Interview with Natalie Grace (Pt. 1)

On Being Trans and Christian

This piece is a part of my Interviews series, in which I chat with some of the people I find most interesting. Of course, views expressed by interviewees are not necessarily my own; you will probably inevitably get a sense of my own views through the questions (and my other work on this Substack).

This week, I interview veteran, wife, mother, and peacemaker Natalie Grace.

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Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview Natalie! If you would, could you tell readers a little bit about yourself? Who are you, how do you spend your time, and what is most important to you?

Thank you so much for having me! Well, a very quick bit about me…first and foremost, I will always lead with my faith. It is truly the most important part of who I am, and I wouldn’t be here today if not for Christ serving as a tether to life itself for me. I am married to the most amazing woman, Heather, and we have two wonderful teenagers (18 and 15). I was born in east Texas, but as the child of a pilot, my childhood included pit stops in Oklahoma and Indiana, and finally settling back in Texas in my junior year of high school. Heather and I met in May of 2002 while we were both students at Texas A&M. Shortly after graduating (with a very bad GPA), I decided to enlist into the Army. That decision was driven largely by an internal desire to hide who I am, but also for the practical reason of needing a career in order to get married. 

I had spent 6 years in the Army as an infantryman, deploying to Iraq from 2006 to 2007. I was medically retired after back surgery (jumping out of airplanes and carrying over 100lbs of gear is apparently not great for a back), and I didn’t really know what to do. Our kids were 4 and 1, I had just earned my MBA, but had no direction. That’s when I stumbled into human resources. Everyone who knows me laughed when I got my first HR job in Houston, Texas, but I fell in love with the field. I spent 8 years in my first position as an HR Generalist, then accepted my first HR Manager role at my alma mater, Texas A&M. It was in this role that I came out and transitioned. 

Nearly 15 years later, I live in Michigan and work as the Director of Human Resources for a public sector entity in west Michigan. Outside of a job that I truly love, I spend most of my time serving on the Board of Directors for RAWtools, the LGBTQ council for the Chamber of Commerce, and trying to soak up all things Michigan. Oh, and watching Doctor Who.

What faith tradition or denomination do you belong to? How has that tradition influenced you? How important is that tradition to you?

I think this is where I select “it’s complicated”, as I’m all over the place on this topic. So, I’ll start from the beginning. I was born into the Independent Fundamental Baptist world. If you are not familiar with them, watch Let Us Prey: A Ministry of Scandals. In a day and age when people like to throw around the word “cult”, this actually is a cult. It was quite telling that when I went through EMDR therapy a few years ago, we found that it wasn’t my 13 months in Iraq that was the source of PTSD, but my childhood in the IFB. 

While in college and in the Army, I largely left the church and would have been, at best, described as a “cultural Christian”. My wife grew up in the Church of Christ, so when my first HR job took us to Houston, we decided to visit the Church of Christ across from our neighborhood. That moment changed our lives forever. For the first time, I had felt love in a church. We stayed in the Church of Christ from approximately 2011 to 2018. It was in 2018 that we moved to College Station, TX and were left without a church home. During that time, as well as during COVID, we largely relied on watching Greg Boyd sermons out of Minnesota. In 2021, we moved to west Michigan and began attending a church within the Christian Reformed Church denomination. But, now we have found ourselves in a situation in which our church is moving towards disaffiliation due to the CRC’s recent hardline stance against LGBTQ inclusion. 

All that said, I don’t really consider myself “Reformed”, and am heavily drawn towards Eastern Orthodoxy, while also being heavily influenced by Anabaptist traditions. I recently visited a local Orthodox church for their Pentecost service and, boy, did it leave me changed in a good way. The eclectic background, though, has been a blessing and I’ve learned to appreciate aspects of each of these traditions. From the fervor to memorize Scripture within fundamentalism, to the reverence of communion in the Church of Christ, to the love of liturgy in my CRC church, to the focus on nonviolence in the Anabaptist tradition, and finally to the embrace of mystery in the ancient Church. It’s all made me a better person as it’s drawn me closer to God.

You have been generously open about your identity as a trans person on social media, which I know has been such a blessing to many (including myself!). Could you tell readers a little about your gender journey? Discovery? Coming to terms and coming out to others? Transitioning?

