Being Trans at Christian College, Part II: "Temptation Tuesdays" and Secret Weddings

the second part of my chat with Ella Baker

The first part of our conversation, Trans at the Evangelical Christian College, can be found here: “I got chapel probation junior and senior year, and I graduated without honors, just like Elle’s evil ex-boyfriend Warner in Legally Blonde.”

Danny: You mentioned new atheism, which was very popular at the time, and maybe all the more so at Christian college for appealing to a very small group of people!

Ella: There was a small group of angry exvangelicals including Andrew and myself who seemed to be the most vocal and militant about it. We sat in the back of Dr. Noble’s Problem of Evil senior seminar, scoffing and being in general rather rude to the entire class. I wrote my thesis on the decline of democracy at the hands of evangelical political power and remember rushing to intervene with Andrew at what looked to be a professor’s last ditch effort to keep you in the fold over coffee. Did you identify with the movement at that time? I found my way to Korean Zen and then added on an identity as an Episcopalian CEO (Christmas and Easter Only), but retain the general skepticism of that era regarding anything metaphysical.

Danny: I don’t remember encountering the “exvangelical” portmanteau, which I’m afraid I find unlovely, until well after college. But I certainly remember that strange combination of anger and motionlessness. I was so resentful over being at APU and so completely unwilling to consider transferring schools. It never even crossed my mind. And I did think of myself as an atheist then, certainly. I probably still do, although in a way that feels a lot more relaxed now. I share your distant affinity with Episcopalians, although Zen practice isn’t for me. Skeptical of metaphysics but very woo-woo and excited about the process of aging and dying.

I remember Dr. Noble! He was terribly kind. To the best of my recollection he seemed desirous of establishing a possible path for me, should I want to remain or re-become a Christian, but not in a way that felt overbearing or officious. I’m afraid that I do remember telling him on at least one occasion that he would have been a terrific lesbian, which was hardly appropriate of me. But for all that it’s a clumsy construction, I think I was trying to make cross-gender identification possible when I would offer the honorary appellation to people I felt some sort of tie with, using language that was somewhat popular at the time.

I did enjoy the occasional bursts of attention I got from faculty and students as a possible lost sheep who might be persuaded back in. It made me feel important. Being at APU flattered my vanity in that way.

Do you remember any other trans students at APU? I don’t remember anyone who was out or had transitioned at the time, of course, but a few of us did so pretty shortly after graduation.

Ella: As for meeting other trans people at APU, many of my friends and one professor ended up being trans but all transitioned after I graduated: Joh C., Jade P., Xio C., and of course, you. The four of you, forged what looked like a feasible path to surviving if not thriving as a trans person so that by 2018 I could take a giant step in transitioning.

Danny: Did you do anything memorable with your gender at APU? I got married as a joke to a friend of my ex-boyfriend’s, and got in a lot of trouble for it. Were you there? I remember that Andrew was, but I was very drunk at the time and I’m not sure who all was present that day.

Ella: I don’t think I, or anyone else, really digested my internal female reading voice or the moniker of “male lesbian” until long after the fact. The bits of gender exploration I did find myself doing in that time were always in secret, either locked in my dorm room or swishing in a mini skirt at Temptation Tuesdays, what was essentially a chaser event held at a gay spa in Hollywood. I recall seeing familiar faces at those events but nothing that was ever acknowledged outside of those dimly lit halls.

I don’t remember if I was at your joke wedding but that is the downside I suppose of having been constantly on weed and mushrooms. What prompted that for you?

Danny: Very little other than impulse and a desire for attention, I think. A few days beforehand I had gotten dessert at a little Filipino bakery in Duarte with Jamie Noling (one of the co-campus pastors) and a few other students. I don’t know if you remember Duarte – it was that little town next to Irwindale, where they have the big Renaissance fair every summer, about halfway between APU and Pasadena. The strip mall the bakery was in also had a wedding venue called the Amoré Chapel. I was at the Brass Elephant bar in Monrovia a few nights later with my roommate Jen and a few other people. This was right around the Prop 8 referendum. It was very much like the “series of escalating dares” that resulted in Gob’s wedding on Arrested Development.

This guy James – who I didn’t know very well but who was visiting Andrew from Yucaipa – and I kept drinking and saying the sort of things that were popular at the time, you know, How ridiculous that you and I could get married, just because you’re a man and I’m a woman, for no reason at all, we should show them, et cetera. And I called the Amoré Chapel and left them a very drunken voicemail at two in the morning and then we all went back to my apartment and passed out. In the morning I got a call back and they said there was an available timeslot that evening if we could bring a few witnesses and, I think, seventy-five dollars.

I had recently stopped dating my college boyfriend because I felt I wasn’t getting enough attention from him, and started dating my college girlfriend, who gave me plenty of attention but I always felt I could do with more. So I kept saying how funny it would be and we all kept drinking throughout the day and stumbled through the ceremony.

Later that evening my roommate told me, “I didn’t want to say anything at the time, because it was pretty funny, but I think if your parents claim you as a dependent on their tax returns while you’re secretly married, that they could get investigated for tax fraud.” I don’t know if that’s actually true or not but of course it scared the hell out of me at the time.

And of course James’ girlfriend ended up being pretty angry with him when she found out he’d gotten married to someone else during a weekend trip to Los Angeles. I think she broke up with him over it, although I wouldn’t swear to it. My girlfriend hadn’t been there either, and she did not love being left out of the loop, although she otherwise maintained a pretty lighthearted attitude towards the whole affair. We met up a few weeks later at a Starbucks somewhere halfway between Azusa and the High Desert to file for divorce because it turns out it’s very difficult to get an annulment in the state of California.

