In this episode, get to know Kate Mower, one of Called to Queer’s co-hosts. Some things Kate talks about include:
- Nonbinary gender in a very gendered church
- Retreating back to the closet to wait until they could safely come out
- How they’ve learned to stay true to their own experiences rather than giving in to other people’s expectations of them
If you want to connect with Kate, you can follow them on Instagram @latterdaylez.
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Colette: Hello and welcome to Called to Queer, where we hold space for the queer Mormon women, nonbinary, and trans experiences. I’m Colette and my pronouns are she/her.
Kate: And I’m Kate and my pronouns are she/they.
Colette: Today, Kate is going to share more of their story in depth. But before we jump into that, we wanted to start off by seeing what brought us queer joy this week.
So Kate, what brought you queer joy?
Kate: I’m actually on vacation in Brasov Romania. And today I was out and about with Fulbrighters and I was wearing my rainbow “true to you” t-shirt which I always am pretty queer- coded. I constantly have my glasses are rainbow everything’s rainbow. So yeah, I, I sometimes get questions about that. And today at dinner somebody asked one of the [00:01:00] people I was with asked about it and he just said, I just love your shirt. I understand what it means. This is a Romanian. I understand what it means. I love your shirt, you know, keep doing you. And that was just such an affirming moment to have a Romanian say that to me, you know?
Colette: That’s huge. That is incredible. Major queer joy.
Kate: It was great. Okay. How about you?
Colette: Well, I’m getting excited here in a couple of hours, I’m going on a little trip with a couple, a friend and her wife, and I just love spending time with queer couples. It just seeing them happy, gives me queer joy, especially knowing this friend and how much she’s been through to get to this point. You know, they’re not shoving their sexuality in anyone’s faces, they’re just living their life and I’m excited to go spend time with them and relax and just be with them and also excited to hopefully [00:02:00] have my own partnership like that one day.
Kate: Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I hope that it’s wonderful. Can’t wait to hear back when you report on it.
Colette: Yeah, that can be my queer joy next time. Probably.
Kate: Perfect! Love it.
Colette: So today I’m excited to hear more about your story, Kate. I know you’ve shared it in multiple places and you are pretty public, but I would love to just hear more about what you want to share with our audience and what your story is like being a nonbinary lesbian that grew up Mormon.
Kate: Yeah, I guess going off of your lead from last time. You had a 60, a 60 second which turned into longer than 60 seconds, because I interrupted you. But 60 second brief overview of intro, what do you call it? What did you say? You felt
Colette: Queer in 60 seconds.
Kate: Queer in [00:03:00] 60 seconds. Let’s see if I can do queer in 60 seconds. Okay. Yeah, I I, I think that I knew pretty early on that I was queer and not knowing exactly what that was because I actually manage multiple letters in the LGBTQ I don’t know, alphabet, alphabet mafia. I am going to just use that. And. So I think it was hard for me to unpack what was one thing versus what was another thing. But I understood myself to be different early on. I understood that my gender, what I liked, what I wanted to do, the way I presented all of those things, were both feminine and masculine, and I loved all those things about me, but there were certain things that were, I was told early on to shut off [00:04:00] and to not be proud of or not excel in. And that was really hard. So then I, I dunno, I think I probably recognize that I liked women, girls, at that point when I was probably 16, but I didn’t really, I wasn’t, I didn’t have the language to talk about it. I didn’t know how to say that, say what was going on for me, but I recognize that I had crushes and I hoped that my crushes had crushes back that I don’t know that they, you know, they never voiced those things. So there’s a lot of shame in feeling that, and I didn’t want to admit that those are the sorts of feelings I was feeling. By the time I was 16, I had a lot of suicidal ideation, suicidality. I started self-harming between 15 and 16, which for nonbinary [00:05:00] and trans folks, you don’t even need the language for nonbinary and trans folks, self harm is like through the roof. And it’s interesting to reflect on that, but yeah, so 16, I started, I really struggled. By 17, I went from being the Laurel president to being inactive. I stopped going to seminary. I was, I was just kind of done with the church and I didn’t really have concrete reasons for that.
