I was scrolling Facebook when I saw the post.
Someone I had mentored. Someone who had reached out, who had sat in the specific loneliness of being queer and trans and faith-formed and told by that faith they were the problem. The post was written by a family member. It announced their passing. It used the wrong name. The wrong pronouns. Even in death, the people who claimed to love them couldn’t get it right.
Liam Gent
I knew why. The why never was a mystery. It was years of a person of genuine faith being told their faith wasn’t the right kind. Every door that closed. Every resource that said not for you. Every congregation that called itself loving and meant it conditionally.
I am a trans man who grew up in the church and loved it until it threw me away. I am still finding my way back to God, slowly, without a destination, carrying more questions than answers. I know what these young people are surviving because I survived a version of it. I know what it costs when no one shows up.
What I didn’t know, when I started showing up, was how much they would teach me.
“I am a trans man who grew up in the church and loved it until it threw me away.”
The young people I’m writing about here are composites, details deliberately blended and changed to protect people I love. What I’m describing is real. Who I’m describing cannot be identified, and that’s exactly how it should be.
There are four of them. All queer or trans. All carrying the particular damage that comes from being told, by family or church or both, that the problem is who they are. Three of them call me some version of Dad. Father Kàel. Papa Kàel. I didn’t ask for those words. I know what they’re carrying every time I hear them.
The first one taught me patience
She is in her early twenties, navigating recovery, a mental health diagnosis and a religious deconstruction that wasn’t voluntary. The tradition didn’t leave her. It pushed her out. I came into this the way you pick up a tool you think you know how to use, confident in the grip. She showed me I was holding it wrong.
Her road had terrain I hadn’t traveled. Her experience of her own body, her own faith, her own relationships was a different song entirely, and I kept trying to read the notes I recognized. She taught me to put the sheet music down. To listen for what actually was being played.
Showing up, I learned, looks different every week. Sometimes it’s a hard conversation. Sometimes it’s just being on the other end of the phone while someone finds the words. Patience isn’t waiting. It is the active, repeated choice to stay present without an agenda, for as long as it takes, which is always longer than you planned.
She is one of the people who calls me Father Kàel. I didn’t ask for the title. I know what it weighs.
The second one taught me we are failing people before we ever meet them
He is in his mid-twenties, one of the sharpest people I know, neurodivergent and being ground down by systems were never built for his brain. When I met him, I thought we had come further than this. He taught me we haven’t.
“What he is missing, what so many of these young people are missing, is basic mental health education.”
He doesn’t lack ability. He lacks a world designed with him in mind. What he is missing, what so many of these young people are missing, is basic mental health education. Not therapy. Not intervention. The language to name what they’re experiencing. The simple information that what’s happening in their bodies and brains has a name, is survivable and is not their fault.
That information should be in every school. Every congregation. It is lifesaving, and it is not there.
The gap between who he is and what the world has given him to work with is not his failure. It is ours.
The third one taught me what it means to be a dad, which is mostly worry with no resolution
He was a teenager when we met, severely isolated, raised in a home where fear did most of the parenting. He didn’t know how to be in a room with people. Not because he didn’t want to be, because no one ever had made it safe enough to practice. He was so sealed off from the ordinary texture of shared life that he didn’t know what his sibling ordered at McDonald’s. They lived in the same house.
I’m 39. I moved out at 18. I still know my whole family’s Taco Bell order.
The distance between those two facts is not a personality difference. It’s years of a child who never was watched closely enough to be known.
Within a year of meeting me, he called me Dad. He had no particular reason to trust anyone. He did it anyway. I understood immediately what the word was carrying. Not warmth. Not a compliment. The weight of everything that had been absent, transferred into five letters and handed to me.
You build what you can with the time you have and then you let them walk out into a world that is not always safe for them. He hasn’t called in a few months. He may call soon. He may not call again for years. I hold both possibilities the same way, the line stays open, the love doesn’t expire.
That is what he taught me fatherhood is. Not the feeling. The practice.
The fourth one taught me not to underestimate these kids
He is young, trying to build structure and direction from materials he never was given. He grew up without access to a lot of information, not because he was incurious, but because no one put it in front of him. The gap never was in him. It was in what he was handed.
What stops me cold about him is this: After everything he has been through, after everything withheld from him, he still wants to fix things. He has fire for this world. He is young and under-resourced and carrying weight no one his age should carry, and he still shows up burning.
He taught me these young people are not the sum of what was done to them. They are what they carried through it.
“One accepting adult in a young trans person’s life reduces their odds of attempting suicide by one-third.”
One accepting adult in a young trans person’s life reduces their odds of attempting suicide by one-third. One adult. Not a curriculum. Not a committee. A person who picks up.
I think about the people I’ve lost when I sit with that number. I don’t say it to carry guilt. Guilt isn’t care and it doesn’t keep anyone alive. I say it because the number is real and most people who could act on it don’t know it exists.
You do not have to be trans or queer to be that adult. I’ve watched people who share none of my experience show up and change things: A congregation member who corrected a misgendering in real time without turning it into a moment, a pastor who let a family’s story get inside him and then said so from his own pulpit, a parent who got it wrong and came back and said I love you and I’m still learning, a teacher who put herself between a trans kid and harm in a school hallway, a family member who held the line at Thanksgiving when it would have been easier not to. None of them had a credential. They had a willingness to be in the room when the room needed them.
That is the whole ask. Not expertise. Presence. Not a finished theology. Faithfulness to the person in front of you, sustained past the point where it’s convenient.
I believe that is what we are called to. I hold that belief without a church to stand in, with a faith still rebuilding from the studs up. The posture I keep finding in the Gospels is not the expert one. It’s the one that goes to the people already written off and doesn’t leave.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available by call or text. The Trevor Project’s TrevorLifeline is at 1-866-488-7386, for LGBTQ young people specifically. If you’re looking for an affirming congregation, the Association of Welcoming and Affirming Baptists is a place to start.
If you are a queer or trans adult who made it through this road and hasn’t turned around yet, the people behind you need you to. You don’t need training. You need to pick up.
I don’t know if I’m getting this right. I’m still learning what right looks like. But I know what happens when no one shows up at all.
Four young people taught me that.
Editor’s note: Normally in this space you will read a brief bio about the author of an opinion or analysis piece. Telling you about Liam Gent requires more than that. Ten years ago next month, I wrote a piece for BNG titled “Seven Things I’m Learning About Transgender Persons.” That piece remains to this day the single-most-read piece in our 36-year history. In that piece, I said I didn’t have any transgender friends but I would like to. Liam was the second transgender person to reach out to me and say, “I will be your friend.” We have been good friends from that day forward. He considers me his pastor. Later, I officiated his wedding in his hospital room because he could not get to the chapel or courthouse with Sarah. Liam is one of the most resourceful, sincere and caring ministers I have known. He saves the lives of young queer kids who have been abandoned by their families and their churches. It helps that he holds a master of public health degree in epidemiology from the Texas A&M Health Science Center and a bachelor of science degree in biomedicine from Texas A&M University. He knows what he’s talking about. And it is my great joy to introduce him to BNG readers as a new columnist.