Honest Conversations Around Gender Incongruence: Kyla Gillespie

Kyla Gillespie started her hockey career on a boys team.

Someone advised her parents that she should get dressed in a different room than the boys. Kyla remembers thinking, “Why do I have to change in a separate room? What is wrong with me?” She didn’t understand why she couldn’t be in the same change room. This was her first realization that she was not a boy. She felt devastated. She was five years old.

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Kyla Gillespie is a speaker at Renewed and Transformed. We have some mutual friends. She lives in BC. REVwords is all about stories and Kyla’s story is remarkable. She wrote it with no judgment, simply descriptive of her life and faith and not prescriptive for others. I reached out to Kyla and share her story with permission. Follow Kyla on Instagram

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Kyla’s Story

I had an older brother and a male cousin who were close to my age. I loved playing hockey and basketball with them, playing with G.I. Joes or Transformers and just being one of the boys. I didn’t know terms like tomboy or gender dysphoria. All I knew was that I wasn’t a boy, but I sure felt like one.

As a child, I was under the impression it wasn’t okay to talk about these kinds of feelings. Amid the silence of everyone around me, I felt silenced. Looking back, I believe it would have made a huge difference if I had known my parents, teachers, friends, or church family would’ve been open to listening to me and walking with me through these feelings, experiences, and struggles.

Incongruence

Gender dysphoria is commonly described as psychological distress due to a sense of incongruence between one’s birth sex and one’s gender identity. My dysphoria presented early on, all while being raised in a Christian home. I loved Jesus as a small child; I can’t remember a time when I didn’t love him.

As I grew into my teens and adulthood, my dysphoria intensified. I felt God had made a mistake in making me female. People already mistook me for a boy, and I just wanted to fit in. I was exhausted from fighting this internal tension.

Around the same time, I also began experiencing same-sex attraction. I prayed every night for God to take away my gender dysphoria and attraction to women. But those answers to prayer aren’t part of my story.

In my early 30s, my dysphoria was at its worst. Before going out, I’d spend hours trying to find an outfit to wear, but nothing fit my body the way I wanted it to. I could not hide my female hips and chest.

Feeing Different

In public, it felt like everyone was staring at me and I felt different. I was tired of being misunderstood. This left me wanting to just disappear. By then, I had also drifted from trusting Christ with my whole life.

In 2010, I started to socially transition by changing my name to Brycen and using male pronouns with close friends. In 2011, I came out as transgender to my family and everyone around me and began hormone therapy.

At first, being called Brycen and treated as a man alleviated some of my dysphoria. It took about a year for me to fully pass as a man as the testosterone treatment began taking effect. It felt like others finally saw me the way I had seen myself for all these years. I felt a sense of congruency with my body.

No Peace

And yet, the transition still did not bring the relief or peace I had hoped for. God started to show me that no matter what I did to look or act like a man, it would never satisfy me. I began experiencing God’s pursuit of me through his Word and my interactions with other Christians.

After six years of living as a male, I sensed God speaking to me through the words of Psalm 139:13-14: “For You formed my inward parts: You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are Your works; my soul knows it very well.”

Awakened

The truth in this psalm pierced deep into my soul. I was awakened to the fact that my life and my body were no mistake at all. God himself created me female, and my body mattered. In love, God was calling me to entrust my identity to him. I was cut to the heart and began to repent of being the one trying to decide my sex and what my body should be. God alone gets to determine this. And when he created me a female, it was good.

After this powerful encounter with God’s love and truth, ​​I felt compelled to de-transition back to my birth sex. I know my story is exceptional. While some people with gender dysphoria do detransition, these examples are still small in number compared to those who don’t. For me, living in the gender God first created for me has been an act of trust.

No Cookie-Cutters

Issues around gender identity and dysphoria express themselves in different ways. My story and experiences are not things that can be used for a cookie-cutter approach with children (or adults) who struggle in these areas. I simply hope my story can help others wrestling with feelings of incongruence between their gender identity and biological sex to know they are not alone.

I want to plead with everyone, especially those in the Church, not to turn a blind eye to the transgender conversation. All around us, young children, youth, and adults are wrestling with questions and feelings surrounding their gender, often alone or in silence. We each have the opportunity to offer safe places where these conversations can happen.

Read the rest of Kyla’s article here.

Courageous Spaces

The last paragraph says so much. Provide safe or as my friend Connie Jakab calls them, courageous places. It takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable for the sake of others.

Connect with Kyla on her website. You can support Kyla as a missionary with CTEN (Commission To Every Nation).

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