The day that changed my life - A reflection for Trans Day Of Visibility
Sarah Hobbs is the Managing Director of a consultancy which supports large organisations to identify and release the talents of their employees. She is an experienced conference speaker and Zoom webinar host with a passion for helping people to realise their potential. In 2017, she publicly came out as a transgender woman and began her transition process. In 2019 she co-facilitated an LGBT+ Christian retreat weekend at St Beuno’s Spirituality Centre in north Wales. In 2020 she became a Co-Chair of the Open Table Network.
WATCH Sarah’s video intro to the Open Table Network [2.5 mins}
ON TRANS DAY OF VISIBILITY, OTN Co-Chair Sarah Hobbs recalls the day that changed her life, and why it matters that the Church of England engages widely and well with conversations around identity.
When I was six, I knew I felt different. One of the lads in my primary school class put on a dress from the dressing up box - as I looked at him, I felt deeply jealous and wished it could be me.
You see, people kept calling me a boy, and I realised, in that instant, that it wasn’t how I felt inside. I realised instead that I felt like a girl. I didn’t have the language to know what it meant to be trans - I simply felt wrong. Apart from feeling very confused that day, I also remember a deep sense of shame, and a realization that I must never ever tell anyone else that this was how I felt.
The only one I could tell was God. I wasn’t a person of faith, and my family didn’t go to church, but I began a nightly ritual that lasted for years. I would time myself for an hour when I got into bed. I prayed that, when I woke up, God would have fixed the problem, that I would be the girl I felt I was inside.
Eleven years later, aged 17, now completely sure that I wasn’t a boy and even more confused by it, I met God properly for the first time, and my journey of faith really began. As well as listening to the idea that God loved me, I thought maybe God might be able to rid me of this awful feeling inside, and the fight of my life began. At this point, the prayers I had been praying changed. I began, with tears and groans (literally), to cry out to God to take this thing away.
In my twenties, I was part of a conservative, charismatic, evangelical church. I confessed my sins to my church leaders and my house group. I had prayer ministry and even so called ‘conversion therapy’ and counselling. I tried everything anyone suggested to me. Everyone to whom I ‘came out’ agreed with me that fighting it was the right thing to do. The possibility that it was OK to be transgender was never considered. By this time, I was married, with three lovely children, and professionally very successful, but my life became a cycle of shame. I spent so much time confessing how I felt, then feeling the overwhelming need to present as Sarah, followed by guilt at how much I’d let God, myself, my family, and my church down.
The dam finally broke when I was in my early 30s. I went for coffee with one of my non-church friends, and said ‘There is something I need to tell you’. After I told her, she said something I’d never heard before: ‘I love you even more now’. After more than 30 years of feeling I was unacceptable, that affirmation changed everything again. I began to realise I need not feel ashamed, and that there were people out there who would love me - I’d just never met them in church. So I began, over time, to come out to more people, including, memorably, one of my friends said, ‘you are now the most interesting person I know’!
Around that time, I parted ways with my evangelical church and I drifted for a while, churchless. I continued to have a faith, but never thought I’d find Christians who would accept me. I believed God would never accept me either, so what was the point? Then God intervened. My breakthrough moment came from one Bible verse:
“Which of you, if your son asks for bread will give him a stone.”
I’d spent more than 30 years asking God to give me bread. Bread in my case was release from being transgender, from that feeling inside. But all I’d been given - in return for my earnest begging, fasting and crying out - was a stone. So, I realized, one of two things was true. Either this verse isn’t true and God gives stones instead of bread, or I’d been given bread all along and I was mistaking it for stone. That thought changed everything again. I began to think maybe, just maybe, God could love me as I am. I’d never entertained the possibility before. Once I did, I read so many verses of affirmation of God’s love, and it was so much better than my human friends saying they loved me.
Things became really difficult for me about six years ago, when I realised I needed to transition. Sometimes people think that’s an easy decision, lightly made - but it’s not. For many of my friends, it has meant losing jobs, friends, homes, family, children and more. I lost a partner and home, but the thing I feared most was losing my three kids. In August 2017, we went on a family holiday from which I dreaded returning home. The day after we came back, I had to tell them - and I was so scared. What if they told me they never wanted to see me again? I sat them down at the kitchen table and said, ‘Your mum and I are splitting up’. They were shocked and demanded a reason. I said, ‘Do you know what it means if someone is transgender’. They said, ‘D’oh, of course.’ I said, ‘That’s why. I’m transitioning’. Much to my surprise they accepted me. I burst into tears of relief. Afterwards, when we reflected on it together, despite all I’d told them, they said: ‘We can’t believe you cried,’ as they’d never seen me cry before.
When I transitioned, I moved to a new city and was determined to get my relationship with the church back on track. I despaired of finding somewhere - many of my friends had struggled too. Then I found the Inclusive Church website which told me that one of my local churches was inclusive, so I went along and asked them if they really were. And they were. In many churches, the view of LGBT people feels like, ‘We’ll have them in our church so God can change them’. Or ‘They are welcome, but only to warm the pew’. This church didn’t take that view - they encouraged me to engage fully in church life - and we have both benefited from that.
Then in November 2020 the Church of England published Living In Love And Faith, a course and resources on identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage (LLF for short) to enable churches to engage with these issues together. The Diocese where I live asked me to be an Advocate for the course, and I was invited to join the national reference group to offer my lived experience to the debate. LLF is the conversation the national church wants us to have, to think about what their policy on identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage should be. Should they stay with the views they have traditionally held, or should they bring change? The LLF course is designed to unpack the issues over five sessions.
You might think that you don’t affect things, but your view matters. You might be thinking, ‘It’s not really an issue I know much about, I don’t have a view.’ If so, you are perfect for LLF. The course takes you through a process to enable you to understand and discuss the issue with the other people in the church so that you can form an opinion. Or you might already have a view - and be wondering if it is the ‘right’ one?
Last year, I was part of a discussion group for a video to encourage people to take part in LLF. One of the other people in the video said:
‘I didn’t think I had anything to contribute, but week by week, I thought about the course and was trying to discern what is God’s will. It changed the way I thought about my opinions. It made me question what I thought and why I thought it. It made me reflect and think about whether they were my views. I had a conservative, traditional upbringing, but was impacted by the idea that God loves everyone and that people are people - and the way that people have been hurt was food for thought.’
A conservative vicar in the group said,
‘I thought it would be difficult to express my views, but the facilitators managed to allow people in our group to speak their minds. It was fruitful and broadened my understanding of the Bible.’
You may not want to - or be able to - take part, so if you can’t, please do pray that the church reaches the conclusion from this process that God has in mind.
For people like me, this isn’t an intellectual exercise. This is why I have taken the risk of honestly sharing my story today. Because the bishops are listening, and our voices matter. The LLF course feedback form is collecting responses until 30th April 2022, and the Church of England wants as wide a range of responses as possible. Please don’t let your chance pass by. You might think we should stay the same, you might think we should change, but the bishops won’t know unless you tell them.
