Hi, I'm Willow

I'd always known I was different than the other kids my age but I didn't quite know why. When I hit puberty, changes that made the other boys in my class happy caused me to feel wrong and uncomfortable in my body. I began to wish that I was a girl even though I didn't have any idea what being transgender was at the time. I prayed every night for God to take these thoughts away from me with no response. I fell into a deep depression over what I thought were impure and perverse thoughts. I stopped attending church at the height of my depression when I was sixteen. I started dating a good friend of mine at eighteen and they convinced me to rejoin the church so we could be married. I thought I had gotten over my "unnatural urges" and come out on the other side. As I reconnected with the LDS faith I started to see problems that I could not accomodate. The LDS church's homophobic and sexist policies became more and more upsetting as I got older and I made more LGBTQ friends and I had a harder and harder time overlooking the historical inaccuracies in the Book of Mormon. I finally found the label for the thoughts and unhappiness in my head when I was twenty-three and tried to tell my spouse that I might be transgender. The confession was met with threats of losing access to my child if I were ever to come out. My relationship with my spouse soured as they became neglectful and abusive. I stopped going to church entirely and began to resent the LDS church. I finally came out a year after I first realized I was a woman and that signaled the end of my marriage. I have now been on hormones for a year and a half and have never been happier.