Not Better Dead
Today, I sat down to write this post and needed a link that I had posted on Threads, only to read that the Mormon church is arguing in the supreme court that trans people's existence infringes on their rights to religious freedom. (Of course it's a bit more nuanced than that, but not by much.)
This highlights exactly why I need to write this post.
Puberty is hard in the best of circumstances. I have 2 children dealing with it right now and oh boy is it rough! Everything is changing. Hormones control almost every function in our bodies, including how you look, but also how you feel. Even when you are cis and happy with your assigned gender, this is a hard time in most kids' lives.
Now imagine that every single change that is happening feels wrong.
That's what going through puberty as a trans kid is like. These things that you've been told are exciting and good and proof you are growing up can make you feel like you're on the edge of a panic attack. Every time you look at yourself in the mirror, it's like there's someone else there and it gets worse by the day. Each change is more proof that you are broken.
I had been excited about puberty because I had foolishly believed that it would finally make me feel like a girl. Finally, the things that I would be experiencing would be proof that I am in fact female.
Except it didn't feel good. It didn't feel good at all.
I hid my first period from my mom. I threw away the blood stained underwear. I found the pads under the sink and since I had a sister in the house, my mom didn't know. I wanted it that way. It made me feel sick to be having a period. I wasn't ashamed of it. I thought it was normal and natural for other people. It was me bleeding that was wrong and I could not explain why. So I hid it.
Around the same time, my breasts began really developing. I had a good friend who was a year older than me. I remember her being at my house and she commented on the fact that my boobs were bigger than hers and that she was jealous. I could not understand why. I wished she had them instead. I wished I could make them disappear. I also knew intrinsically that she could not hear that at that time. So I just nodded along.
When my second period came, I realized that I could not keep throwing my underwear away. My mom, as discussed before, made me feel guilty for every single purchase she made for me. How was I supposed to go to her and say "hey, I need new underwear?" She would, for sure, ask me why. So I hid them behind my door until I could do laundry. I did my own laundry, so my plan was to just wash them and put them away without her ever knowing.
But she found them. And she asked why I hid them. And I had a panic attack.
As an adult with two children about the age I was then, I cannot fathom responding the way my mom did. I cannot understand it at all. It horrifies me to think that any adult could respond the way she did to any child, much less their own child.
When I think of this moment, it has the dreamlike quality of trauma, where everything overlaps and you find yourself just breathing through the moment, hoping to survive. It's in slow motion and I can still hear her voice searing through my brain.
To be clear, I did not expect my mom to respond well to my emotions. She never did. But I had gone into the encounter fully unprepared for what followed.
At her question, I broke down, sobbing that I hated my body and I hated the changes that were happening and I just wished I could be a boy so I didn't have to grow boobs or bleed. I just wished I could be a boy.
With one hand, my mother grabbed my hair at its roots and began swinging my head wildly. At one point, it crashed into my dresser and I felt it throbbing with pain. When she grabbed hair like this, I couldn't get away. This was worse than usual, but it was not the first time she'd commanded my body by yanking on my hair and I knew better than to fight back. Using her other hand, she hit me, over and over again. I relaxed into it as much as I could because my survival instinct said that the best outcome would be letting her do it and get it over with. The more I fought back, the worse it would be for me.
As this physical assault commenced, my mother, in barely more than a whisper, but with words spitting of venom and anger, told me to never, ever, ever, under any circumstance, speak of this again. I wasn't to tell my dad. I wasn't to tell my friends. I wasn't to tell my siblings. I was breaking the commands of God and I would be punished for these feelings. Being like that meant I deserved to go to hell and be tortured for eternity. I would have no happiness, no hope and I would deserve it. Ever talking about this again, ever even thinking about this again, would be the worst thing I could do to her, to my family, and to myself.
She ended by saying, "it would be better to die than be like that."
I was a very sheltered 12 year old. I did not know what that was.
I just knew that it was me and it deserved death.
I stuffed all my feelings of sexuality and gender as deeply inside of me as I could for my entire teenage and young adult years. I didn't experience any sexual attraction until I was 29. I didn't come out as queer until I was 30. I didn't realize I was trans until I was 31.
When I did finally embrace myself as Simon, a trans man, I was left reeling with PTSD and this memory, which had always floated in the back of my head with no context. Now I had context.
My mother had believed it would be better for me to be dead than to be myself.
