Is the Presbyterian Church Harmful to My Health - Part 3

As I explained in Part 2, a lesbian couple had been assigned the task of helping me fit in at Sixth Presbyterian Church. However, they were going away on vacation for a month. It turned out that I did not see them again for five weeks, and this caused all kinds of interesting things to happen in my saga of returning to the Presbyterian Church.

First of all, I could not attend Sixth Presbyterian on Easter. I had four other services to go to from Maundy Thursday through Easter Sunday. I resumed Sixth Presbyterian the next week, but the couple had left on vacation. I knew this, so I had to approach fitting into Sixth Presbyterian in a much different manner. I decided I liked and trusted the church, so I’d just try to meet as many people as I could. Most of the people I met were non-LGBT. I just tried to get as much as I could out of the services and meet people during the social hour. I went from a rather anti-social person to becoming a complete extrovert. I didn’t even think whether someone I was approaching was straight or gay. I just tried to be friendly and loving to all. This worked out pretty well and I think had a lasting effect.

However, something much more profound happened to me as a result of the absence of the lesbian couple who was supposed to take me under their wings. What happened was that I depended instead upon Erin, the woman who had originally rescued me off the internet and arranged for me to go to the church, and that turned into a big emotional situation. Anyway, I was so impressed with this Erin and how she’d helped me, that I wanted to find out who she was. It turned out, she had a website, so I logged onto it and was quite shocked when it came up and said, "Erin K. Swenson, Transgender Presbyterian Minister." Well, then I read an article about her on the MLP web site. I got very emotional about her story. I sent her an e-mail thanking her for sending me to Sixth Presbyterian, and I told her I had read her story and how moved I had been by it, and I told her I had gone through a gender transition with a close friend. I got a very nice e-mail back from her.

However, then it started. This brought back the time I had spent in San Francisco with my friend. I had put it into the back of my mind, and I think I thought it was kind of a San Francisco thing. Well, I realized I had never really dealt with it and worked through it. It had been a very intense time for me. It was a very rewarding friendship for me, and it was an experience like no other to go through a gender transition from male to female with a friend. I started to realize that I could never be the same person again after having gone through it. I also started to think, having met my first friend and now having met Erin, that I really like transgender people.

This is where things took quite a strange direction in my life. If the lesbian couple had been at church every Sunday and had looked out for me and gone out to lunch with me, I’m not sure any of this would have happened. But since I was in kind of a holding pattern waiting for them to come back and integrate me into the new church, I had more time to think and get into "trouble." Well, I was very realistic about the fact that Erin was a well-known and very busy person, she was one of the top leaders of the organization, and she didn’t have time to be my best friend. So I decided I would have to meet other transgender people.

To be continued…