The Sacrificial Lamb

An essay on growing up non-binary in an evangelical household

Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late-diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religions. This month marks one year of me being publicly out as non-binary, and this is the essay that poured out of me. TW for a bit of religious trauma stuff. Thanks so much to everyone who supports this newsletter and allows me to write exactly what I need to write.

After I wrote this essay I immediately buzzed my hair and bleached it. And then I cried a bunch. And then I made myself some scones and felt a whole lot better.

A few years ago, back when COVID-19 was in full force and people had pods that they hung out in, my family was my community. I (along with my two sisters) worked hard to keep my parents safe and to convince them to take COVID seriously and get the vaccine. They were some of the few people my kids trusted and hung out with for multiple years. My relationship with my parents at this point had already begun to fray, especially with my dad. All growing up he was seen as the calm and loving and wise one—except for when it came to politics. His voice would change, he would imitate Rush Limbaugh, and he would grow increasingly frustrated with me over the years as he felt I was being indoctrinated into liberalism. 

I tried so hard to be the good, dutiful Christian daughter. I tried not to flinch when my dad raised his voice at me, when he called me naive and indoctrinated, when he said increasingly callous and ignorant things about immigrants and progressives and people who died from COVID. I wore myself out trying to be in a relationship with someone who didn’t seem to be trying very hard to see where I was coming from, but I didn’t know that I had any other options. My entire life I had been told that my family was perfect, loving, Christian. We were paragons of virtue and as a pastor’s family we were always on our best behavior. And yet, the more I tried to earnestly follow the teachings of Jesus, the angrier my dad seemed to become at me. He stuffed his emotions deep down and we still had good times together—BBQs on his back porch, family vacations. But he wasn’t proud of the work I did in the world, and in fact it made him deeply uncomfortable. And this, more than anything, I couldn’t understand. All I was doing was taking my Christian faith—and the call to love my neighbor as myself—seriously. Why couldn’t he see this? Why couldn’t he be proud of me?

One day during the COVID lockdown, I was at my parents house while my children played with their cousins. My dad was repeating some sensationalized transphobic news story, and followed it up with the declaration that, “The one thing I will never change my mind about is trans people.” That sentence rang in my ears, sending off warning bells. The one thing my dad would never change his mind about? This was his true gospel? It wasn’t even about Jesus—it was about people not conforming to strict gender roles and norms and how dangerous they were to a patriarchal and hierarchical society. I was quiet, but my heart was racing. I hadn’t even begun to explore my own gender expression at this point, but it was on my radar that my children (plus my nieces and nephews) might one day identify as queer. I could see the patterns and the conflict that would inevitably arise. And here my dad was telling me what he would choose, every time. He would choose his religion and his ideology and his politics over people. His own family. His own grandkids. 

And, as it turned out, over me.

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My dad doesn’t text me very much anymore. But one of the last times he did, he wrote “it doesn’t matter to me that you are non-binary.” I stared at the text for an awful long time. I wish I could believe it. I wish I didn’t have almost 4 decades of hearing his beliefs about liberals, gay people, and (more recently) trans people embedded in my bones. I wish my nervous system could just forget and pretend that everything is fine. I wish I was loved for who I am, and not whether or not I respect the toxic belief system I was born and indoctrinated into. I wish he hadn’t told me what his core beliefs were, over and over again, for my entire life. 

And the awful truth of it is that many days I wish I could keep pretending to be the good and dutiful Christian daughter. I wish I hadn’t been forced (through life circumstances and mental health outcomes) to process my own pain and grief at being indoctrinated into a religion that only wished to exploit me. I would have kept pretending, perhaps up until the day I died, because that is how much I love and miss my dad. No child wants to be estranged from their parents, but, equally, no child wants to be sacrificed on the altar of politics and religion and ideology. Eventually I had to choose between keeping my dad happy or keeping myself alive and at peace in my actual, physical body.

