The Mennonite to trans woman pipeline

I grew up in a small, deeply Mennonite, prairie town. If you picked up any Miriam Toews novel and squinted, you could see my house a mile up the road.

I was in my 20s before I would admit to anyone that I was Mennonite. It was how I grew up, the faith of my parents and grandparents, the culture that raised me and the friends I surrounded myself with. But don’t worry! I was normal. I was just someone who knew a ton about Mennonites, observed them in their natural habitat, and got mistaken for one a lot, usually because of my Mennonite last name. There was a certain appeal to having a background that sounded kind of mystical or old-world to anyone who asked, but I always presented it as this thing that I was in, but not of.

Did you know that in the 90s, public schools could have daily Bible readings? At least, my school certainly did. Don’t worry, though: the single person who had the audacity to be an atheist (despite all the evidence) was allowed to wait in the hallway. It wasn’t his fault. He was raised that way, and I was sure that God would get him in the end.

As I got older, I learned to embrace my heritage, even if it centred around a religion and ideals that I ended up rejecting. Most people seem to understand that, as an adult, you’re more than just the congealed remains of your childhood.

Yes, the things that we were taught as kids can play a huge role in who we become. But the things we reject, the things that didn’t stick, or produced an almost allergic reaction, even at the time — the things we carried with us, shrouded in ignorance, until someone came along and knocked them out of our hands —

those are the operators, the additions and subtractions and multiplications and divisions that turned us into the people we became.

When I came out as an atheist, I remember being asked when I had stopped believing in God. Later, I’d get a similar question, which would turn out to have the same answer:

When did I know I was trans?

It’s always the first question, right? People want to know when. But it’s so incredibly loaded. What they actually want to know is: Was I a weird kid? Did I always know? Were there clear signs? And, leaning in close, as though they know this is the wrong thing to ask but dammit they need to know: Was there some sort of inciting incident that made me this way?

But they’ll find the answer disappointing. I grew up with the regular amount of trauma. Nothing happened that directly influenced my particular outcome.

So when did I know?

The short answer is that I didn’t know, until I did, and then I always had.

Discovering I was trans was a weirdly identical experience to discovering I was an atheist.

Church never sat well with me. I was terrible at “sword drills“ — a panic-inducing game designed to cleanly divide the Good Christians from the ones who hadn’t memorized the order of all 66 books. But more concerning was the irrational anger I’d feel after every other sentence that left our pastor’s mouth. Every Sunday morning, I would jot questions all over the church bulletin or little quotes from the sermon that just weren’t sitting right. My friends didn’t like this. The consensus was that I was being both extremely rude and looking for reasons to be upset.

But I needed my religion — and by extension, my culture — to work. I was trying to make sense of the things that were being taught. I spread the Word of God on

mission trips ranging from a murder scene in Duluth to a Mexican prison, where I delivered my testimony about how great God was to me, a middle-class Canadian. I surrounded myself with God-fearing friends. I spent 13 years meandering through post-secondary Christian education (not all at once, and atheism struck halfway through, but it’s still an impressive stat to pull out in certain circles).

My point being: I tried. I tried so hard. And I really, honestly thought that I was fine, that my faith was a rock, and poking it with a stick would only make it stronger, more evidence-based, utterly fool-proof. Until the day I knew I was an atheist.

There was no event that triggered this, no trace of any of the reasons I was told someone might willingly walk backwards into hell. It wasn’t even that I stopped believing in God. I just realized that I never had, but I had never been willing, or able, or ready, to let that particular thought surface.

The courage it took to admit that I didn’t believe in the god of our Lord and Savior Menno Simons laid the groundwork for questioning and challenging some of my other core beliefs.

You can’t kill a belief without defining it first. It’s like flipping over a puzzle you’d been working on face-down your whole life and going “Oh shit,“ because the picture wasn’t what you were told it was going to be. And you can’t unsee it. You can’t go back to pretending that you don’t know what’s on the other side or go on filling in the pieces as though nothing’s changed. You could tell yourself that maybe, if you’d been paying attention to what was happening, you could have stopped yourself from peeking, and things could have been so much easier. Because now, it’s so very, very hard. But you know that isn’t true. You were always going to peek when you were ready.

The moment I asked the question of whether or not I was trans, the moment I let myself even think about my own identity, I saw the other side of the puzzle. And I knew how it was going to go because I’d done it before. At first, it was upsetting, a complication I didn’t expect or ask for. I had tried so hard to be a boy, and it didn’t work. But the revelation also gave me context that had been missing from my entire life, a variable that completed or complimented every equation. It felt warm, it felt right, it felt like me, in a way things never had.

The trans community has a term for all this because being faced with this “inability to unsee“ is a very common experience. We call it “cracking the egg.“ (Funny story: My very first job was collecting eggs in a chicken barn. I broke a lot of them. It’s kind of been a running theme.)

I don’t know if I’m done. Challenging everything about my religion in my 20s became a blueprint for grappling with my identity in my 30s. For all I know, this has laid the groundwork for yet another existence-shattering revelation. My 40s have been pretty calm so far. God help me, I probably won’t even see it coming.

Hanna Hildebrandt (she/her) is a queer game developer and writer based in Vancouver, Canada.