Dear Person of Faith,

Dear Person of Faith,

What would you do if you were in charge?

Please — think for a second with me, since you know in your heart that we aren’t in charge, but: what would you do if you were in charge of this world and this universe, and you didn’t know what God wanted?

What if no one had told you?

Now imagine — if you’re still with me — that in this twisted world — twisted in that it was not God’s, but yours alone — that you met me. And that in Your World, I — a shy but willing stranger who looks like a woman — told you that I wasn’t the right shape.

What if I told you that my soul didn’t fit into this body at all, and that I wasn’t a sad woman, but a sad man.

That I tried and tried to live the quiet life we all wanted, and that everyone told me I was beautiful and doing it right,

but I was still just a sad man.

An empty soul, wrapping itself around the wrong contours — contours that would be so damn easy and quiet and unobtrusive to just live with, like any other woman, if only she were me. Are you still with me?

Pretend to be, for just a moment, and let it be Your World. You can think it’s a little strange, and that you’ve met a strange little woman in Your World, but you don’t have to get angry right away, right? If it’s just you running this place, some twisted place without God, you might just want to talk to me instead.

So you talk to me. I am excited to talk to you, too — I love to meet people.

And I tell you, in this world where nothing is written down, that there is a way for me to look and feel like a man after all, and be seen as one besides. A magical way to make my body the right shape, and to calm my soul down and help it fit snugly into place.

Are you still with me, or did you get scared and react? If this was Your Universe — with no rules that you learned from before -

Why?

I just told you how I was feeling. I didn’t cause any hurt.

So, if you’re still with me in this odd place, what if I did the magic on myself after all?

What if the stranger in front of you looked like a man now, but with so much more light in his eyes?

What if — in this world without the rules you learned from people who learned from people who learned from God? — I was not a sad woman or a sad man anymore, but just a regular, happy man? A calm man, smiling back at you, in full color instead of muddled gray. A regular man, happy to go about his day, as quietly and ordinarily as anyone else.

All other things aside, and all other things fallen away — if this was your universe, and yours to judge alone — how would you feel?

You barely know me — this weird little man you just met in this twisted little world — so that might be asking a lot. But. Would you look me in the eyes — the ones that finally have light in them — and tell me that I am wrong and bad?

It pains me that your real world — God’s world — does say so.

That something, somewhere, passed or written down through the ages, says that some of us do not even get to bear our cross — whatever it may be, in this real world — with our own bodies.

That our ‘cross to bear’ may literally be a denial and twisting of the congruent, ordinary self that most others take for granted.

That the devil really is so cruel as to give some of us the temptation of regular life. Regular life, in the image he must have so convincingly drawn on every neuron — so deeply and convincingly that it literally became our sense of self.

That it really is my prerogative to live a life without color, simply because I am transgender.

Dear Person of Faith,

I don’t know how to talk to you, even when the science is with me and my joy is with me and my loved ones are with me and I finally, finally feel whole again.

I wish I could put you into my mind — before and after — and let you feel it. Maybe I can’t.

But if God doesn’t make mistakes, would it help to tell you that I agree?