When I put all the pieces together, I remembered how, shortly before this happened, I had been told by a Sunday School teacher of a little boy who had died only a week before his 8th birthday and how his family had been so grateful that he had never sinned. She said they had prayed, before his death, that if he were going to screw up later in life, God would take him before he turned 8 to save him. So they were grateful when he died. I remember sitting there, uncomfortable, but not understanding why. (For context, Mormons don't believe in Original Sin. They believe that you cannot sin until you reach the age of accountability, 8 years old. All children younger than that are saved by default. So these parents, as my teacher told it, wanted their child to die before he could sin.)
My mom's response coupled with this Sunday School teacher's story, taught me before I ever left elementary school that who I was deserved death. I was more than 8. Having these feelings was a sin. I didn't even know what they were, but they were bad. Which meant I was bad because I couldn't help what I felt. Before I ever entered junior high, I believed I deserved hell simply for existing.
Is it any wonder that I began experiencing SI the same year? Is it any wonder I spent the next 23 years wanting to die? Is it any wonder that accepting myself as Simon left me reeling with feelings of hurt and coping with PTSD and sent me in and out of psych wards?
Except as Simon, I finally wanted to live.
I wanted to see who Simon could become. I wanted to see my life unfold. I wanted to see what it felt like to be me. So, without fail, every time I got too close to the line where SI became a drive to die, I would go to the hospital. I drove myself more than once. Because I wanted to live.
It was in one of those states of anguish, trying to wrap my head around my mom's response, trying to fight to live when it felt like the entire world would be happier with me dead, that I wrote the poem "Not Better Dead" (I have it typed at the bottom of this post).
No, I am not better dead. Being in the closet never, ever brought me happiness. Killing myself would have simply robbed future me of the chance of happiness. Killing myself would have meant I never met my husband. It would have meant that I never got to be a dad. All the things that today bring me joy would have never existed.
No, I am much, much better alive and I am much happier as Simon.
For many years, while I knew that my experience was not unique, I also didn't realize how common it was. The more I've told my story, the more I've found that in Mormonism, being told it would be better to die than be queer was a common experience. A very common experience.
Last weekend, a writer I follow, Kerry Spencer Pray, posted an article she wrote about the POX (the policy of exclusion) that the Mormon church implemented between 2015-2019. It's pretty horrific. And yet. As an in-the-closet Mormon (at the time), I genuinely believed it would be better to have the POX. Not because it was good or Christlike. But because the church was so bad for queer people that this policy saved their children from the absolute heartache of being told by their religious community that their parents were better off dead.
I did not have my brain untangled from Mormonism enough to be able to say that the church was bad as a whole, but even by 2015, I believed that the church was wrong about how it was treating the LGBTQIA+ community. I believed that any just, merciful God would not inflict this horror on his children. Surely, surely this would all be corrected in the afterlife - not the way other Mormons believed, with people no longer being queer, but by queer people getting the same Salvation that heterosexual people got.
I'm happy to be free from that religious baggage, and by and large my religious trauma is a blip on the list of the fucked up things that happened to me. But this year, at General Conference time, my heart was heavy again. This year, Dallin H Oaks was sustained as the president of the church, the prophet, seer and revelator. Any goodness in the church cannot ever outweigh the evil done by this man.
When I came out as queer in 2020, I knew I had to distance myself from the church. I also knew that I wanted it to be true, even then. So I did the radical thing of reading the true beliefs of the church about people like that. I read every single word publicly available that has been taught over the pulpit by the general leadership of the church about the LGBTQIA+. I read about the BYU experiment in electroshock therapy to "fix" the gays. I read it all from the church's sources so no one could say I sought out ex-Mormon literature. I read every single word. And it made me want to vomit.
The anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric really started taking off in the 1960s and into the 1970s. It just has gotten worse and worse. And the thing I learned was that almost every piece of it since the late 1970s was co-authored, endorsed, defended by, or influenced by Dallin H Oaks. The man hates queer people. He was the primary author of the POX. Under his leadership, anti-trans rhetoric has also ramped up. Worse, he does not believe that the church should ever take any accountability for the harm it does. The repentance process so often touted in my youth, apparently, does not apply to the church itself. So the hundreds of children who have killed themselves because of words he created, he sees as an acceptable sacrifice to make sure the church never has to apologize.
