When I Knew
I don’t know how many times I’ve told my deconversion story, in whole or in part, on this blog or elsewhere, but my impression has been—for years at this point; yes, I’ve been an ex-Mormon atheist for that long now and it blows my mind—that the fundamental seed of my apostasy, the moment I first broke from the faith, was when I was about twenty-two and finally began to accept myself as a gay man.
In fact, I’ve found myself defending this position several times, when people have implicitly and explicitly accused me of leaving Mormonism so I could go “sin” and “be gay.” I’ve been forced to say repeatedly that my being okay with being gay, as the first point of doctrine I disagreed with my church on, was a (perhaps the) deciding factor, the first step in my journey away from religion, but wasn’t the REASON I ended up leaving. After all, I pointed out, there are any number of practicing Mormons who are also okay with gays or with being gay and they haven’t felt the need to leave. I left the Mormon church because I disagreed with virtually every point of doctrine, including the existence of deity.
I realized today that I’ve been fundamentally wrong this whole time. Not about Mormonism being full of shit, or about the existence of deity, or about religion being a net negative in today’s world, but about when I felt the first disconnect with religion.
It all comes back to patriarchy. You see, I was a feminist long before I realized I was a gay man. I was a feminist in the making before I started kindergarten. Why? Because when I was a kid I wanted to be a girl. When I was REALLY young I very nearly thought I was a girl. I had no interest in the “boy” things other boys were obsessed with—I wanted a Barbie and a My Little Pony and a Rainbow Brite and pretty dresses and I wanted to be a princess AND a sorceress AND an enchantress and forget that moron He-Man, I wanted to be SHE-RA.
I identified strongly with my mom over my dad, and, especially when I was super-little I had trouble accepting that my (one-year-older) sister and I were not functionally the same person. (I mean, we did everything together, and we always would, right?) So when I found out what the Mormon patriarchy expected of young women, I took it very personally.
My mom had her own visible struggles with patriarchy as well. She told us how her father was a Scoutmaster when she was a tween and she fought long and hard for the right of going on campouts with him and her brothers without success, and I watched her do her best to turn the local Young Women’s camping program into something resembling an actual outdoors exploration course.
It upset me that my mom, who was so smart and capable and (let’s face it) ambitious, especially when compared with my go-with-the-flow dad, was expected to accept a background role and take orders from all the stupid MEN around her just because she was a woman. My mom tried to be philosophical about her lot; denying her natural gifts was God’s way of teaching her to be patient, and a better person, and what-the-fuck-ever-else, but I didn’t, couldn’t buy it.
Polygamy bothered me for a similar reason. Why had men been “given” (yes, that’s right—GIVEN) more than one wife, but women were only allowed to marry one man?
Why were there so few independent females in the scriptures, which were otherwise crowded with independent men? Why were there vanishingly few female prophets?
I’m sad to say I learned fairly quickly that voicing concerns about this got me labeled as weird and girly, and I learned even quicker that these were “bad” things to be. As I got older and became more convinced that I actually was male I found myself participating in the patriarchy, both overtly by becoming a deacon at age twelve just like all the other guys, and by laughing uncomfortably at my friends’ sexist jokes. But I was still never comfortable with the whole thing, just like I was never entirely comfortable being male.
Another thing I’ve often said is that I was a “true believer” back before I started explicitly questioning Mormon doctrine when I was in my early twenties. But I’ve been wrong about that, too. I certainly tried hard enough to be a true believer—doing everything I could think of to convince myself and everyone else that I believed. Hypnotizing myself into suppressing my doubts. Testifying to others with passion, zeal and throbbing sincerity that I not only believed, I knew that the Mormon church was the true church of Jesus Christ on the earth.
But the seed had already been planted. The seed of feminism, of fairness, of this isn’t right, this can’t possibly be right, because it contradicts everything that makes sense. And once I took that next step of acknowledging that I was gay, and accepting myself for who I was, it couldn’t be held back any longer. Because if I was gay, then not fitting into the straight male paradigm was completely irrelevant! I could be as girly or as feminine as I liked. Everything else in my ex-religious journey, I’m convinced, followed from there.
The Mormon church, like almost every other existing religious sect, is fundamentally patriarchal. It is anti-feminist, anti-fairness. Anti-sense. Not just because its doctrines are not true, but in its philosophy, organization, culture and outlook. It pains me to say this, because so many people I love and value are still part of it, and have defended and will continue to defend its destructiveness to me and to others. I just hope that if enough people point out the reality of religion and Mormonism that we can make a difference in the future of girls, women, boys and men everywhere.