It cost $500 and the court clerk told us there would be a six-month delay before the divorce could go through, as a sort of mandatory cooling-off period. I had to borrow the money from my friend Maddie because I didn’t want to tell my parents I’d gotten married or divorced, and paid her back over the next year. It was sort of funny, and sort of anxiegenic, and sort of troubling, like a lot of things I did at the time. I still have my divorce papers in a silver folder. Every time I moved in the next ten years, my mother would come to help me pack up, and I would drive myself crazy trying to hide the folder so she wouldn’t see it.

I don’t always think of that wedding as an experience of insufficiently-realized transsexuality, but I do think I tended towards bluster, attention-seeking, bids for control and domination, forced bonhomie, etc, rather than secrecy when it came to unusual expressions of gender. I wanted every man in a fifty-mile radius to be my comrade and my bondservant at the same time, not to mention find me wildly charming, and I was perfectly willing to behave atrociously and drive people away in the pursuit of my goal.

Ella: After graduation I got an interdisciplinary humanities degree at NYU and remember being embarrassed of APU but also woefully unprepared. Part of this is my own fault for majoring in creative writing to avoid Literary Theory, which I ended up having to catch up on rapidly to make sense of Zizek’s endless, mostly unnecessary, sniveling allusions. I quickly learned that most of my very expensive reading lists would never be referred to in class, not even Sartre’s excruciatingly long Critique of Dialectical Reason which was marked an “essential text” in the required reading section of the syllabus. I managed to fake it through to graduation, blaming APU for not properly setting me up for success, having expanded my library but not really having digested much.

Danny: I never took a run at grad school. I don’t think I could hack it. I still don’t. I do think I could have done better than APU for undergrad, but I don’t think there’s any version of me that could have successfully gone to graduate school. Lucky for me there was blogging, I suppose. Not now there isn’t. But for a few shining years, there it was.

How evangelical was your extended network in 2018 when you started transitioning? It’s remarkable how quickly I went from being immersed in an almost-exclusively evangelical culture to almost completely out of it after graduating. Everyone I knew played soccer all the time and had the worst ACL tears you’ve ever heard of in your life and carried around copies of, like, 365 Devotions to Set Your Faith on Fire – evangelicals are always anxious to set their faith on fire, except for the slightly progressive ones, who were into Francis Chan and wanted to be “biblically outrageous” – and then I almost never met that kind of person ever again.

Ella: While I think you could have done well in grad school¹, I’m grateful for the blog to book publishing route your life has taken. For one, you gave me my first byline on The Toast, which I still parade in my author bio with deep pride. More importantly, your work and presence has been a needed mirror to so many. For instance, one of my favorite couples - Achu and Michaela - who I love as individuals and as a unit, used your beautiful words to Grace in the acknowledgements of Something That May Shock and Discredit You at their wedding this past December. I just reread it now to ensure accuracy and my eyes are still watery.

Before coming out I had been adjuncting at APU and working with Allbaugh on organizing the Freshmen Writing Program straight out of grad school through the recommendations of Okamoto and Carlson, who I still keep in touch with. I taught Thomas Merton’s New Seeds and Rob Bell’s What We Talk About When We Talk About God as a way of trying to evangelize a more humanist approach to faith to students that seemed to get more fundamentalist and less curious by the year. Then I picked up a day job for a steadier paycheck at an evangelical prep school in Pasadena, which is where I was working when I came out in 2018.

What sparked it was my ex discovering that her makeup had been used and worrying that I was cheating on her, inviting strangers into the house to use her things. This made me sad enough to come out of the closet to her, which I don’t think I could have done entirely for my own sake, possibly ever. The truth of course wasn’t consoling to her in any way - that it wasn’t any secret affair, but a husband who spent every spare hour alone crossdressing and putting on her makeup - wishing for a life I never thought I could have. She was kind enough to encourage me to push forward regardless of what that meant for our relationship and I came out to my family on Father’s Day (highly do not recommend this) after a service at All Saints Church in which Father Mike Kinman preached on David’s queerness and the God who includes that which has been cast out or devalued. The next step would be to come out at work, which I felt emboldened to do because evangelicals do a really good job at making you feel like you will always belong.

Danny: You came out to your family on Father’s Day! You ought to get back hazard pay for that. I came out to my family after a Thanksgiving weekend where my mother looked critically at my neck and said “You’ve been breaking out a lot lately. Did you start testosterone without telling me?” which I can’t recommend either.

Ella: I thought that I could barter with transition and with the school leadership - my plan was to just be referred to by last name and to dress in male drag while in my roles at school, while I would be free to live as myself outside of school hours [See Let Me Save You Some Time: On Transitioning Like You’re Opening A Candy Bar In A Crowded Movie Theater With A Really Loud Wrapper for a guide to avoiding this phenomenon]. The bargain was of course not struck and I was promptly coerced to resign or be fired, which somehow shocked me. I love my life and the work I do today but I do miss the summer camp feeling of the campus and the deep mentoring I was able to do for so many students, some of which later came out to me as trans and many of which reached out to me to express their continued support including a few of their moms and a few straight boys - which happily surprised me and continues to warm my heart. You never really know where they might be found, the hats they wear, or the identities they hold, but allies are everywhere and love really does abound.

Danny: I’m very proud to know you. Since we’ve been a little hard on Christian college today, I’d like to close with a few things I liked about it: They sold good chicken fingers in the snack cafe. I want to call it Cougar Café? The old-fashioned streetcar trolley that went back and forth between West and East Campus was charming. Pretending my college girlfriend was just my good buddy and then secretly hooking up in the stacks at the library was a transgressive sort of fun that I would never have been able to experience at a regular college.

And I really was fond of quite a few of those earnest longboarders, sailing from class to class, hair blown back from the force of God’s love and the Santa Ana winds.

[Image via]

1. I could not have.