I knew very early on that I wasn’t a boy. I was probably around 5 or 6 years old at South Shaver Elementary (an IFB school). The problem was that I was born in 1979, so even by the mid-1980s, being trans was not something that was talked about in society. I wasn’t familiar with the language surrounding gender dysphoria or being trans. I also lived in the IFB bubble that had little-to-no interaction with the LGBTQ+ community. So, even if I was equipped with the vocabulary needed to articulate what I was struggling with, I had no safe avenues in which to discuss it. I was so alone in that pain. The only vocabulary I had related to the LGBTQ community was one overflowing with hatred and condemnation.

So, I did what so many young trans girls do…I went about trying to fix myself by embracing hyper-masculinity. I played sports. I got in fights all the time. I tried everything imaginable to be the stereotypical boy. Those efforts always ended in the same place: me crying into my pillow at night praying that God would either perform a miracle or kill me. I just couldn’t take it anymore. But if fighting and football wouldn’t fix me, I thought, then surely marriage and the infantry would. Of course, I know now that that’s not how God works.

I went about trying to prove how “manly” I was, but was always secretly falling back into thoughts and behaviors that I was raised to believe would condemn me to an eternity in a lake of fire. The root causes of the depression and suicidal ideation were easy to mask because everyone just assumed it was PTSD from Iraq. But it began to weigh so heavily, and I would spend days of doing nothing but going straight from work right into bed. I just couldn’t take it anymore. Suicide had ceased to just be a possibility. It had become an inevitability. It was around 2015 or 2016 that I finally had to tell someone. I had to tell my best friend…my wife. 

I would love to hear a little more about your relationship with your wife and children throughout all of this. How was this process for them? A specific question I have been wondering about, if you're up for sharing: what have you learned by comparing you and your wife’s different experiences of femininity and womanhood?

So, this has been the source of some minor controversy, as some within the trans community abhor the approach our family took. The mantra for our family during this process has always been “we transition as a family, or we don’t transition at all.” I was not willing to cast aside my family for my own personal happiness. I knew I had to tell Heather who I was, and I knew she could leave me as a result, but if I had to choose between transition or our family remaining intact, then there was no decision to make. I would always choose my family. I care about my wife and kids too much to willingly blow that up. So we took it slow because we wanted to run this race together.

It wasn’t easy though. Heather’s initial reaction wasn’t something she is proud of. Looking back, however, I love that initial reaction because it provides a starting point which makes it easy to recognize how much she’s grown and learned. Not just about having a partner who is transgender, but also about herself. Heather knew long before the kids. The depression only deepened and I remember the day vividly. I sat down with her and said “we both know where this will end up. We both know I will eventually take my life, and my two biggest fears are dying alone and my family walking in on my lifeless body. Can I please just take pills, and we can say our goodbyes as I slowly drift away? Please!” 

Obviously, the answer was a resounding “no!” She told me to talk to a doctor. The diagnosis was clear as day, and we sat the kids down to discuss hormone therapy. They were confused, but we told them that we’d get together in two months and discuss everything. Everyone had veto power. I didn’t want to continue if they weren’t on board. Two months later, everyone was on board because they saw the tremendous change in my mental health. From that point forward, Heather and our kids have been my fiercest of allies. We took our time. We ran at the pace of whoever was struggling most. It’s why I was on hormones for two and a half years prior to social transition, as no step was taken without everyone being on board. I believe that slow, methodical approach only strengthened our family. As other family members, such as cousins, brothers, and aunts, left us, we began to realize that it was the four people in our house that we could always count on.

As for the differences in our experiences with womanhood and femininity, this is a very interesting question. Heather has made me realize just how much my life was influenced by male privilege, and to see that just because I transitioned doesn’t mean that sense of privilege vanishes. It was driven into me. It was something I was raised and socialized in. There was so much privilege and internalized misogyny that I had to unpack. It’s something I see so many late-transitioning trans women never address. I never experienced being sexualized as a child. I never experienced the fear of walking to the car alone. Or walking down the street alone. Or the anxiety created when you are home alone and a man comes to the front door. This was all so foreign to me.

One small example was my first appointment with my primary care doctor after my social transition. I have had wild fluctuations with my weight my entire life. It was nothing to gain 50 pounds, then lose it, all within the same year. My doctors had never once commented on these fluctuations. In that first post-transition physical, my doctor made special note of my weight gain. I had gained 8 pounds. So there are issues like that. I don’t experience periods. I don’t have to worry about the cramping or bleeding. Incidentally, it’s this topic where I see a lot of that unprocessed male privilege, as there’s a growing trend among trans women to claim that they experience periods, even as cisgender women point to how offensive such a claim is.

