To be transgender and religious is to live a life of tension
In living as I do — Muslim, transgender, whole — I have found a middle ground that feels sacred
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I was born twice: first, as a baby girl on an unremarkable Monday morning in October, 24 years ago, and again, as a teenage boy, in the sterile air of a GP’s office.
At 19, I was handed a prescription for testosterone, along with one important question — one not posed by the GP or the nurses, but a question that had been waiting for me in the silence of all those years: how would my parents react?
I grew up in a Muslim household where God was everywhere. As a child, I liked God. I liked his warmth and the sense that he was always there. Islam felt as familiar to me as the sound of my mother’s voice. Yet the more I studied it, the more I saw the fractures and faultlines of religion. Faith had built its temples under different stars, one bowing to the crescent, the other to the cross, but as I came to understand my identity more, I found a God accepting of me in neither.
My parents, however, were and still are devout Muslims. As a young girl I convinced myself that I would naturally grow into my femininity and accept my womanhood eventually. But I later saw that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I could no longer hide.
I decided to tell my parents on a Tuesday, a day that seemed harmless and neutral. If I had to ruin something, it might as well be a day they didn’t particularly care about.
I had dreamed of speaking freely to my parents. I had hoped I would have been able to explain to them how I was crawling into the darkest parts of myself to tell them how difficult it was being born transgender and how much I hated it. I figured I would go on to say how sometimes I felt that I was living in two worlds: the one my parents had set out for me, and the one that I believed God had told me to create for myself in order to cope and survive.
In a way, I naively thought that through honesty and revelation, I would feel like a hero. Maybe even someone to be loved, admired and embraced by a world that seldom welcomed someone like me.
But in that moment, my mum didn’t reach out for me and my dad’s gaze never left the floor. The silence was unbearable. I knew we wouldn’t speak again for a while. I also knew that, when we did, we’d pretend that conversation had never happened.
Now, years later, I have learned that my parents love me in ways only they know how. I imagine this is how God feels towards me. Loving me despite my shortcomings.
Like my friends and peers, my parents assumed that my faith would fall by the wayside. They believed, perhaps understandably, that one cannot love both God and testosterone at the same time and that to be true to myself I would have to let go of Islam entirely.
I do not blame them for their reluctance or hesitation to understand. Faith and identity are subjects that often give rise to conflict — sexual, ethnic and intellectual. And without disrespecting anyone’s beliefs, Islam’s differing interpretations have created some striking and difficult realities for its LGBTQI+ members.
It would be in bad faith to pretend that there is no clash between the transgender experience and Islam. It is a conversation much more fractious, divided and anxious than most are willing to confront.
Yet the question of whether a transgender person can reconcile faith with their lifestyle is often answered by those who have never lived through the experience.
I have found that to be transgender and religious is to live a life of tension — constantly negotiating between what you believe and who you are. The mosque may tell you that you are wrong and immoral, but your heart says you are the most divine thing of all.
Some friends have told me to quit my faith. Sometimes, it is a tempting idea as remaining in a religious belief system that seems to condemn you can feel as painful and confusing as being in a relationship where love and rejection are equally intertwined.
Still, a distinctly Muslim shape exists in my life, not least because of my honesty about the contradictions of my religious beliefs, but because it is in navigating those very tensions that I feel like every other Muslim and believer in God.
Islam, for all its intricate rules and rigidity, has always struck me as one of the most human of religions. A faith that sees the best and worst in people and challenges them to reconcile both. It’s comforting to think that God — wise, patient, maybe a bit fed up — sees every misstep, every wrong footing, and still asks us to try. Not win, mind you, but try to persist in our faith.
Every believer carries their own catalogue of contradictions. One drinks, another lies; one cheats, another envies. Sin is the universal currency. I have learned that my faith is personal, not preachy. It’s entirely about making me a much better person.
There is no religious destination in the future where as a transgender Muslim I would plant my flag and capture the thumbs-up photo. I have learned that there does not need to be. But in living as I do — Muslim, transgender, whole — I have found a middle ground that, for all its tension and imperfection, feels oddly sacred. It is not peace, but it is something like grace. And for now, that is more than enough for me.
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