By the time I was born in the late 80s, my mom had been exposed to so much anti-queer/trans propoganda points from the church with Dallin H Oaks' fingerprints all over them. It was from the words of this man that my mom took the belief that my life would forever be broken if I chose to embrace myself. The more I've reflected, I think one point that needs to be highlighted about my mom's tirade is that it would be the worst thing for me to be queer. In her own way, she was trying to be merciful by beating the queer out of me. And she got many of her beliefs about why this was true from the man millions of people just sustained as prophet.
The crazy thing is my mom simultaneously believed it would be better for me to die by suicide than be queer and that suicide would result in me not making it to the Celestial Kingdom. I'd heard her speak of her brothers ending up in hell for their hand in their own deaths. She saw suicide as murder, which in Mormonism was the worst imaginable sin. Yet, to her, being queer was worse than murder.
Being queer was the worst thing I could ever do.
It's wild to watch my kids grow up in a home where they get to be themselves. Where they are told, repeatedly, how much we want them to live. Tonight, B was processing E's suicide attempt and I helped her dream up a future where she gets to be a 65 year old, retiring and exploring the world and coming back to me in my 90s, telling me of her adventures. That future may or may not happen. I don't know. But it's possible. And in that future, she gets to be herself. She gets to grow old and be happy as herself.
I want to explicitly state that my love for her is not dependent on her gender. She could change her mind at any point in time and I would love her the same. I don't care what gender she is as long as she is happy and kind. That's all I want for any of my kids. Find joy and be kind.
Someday, I'll tell my kids how different it was to be me. How my mother followed up her beating with policing my gender. How she didn't let me have female friends over for a few years unless they were kids she already knew and approved of, and even then, allowed it so infrequently that my brother once had to step in to point out that people were noticing that she didn't let me have friends. How I always found it strange that I never got the pushback with dating boys that I'd seen my older sister get, how she encouraged me to go on dates. How the picture I have of her at my wedding, smiling with pride in a candid shot mere months before her death that used to bring me comfort, now makes me want to cry.
The only time I ever felt like my mother was proud of me was at my Mormon wedding where I married a man in the temple, for time and all eternity.
She thought she'd done it, fixed me. Knowing she was dying, she felt relief because I was married to a man. She didn't need to worry about my Salvation anymore.
And now, now I stand on the other side, married to a man she wouldn't consider a man, and living as a man myself in a very happy gay little life. I am not the mother she expected me to be, rather, I am a dad.
My father isn't a part of my life anymore. He can't see me as his son. He definitely doesn't deserve to be in the lives of these kids. He wouldn't understand them or love them the way a grandparent should love them. He couldn't love me the way I need to be loved, so no, I'm not letting him near my kids who are going through the same thing. If he can't see me as his son, what would ever make me think he could see my daughter as his granddaughter?
And my mother, who saw a brief moment of who I am, will never, ever know me as Simon or get to meet my husband or the grandchildren she would have accepted better than she did her own children. I tell Tommy that my mom would have hated how much she liked him. She really would have liked him as a person and hated everything we stand for as a couple. In her view, who I am now is the worst thing I could ever do.
But she was wrong. Being me is worth living for. Every day, this life is worth it.
Not Better Dead
I am a daughter of my heavenly father who loves me and I love him
Every day of 7th grade, I repeated these words, these lines,
Trying to drill into my brain two things:
One, that I deserve to be loved and
Two, I was a girl, a daughter
Because deep inside, I didn't feel like a girl
My mother said I would go to hell if I tried to become a boy
She implied that it would be better if I died
She was wrong
Hell, hell is what I experienced trying to be a girl when the skin didn't fit
Becoming a boy gave me purpose when I was ready to die
No, Mom. Life is beautiful when you become who you're supposed to be
Every day I change, shifting closer to who I really am inside
Not just a boy, but a man
No longer a daughter, but a son
A son of the mother who out of fear beat me "cis"
A son of the father who didn't notice
And a son of the God who didn't intervene
But love, I've found love
That thought was true. I did deserve to be loved. I do deserve to be loved
Not in spite of being trans, nor because of it
But because I'm me
~Pope Simon X
(Written sometime between 2021 and 2023)
If you haven't already, check out my first "Ask A Trans Man" post! You can submit new questions here. I'll have another one up later this week.
Last Friday, I ended up in the ER with a ruptured ovarian cyst and kidney stones. Not good times. But apparently I have another cyst and another kidney stone on my right side and a polyp in my uterus. I cannot afford to go to the doctor. If you could help at all, you can donate to my GoFundMe, on PayPal, or you can become my client! If you want to help in other ways, reach out to me on Instagram, on Threads, or on Bluesky.