions, particularly most forms of christianity, teach that families do not break apart in heaven, mormonism often creates the lie that they do, in order to make itself seem more unique. A betrayal to the church is a betrayal to your family, and I love my family! Especially growing up, I always wanted to please them.
So, when I first felt that I might be queer, I spent weeks feeling nauseous. I wasn’t quite sure what form this queerness even took - after all, the possibility of being “lesbian” wasn’t a possibility afforded to me in a system that decided your gender was part of who you were before, during, and after whatever life you had. I did get close once though–spent a while around freshman year of high school entertaining the thought and even talking to friends about the possibility of what I felt inside–before my mother found out about these thoughts and, to say it very politely, made sure they were shut down. So, instead, my high school experience is one of repression made worse by the fact that I had almost reached where I needed to go; an experience of some kind of “queerness” and a strange form of comphet that is hard to articulate.
“Well, you still date girls, right?” mom had said. “So how about we focus on that.” Did I hang out with boys, sometimes kiss them, forcing myself to be attracted to them to find queerness? Well yeah, of course. But, Mormonism demands loyalty, and Mormonism was family, and loyalty to family meant not letting them know that I was queer in some way, even if the whole world knew.
It is, in hindsight, and to any outsider, not a sustainable way to live.
And so, it was inevitable that it ended, at 18. At the age when Mormon men are “called” to leave their families for 2 years, to spend 24/7 with another 18 year old boy by their side, to almost never have contact with friends or family. I think, even from a young age, I wasn’t very sure of this idea, in fact looking back it was clear I was averse and in denial. But, at 18, that old gender dysphoria came back with a vengeance.
I went through many of the normal rites Mormon boys go through at 18–they are ordained to a higher priesthood, they start to get ready for secret Mormon rituals held in their temples, they prepare for their missionary service. At the same time, I knew more and more not only that this religion wasn’t at all where I needed to be, but that that old body was not the body I wanted to be in. The more I was gendered as a boy, the closer and closer I felt to my grave.
The breakdown happened to the girl I was dating at the time; the realization as I had a brief glimpse into how it would feel to not be gendered as a man. I still opted not to tell my parents about this, however, and even waited several more weeks to decide to tell them I was not Mormon, and was not going to continue pretending I was.
And the answer was a certain kind of revelation, or radicalization, or something. I think many of us might have felt similarly alone, similarly at moments where we had something we knew we needed to say but not how to say it. It’s an isolating feeling, especially when you have been conditioned to believe that something as simple as saying you don’t believe in a religion is the same as saying no to your family. It’s hard when, deep down, you consider yourself a spiritual and possibly even religious person–just. Not this one. Something different, and probably something better than this. But it was far better to reveal this and try it moving forward.
Now, the next few days and weeks did not go well. I had the conversation with my parents–a very rough conversation–and the response was dozens of conversations and even texts and calls from them about whether this was what I wanted. About whether it was my girlfriend that was somehow responsible for this decision, even though I had expressed queerness years prior and it was readily available to them and to anyone else with the barest information about Mormonism that being queer in the church is often unsustainable. Questions about whether I really believed in it in the first place–when I had been the most well-researched and knowledgeable person in the family on Mormon lore and doctrine–and questions about whether I was destroying relationships with my family for a reason. Wait. Destroying my relationships? I was still living there, still trying to talk to them as much as I could, following all the rules of my parents house.
But also . . . was that it?
Of course I fought with my mom, and of course it had disastrous effects but . . . that was it, for the most part. The weight off myself was massively better, and although I did have anger towards the mormon church–most who grew up in an oppressive religion gain anger as they leave and discover how oppression functions–a far more massive part of deconstruction was realizing how it feels to actually have a weight off your shoulders and feel like you aren’t hiding something; really an ironic feeling considering it took three more years for me to tell my family about being trans.
Coming out as trans, in fact, was something I was much more of a coward about. It’s comical, to be honest, when I show people pictures–after all, I only came out after almost two full years on hormones, and so much of me being a “boy” for the two years prior was like if the world’s laziest drag king managed to play to straight people. When I came out to my parents, I did it at the same time and in the same method as I did for everyone else: I made the announcement on the instagram account with my deadname attached to it, stated very clearly that she/her pronouns were mandatory, and left it at that. My family came around much faster to this one: the pronoun switch was instant (at least when speaking to me, even to this day there is a decent amount of misgendering), the name switch was clarified as soon as possible, and overall things have been somewhat smooth since then.
And that was when I realized that the “bomb” literally does not matter. I am building my own self, my own sexuality, my own spirituality, my own gender. When I say these things to people, when I express that I am a butch, that I am a lesbian, that I am trans, the “bomb” is not actually me. It was simply their reaction to me–whether good, bad, or anything else in between. The bomb was not me, and it was not healthy for my mind or spirit to keep considering it like that.
There is a well-known card in the Tarot: The Tower. The 16th card in the major arcana, the tower’s meaning is very comically well-known to someone that has ever even glanced at the meanings of the cards: disaster. Breakups, divorce, death, a falling-out, loss of a job, most readings of this card read as “catastrophe” in some form. And while I, in particular, don't believe in any kind of future telling by these cards–something I hope to talk more about in the future–the lesson of the tower is two fold to me.
The first lesson is that a tower you build up could stand forever but is very likely to fall. What you do in the moments after - what bricks you choose to lay down for the next time this tower falls - that is very obviously the important lesson; that is what many readers will tell you if they see the tower during a reading for you.
The second, is that sometimes it is not an outside catastrophe that the tower signals. Sometimes, you just need to blow it up on your own, when you realize the foundations are bad. Transition, leaving religion, realizing your sexuality. . . These are all knocking down those old towers. And it is something that can only happen within the self.