Growing up, I was told the story of the patriarchs in the Hebrew scriptures over and over again. My parents seemed to love the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, because to them it was a story of God’s goodness and faithfulness. After Abraham agrees to sacrifice Issac to his deity, the sacrificial lamb shows up right at the last moment, and the crisis is averted. My parents, and all the Christian adults I knew, loved this story for the drama, the intrigue, the proof that God always fulfills his promises. But to me it was terrifying, frightening, a vestige of a wilder and older relationship with the gods who constantly demanded blood. My parents never even considered what it was like to be a child and to hear this story, over and over again. To understand, at a cellular level, that this is what God wanted from your parents: devotion, even at the cost of familial love. 

Long before I stopped being a Christian, I realized how little I wanted to indoctrinate my own kids into the Christian faith. Reading through the Jesus storybook Bible with my autistic child was a trip—they constantly brought up excellent questions regarding God that I only had automatic and pre-programmed responses to. I remember when I started skipping certain stories in the Jesus storybook Bible—mainly, the story where Abraham sacrifices Isaac to God. I knew my child would have questions about this one, and I didn’t have it in me to answer them. Deep down I knew it was a story that I recoiled from deep in my guts. I didn’t want to make excuses for a God who demanded that a parent would sacrifice their own child, just to prove their devotion.

Many years ago I picked up a book by the Irish poet Padraig O’Tuama, right when my own child was starting to read and ask questions about the world. Padraig wrote that after Abraham ties Isaac to the altar and raises the knife to kill his only son, the story of Abraham and Isaac is irrevocably changed. In fact, there is no reference to Isaac ever speaking to Abraham after this event occurred. I think about this a lot. I think about all the queer, trans, gender-nonconforming kids who were born into a movement designed to crush their spirits and who were told over and over and over again how willing their parents were to follow a god who demanded blood. We are the Isaacs, left to wander the earth after being held up to a ravenous god.

The sacrifice we never signed up to be.

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Now there are moments throughout the day when I realize I am happy. I like my weird and lumpy and middle-aged body. I love every element of my partnership with Krispin. I love being a mom and parenting my kids in the ways I wish I had been parented. I love poking around my wild garden and seeing new bursts of color and life. I love my dog, and I love good food, and I love friends who are not troubled by my big feelings and existential crises and my gender presentation. 

But whenever I am really happy—like, say, losing myself in the beauty and majesty of the redwoods—sometimes that very happiness triggers the grief. Little me comes to the surface and cries about having been left on the altar of an angry and vengeful and punitive god. I feel the ache, the fear, the anger, the loneliness overcome my limbs. I sob until my head pounds. My thoughts swirl with the old messages I was given: I don’t deserve happiness, or goodness, or peace, or safety. Because I am everything I was not ever supposed to be: not a girl, not a Christian, not an ever-dutiful daughter. 

I would have kept my hair long. I would have kept trying to follow Jesus perfectly. I would have kept pleading with my mother and my father to care about others. I would have absorbed the pain of the world, the pain of the hierarchy, the pain of the patriarchy, the pain of white Christian supremacy in my bones and nervous system until the very day I died. A martyr for the cause, a sacrifice for the greater good, a good Christian daughter until the very end. I would have kept making myself small and miserable and unable to experience joy and pleasure and the present, if it meant I could make my father proud of me. 

But one day my own children asked me to look at them. They did not want to be second-hand sacrifices to a deity they did not see. They wanted to know if it was safe for them to be who they were. I had to make a choice. Do I want my parents to be proud of me or do I want my children to be proud of me? It was the easiest, most painful choice I have made in my entire life. And I know I am far from being the only person who has had to make this terrible choice, thanks to the decades of strategic propaganda utilized by white patriarchal authoritarians in the name of Christian love.

This pride month, I am celebrating being publicly out as non-binary for one year. Nothing much has changed and yet everything has changed. My skin looks better than ever. I was finally able to go off blood pressure medication. I wear clothes that feel good and I do whatever the hell I want to with my hair. The sharp pangs of grief and loneliness still come, but not every day.

I am my parents worst nightmare but I am exactly what I need. I am the savior I was always looking for. I am the deity who will never, ever sacrifice the vulnerable and the powerless for their own gains. I am the proof of my parents' devotion to a hungry god. But most of all I am the one who got up from the altar and walked away, determined never to let anyone tie me down again.

I made this art out of the Jesus storybook Bible over a year ago and forgot about it until I wrote this essay.