July of this year will mark the ten-year anniversary of an experience which would alter my life forever. In 2002, I attended the Oregon Country Fair in Veneta, Oregon for the first time. I had no clue what to expect other than it would be filled with the unwashed hippies and sparkly-woo new-agers of Eugene. I was still living in Corvallis at the time, and was attending the Fair with the belly dance troupe I was in. While I had studied belly dance for about five years, I didn’t actually do any dancing in the troupe. Instead, I was one of the musicians, playing the flute. We had been invited to perform, not at the Fair itself, but at one of the campgrounds along the lake. It was a sensuous experience with the pungent aromas of food carts, incense, and body odor; the visual cavalcade of wild costumes, painted faces and breasts, and glow sticks splattered on shirts; and the aural ambiance of music and drumming and dance. It was overwhelming.

At the Fair itself, I lost track of my troupe almost immediately after walking through the front gate. So I was left on my own to meander the strangely dizzying figure-eight layout of the Fair. In my decidedly less-than-extravagant tanktop and shorts, I wandered in to behold the weirdness that was the Oregon Country Fair. I ate kebabs and drank mead. I occasionally stumbled into clouds of cigarette or pot smoke. I admired the topless women with their beautifully painted breasts. During the day, a wandering thought wafted into my mind like a wisp of lavender in a dense fog of nag champa: “I wish I had breasts so I could paint them and walk around topless.” The thought rattled me to the core, and I was temporarily immobilized. You see, dear readers, I am transgendered, and this was my moment of clarity. I had turned back once before, but this time it was for keeps. I had to transition or perish.

I had spent my entire life wrestling with the unbearable burden that I was a boy, but I desperately didn’t want to be one. I spent a lifetime in the closet about being trans, leading my friends and family to assume that I was probably gay but hadn’t worked up the courage to come out about it. It turned out I was gay, but in a different way than everyone initially figured. By the mid 1990s, I rediscovered who I wanted to be, but I was terrified to come out as transgendered. My only experience with transsexualism at that point in my life had come from daytime trash television, which was hardly the best way to learn about something this complicated. I didn’t want to be feminine, I just wanted to be a girl. I was a tomboy who had the luxury of spending my childhood as a boy, so I didn’t have to wrestle with the kind of gender policing bullshit that tomboyish girls had to go through. Instead, I only had to go through an acute kind of body dysmorphic disorder related to going through puberty into manhood when which was the last thing I wanted. I can’t even imagine how much worse my experience could have been if religion had been lumped in there with it. I grew up in a family that did not practice religion but promoted free thinking, so I didn’t have to wrestle with any theological implications of being transgendered. I imagine if I had, I likely would have committed suicide a long time ago.

Coming out as transgendered and coming out as atheist were surprisingly similar processes. In childhood, around age five, I just knew I wanted to be a girl, and I just knew I didn’t believe in God. But as I grew up, and society had its opportunity to fill my mind with doubts, I buried the transgender feelings deep within my psyche, and I tested the waters with religions because that’s what I thought I was supposed to do. The first religions I experienced were Christianity and Judaism, and neither of those looked upon sexual deviance with any favor. I settled on Wicca because it seemed to be pretty relaxed about gender, viewing male and female as opposing and equal forces. However, I was angry that I had to be transgendered. If there was a God, then why would such a being create a person such as myself who would be so absolutely miserable in the shell which had been (presumably) crafted for me? No, there was no loving and just God, not when there was so much misery and suffering at once in the world and within my own mind.

Religious institutions are powerful, and powerful enough to shape the very psyche of the culture in which we live. These monolithic powerhouses demand conformity and obedience over personal liberty and happiness. The social draw of religion is strong. Whether an person is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or suffer from socially taboo maladies like clinical depression or bipolar disorder, or is atheist or questioning religion, it takes a brave and determined individual to be able to stand up, come out, and say “I choose to be who I am, not what religion or society says I’m supposed to be”.

Being transgendered shaped absolutely everything about me, yet to spend ten years of my life more-or-less in a closet of my own devising by not being out and open about being trans, I’ve wound up in a similar kind of isolation and self-loathing that I experienced when I was still a guy and silent about my gender dysphoria. So here, now, ten years after my life-changing experience at the Fair, I come out again. I’m fortunate to have gotten through this process relatively unscathed, but for the scars on my forearms and memories of emotional pain. I did not have to endure exacerbated psychological scarring from a religion which would condemn me to an eternity of suffering before seeing me as a transgendered person at peace with myself. I’ve learned that there is far more diversity and community than I ever could have dreamed of when I was still petrified and in the closet, both in the queer community and atheist community. I’m glad to be a part of both of them.

I am an atheist. I am transgendered. I suffer from clinical depression. These things do not make me weak, they make me who I am. The sooner we can eliminate the taboos imposed upon society by backward religious dogma handed down throughout the centuries, the sooner we can all strive toward healthier, happier, brighter lives.