Or when we were walking in Paris and Heather noticed how a man had “checked me out”. I laughed it off, but it had clearly bothered Heather. I don’t carry the lifetime of experience that she does. But she will also tell you that she doesn’t know what it’s like to have your mere existence be the subject of national debate. To not just be dismissed because I’m a woman, but because I’m the most objectionable kind of woman. I’m a woman who rejected manhood, and that pisses off some people.

She’s also been an enormous help to me in understanding femininity, as there’s a trend among late-transitioning trans women to go through phases of clothing style that we missed. Well, when you take that first step into the world as yourself at the age of 40, that can be problematic if you’re trying to dress like a 20 year old. She was able to be a guardrail for me and helped prevent a lot of very, very unfortunate clothing decisions. And now, as Heather says, I’m a better dresser than her! She was a teacher to me, because no matter what others say, transitioning later in life throws you into a world you don’t understand or know how to navigate. Having Heather, and close female friends, that weren’t afraid of advising or correcting me kept me from so many missteps on issues great and small.

I know from experience that the process of reconciling faith and other aspects of oneself like sexuality or gender identity can be complex, and there is no one path. How have you gone about reconciling your Christian faith with your gender identity? Any major shifts along the way?

You know, one of the most influential works in this area for me has nothing to do with LGBTQ theology or reconciling faith and being trans. It’s Greg Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God. This book is an immaculately researched two-volume look into the violent texts of the Old Testament. It was a life-changing work in how it helped me to understand the Bible and the centrality of the cross. Especially what the cross tells us about the nature of our Triune God.

So for me, it was an issue of, what does the cross tell us about God? On the cross, we see a God who loves His creation so much that He was willing to become human, walk among us, and to even be murdered by His own creation. If we truly believe that our God is a God of life, and that our God is Love itself, then I have to believe that God truly does know my heart. God knows my heart and why I made this decision. I believe the cross reveals a God who is not petty, but one who will go to unimaginable lengths to remain with us. Could I have been wrong in my decision to transition? Absolutely. Could it be a sin? Sure. But do I believe God would rather me be alive than be a man? Without a doubt. 

But I must approach this topic with humility, as it’s not something the Scriptures are explicit about. There are some areas of the text, such as when Christ talks of eunuchs, that brush upon it, but that’s not a clean comparison. From a Christian perspective, it’s just not something that was understood 2,000+ years ago, so I have to default to what I do know…God is love. 

One work that was also exceedingly helpful, and one I highly recommend, is Mark Yarhouse’s Understanding Gender Dysphoria. He’s a Christian psychologist and he brings so much compassion and nuance to the discussion. He helped me take a more measured approach, and he always played in the back of my mind as I had found myself residing in activist circles on social media. Circles that do not have the time, or grace, needed for compassion or nuance.

In my own tradition (the Roman Catholic Church), a recent document was promulgated by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith titled Dignitas Infinita (or “Infinite Dignity”). In a section listing various violations against this infinite human dignity, the document condemned what it called “gender theory” as well as “sex change.” These condemnations were met with a mixed response, to say the least. When you encounter condemnations of “gender theory” like this, what is your reaction?

I used to bristle and prepare for the fight, but now I try to listen. I don’t know if it’s simply from experience on this topic and how fruitless the bickering can be, or if it’s from my career in HR, but I feel like I have a pretty good ability to detect if someone is approaching a conversation in good faith or not. I believe the Pope, in Dignitas Infinita, is approaching the conversation in good faith.

So, I try to listen because…gasp…he could be right. And given that my faith is central to my life, why would I not listen to someone in his position and with his authority within the Church? I also see some of the things said by the other end of the spectrum, and that makes me much more intrigued by people such as the Pope. I mean, if my faith is important, and I have to choose between a theology, such as queer theology, that leads some to go so far as to sexualize the Holy Trinity, or a theology that holds the imago dei in such high regard that they tell me lovingly that I shouldn’t take a step towards altering my physical body, then it’s a no-brainer. 

That said, I do disagree with the Pope. I believe some of the underlying assumptions, such as we are “choosing” our gender, are fatally flawed. I didn’t choose my gender any more than I chose to be right-handed. What I did, though, was to live a life as the wrong gender for 40 years. Again, I fully acknowledge I could be wrong! It also ignores that there are countless other ways humanity alters itself for either mental health reasons, or for personal preference, that are widely accepted, even within the Church.

I’m not a theologian, though. I am certainly not going to win some theological debate with the Pope. All I can do is love others and love God as I’m called to do. I finally reached a point of realizing that I’m not called to defend my existence or identity. I’m called to love others and love God with all my heart, soul, and mind.