Trans at the Evangelical Christian College
everybody was riding longboards to chapel but only a few of us got a sex change
Ella Baker and I attended the same evangelical Christian college in Greater Los Angeles between the years 2005 and 2009.1 Later we both transitioned, although not at the same time, and a few years ago I was very pleasantly surprised to see her in The People’s Joker. Recently we had a long chat about the experience. You can expect the second part of our conversation later this weekend.
Danny: Hello, Ella! I don’t always think about the fact that I went to evangelical Christian college, but when I do, my mind turns fondly to thoughts of you. I was reminded this week because I was writing at the library and saw a copy of The Advocate with Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig on the cover.2
Our tenure at Azusa Pacific University (“Christ first since 1899”) overlapped with the original run of The L Word, and I remember spending a fair amount of senior year going off-campus with one of the handful of other gay students to go drinking in West Hollywood, where we were forever trying to convince one another that we had “just seen” a cast or crew member around the next corner. I’m sure we never saw anyone from that show, but we kept hyping one another up about it.
Neither of us are evangelical Christians today, and I feel reasonably certain that neither of us were evangelical Christians between 2005 and 2009, either. But we are both transsexuals, and I think “changing sex” and “going to Christian college” are two relatively unusual experiences, and I don’t know many people who have done both.
I don’t intend to merely invite complaints about the experience. It is easy to focus on the elements of evangelicalism one doesn’t like, after all, and there has already been plenty written on the subject.
Do you remember much about deciding to attend APU? Were you prepared to enjoy yourself, or did you already think of it as something you were going to have to get through? Do you remember, incidentally, how and when we first met? I’m not sure I do. I think it must have been in one of Dr. Esselstrom’s English classes, but part of me wonders if you were part of that cigarette-smoking club that met off-campus near the Stater Brothers, since we weren’t allowed to smoke on school grounds. If memory serves, they called themselves the Pirates, and in order to stand around and smoke with them you had to put out a cigarette somewhere on your own arm. I did it four times, to show off, and the scars are barely noticeable now.
Ella: The memories I have of you at APU are equally fond and I remember you as someone who was miles ahead of where I was in terms of self-understanding and the courage to actualize. I was indeed an evangelical for the first year at APU and chose to apply exclusively to the school as I was hellbent on becoming an evangelical pastor. My choice was solidified after attending a preview weekend which painted life at APU like a four-year long Christian summer camp.
Danny: I did enjoy Christian summer camp, even the very extreme one in the Ozarks. I played so much tennis.
Ella: I held multiple perhaps contradictory viewpoints - CS Lewis-loving creationist, Republican Socialist, affirming gay rights but still viewing “homosexual behavior” as sin - which made APU a logical place where I thought I could be a scholar who held deeply committed ideological nonnegotiables.
I very much enjoyed and celebrated my first year until I went to a creationist museum in San Diego (to help me better debate the evolutionists on MySpace) and felt like the rug was pulled from under me, which sent the whole fragile structure tumbling down. It was an exhibit on the second law of thermodynamics which was what pushed me firmly into the rising “new atheism” of that era, at least for my last three years at APU. The exhibit was full of lies and bad faith, I came away fuming and eager to learn what other received ideological commitments were equally false.
As for how we first met, I believe it might have been Eaton’s Film and Lit class? I remember you talking about Nabokov and recommending Pale Fire to me, which I must admit I still have not read (but will!). I remember being instantly intimidated by having met someone who was so vastly more wide read but was quickly charmed by your impish iconoclasm which came out in full force in nearly every class and interaction. I don’t think I ever was cool enough to be part of the Pirates but I did smoke with you and Andrew often (Djarum Blacks that crinkled). It was also either you or Joh C. who deemed me at the time a “male lesbian” which my closeted self grasped with deep pride. By sophomore year I knew there was some weird gender stuff going on, having felt the most joy I’d ever felt two years prior as a cross dressing cheerleader for my high school’s powderpuff game and telling my classmates in Carlson’s Intro to Poetry lecture on voice that the voice I read with and spoke to myself in was female. I took to burying my feelings beneath constant clouds of weed smoke and I’m not sure who sold to who but do remember sharing a bowl with you on a weekly basis, which became the daily bread of our communion.
Danny: I do think it’s unfair that there are so many vapes now, just anyone can purchase a little vehicle for watermelon-flavored steam, but you can’t get Djarum Blacks anymore, or even Camel Crushes, which had those wonderful little menthol balls in the filter. They tasted pretty bad for regular cigarettes, but absolutely terrific as mentholated cigarettes.
I’m both charmed and a little chagrined to think that I might have been handing out “male lesbian” appellations. I don’t remember if I said it to you, but it certainly sounds like something I would have said. It’s flirtatious, a little controlling, and positions the speaker as an authority on lesbianism, which I certainly wasn’t, but was perfectly happy to let people think I was one at the time.
There’s a sort of rude and Masonic quality to the things I used to say before I transitioned to other people who were also yet to transition. I remember the day I met my wife – I was speaking to a class of graduate students at UC Berkeley at her invitation – and I asked her outright, “So what kind of gay are you?” in front of them. She deflected it admirably, and it took us a few more years to sort out the answer to that question to everyone’s mutual satisfaction. I was often, I fear, astonishingly rude when what I was privately experiencing was flustered interest, but I’m glad that at least some of the time it came across as impish.
You mentioned Lewis and it reminded me of the strange Anglophilic strain running through certain parts of SoCal evangelicalism. We had a surprising number of classmates who wore Rainbow sandals to class and longboarded everywhere, while also being super into Chesterton and Belloc. Of the major evangelical Christian universities in Southern California – I don’t count Pepperdine because they don’t require faculty or students to sign a statement of faith, besides which their chapel requirement is something laughably low, like fourteen hours a semester – I think Westmont and APU skew more scholarly, while California Baptist University and Biola skew more pious, at least in terms of vibe. “Scholarly” being a relative term, as most people don’t go to either San Bernadino County or evangelical school to think deeply. But certainly some did!