By 19, I had had a suicide attempt. I was in the hospital in Salt Lake City at LDS hospital for a couple of weeks. Yeah. All of that was really challenging, really difficult. And by the time I, I think, I think it was not for a couple years. I decided, yeah, I have to come out. I came out to my brother who rejected me. Didn’t talk to me for months. We [00:06:00] lived in the same house and he was like, “I want nothing to do with you.” And my mom was like, “What’s going on between you two, you used to be best friends. And now he’s not even talking to you.” And she asked my brother and my brother said, go talk to Kate. And I told my mom, I think I’m bisexual. And my mom said, “You’re experimenting. Don’t tell your dad…” just enough for me, two really bad experiences, right in a row enough for me to go right back into the closet. And I remained there for many years. I eventually came back to church when I was 26. I had this conversion back to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints through like a very personal, intense conversion that I think of [00:07:00] as like a revelatory vision process that I think it’s really important to my story. It’s really cool. I went from being, doing all sorts of behaviors that were not bringing me any happiness to the next day, being fully committed to the church. And I think that helped me a lot, but it continued to hide my queerness and eventually, so that was at 26 and I didn’t really quite understand how, how much I needed to be out until I was 31, and I had fallen in love actually with, I was, I was engaged to a man and fell in love with a woman. And that was a really tricky because it was, it was a [00:08:00] hard challenge. But I couldn’t stay in the closet any longer after that. And. Yeah, it was, so that was 2018. And finally by 2020 last year almost exactly a year ago now I also came out as nonbinary, which really kind of completed my queer journey of coming out and fully embracing myself.
Colette: Wow, so much to dig into here. Thank you for providing that overview. I’m kind of curious what being nonbinary means to you. I feel like that is an experience that we don’t hear as much about in the church, especially if you could talk about what that experience is like being in a church that is pretty gendered.
Kate: Yeah. Great. Thank you. So being nonbinary is so different for every nonbinary person. It’s hard. It’s really hard to [00:09:00] pinpoint what that means. And in your episode, we talked last time, we talked about labels and you talked about labels. And I think that this is one label, it doesn’t really explain what somebody is very well. Especially because you have the transgender umbrella, transgender means that you were assigned a gender at birth that you do not identify with. And for nonbinary folks that we. Lots of us also identify as transgender. So there’s a broad umbrella. And then under that umbrella, you have you, you definitely have nonbinary.
And then under the nonbinary umbrella, you have agender, which means you lack any sort of gender. And so I sometimes compare my experience to an agender experience. Both of us are under the [00:10:00] nonbinary flag or under the nonbinary umbrella, but where an agender person doesn’t see themselves as having any gender, I see myself as having all the gender. I often call myself gender expansive in that I want all the gender all the time. Just like, give me, feed me the gender. That’s what I want, because I feel like there’s so often that I was cut off so often in my life I’ve been cut off from my femininity. And so often I’ve been cut off from my masculinity and I want to breed both of those things.
I don’t want to have to pick one or the other. I want to, I want all parts of me to be able to be allowed.
Colette: I love that. But what was that like growing up in a very gendered church?
Kate: Great. Thank you. Yes. Thank you for your question. So for me, I often refer to [00:11:00] myself as assigned female at birth because within the Mormon context, when you’re assigned female at birth, there are certain rituals and things that you must go through that somebody who is assigned male at birth, doesn’t go through and somebody who’s assigned male at birth goes through different rituals and things that somebody who is assigned female at birth, doesn’t go through.
And so that’s one that right off the bat. That’s one thing for, to be able to talk about your assigned gender at birth, because it impacts your everyday experience. Within, within your life because your life is the church, right. Oftentimes are like, we’re going to young men’s and we’re going to young women’s and who your friends are going to be at young women’s.
And the different talks that you’re having in Sunday school on Sunday, because you’re assigned female versus assigned male. Those are really important distinctions for me to [00:12:00] talk about being assigned female at birth versus being assigned male at birth, because I have those gendered experiences. And so even to be able to talk within the nonbinary community, within the queer community, about gender it’s my, my gender language, the way I think about gender is so clouded it’s so painted by growing up in a very gendered church that, that I talk about it very differently than somebody who wasn’t, who hasn’t grown up in that environment because they haven’t had to be segregated so often, multiple times a week. So it impacts everything. So that’s just like growing up right now. How do I, how do I think about this? What do I think about going, if I were to go to the temple, what would that mean?
Like there’s no real place for me at the [00:13:00] temple. What does it mean? You know, everything is gendered. Every single thing in the church is gendered. So there’s constant gender dysphoria and thinking that I need to pick between the two and pick right between the two. Between the binary that doesn’t really exist.
Colette: Yeah. That would be really difficult. And I, I’d be curious, kind of what sort of pushback you receive by people who are living in this binary world, where you don’t see yourself you know, have you had conversations with people in the church that’s, pushed back against your experience or invalidate your experience?
Kate: I, I almost wished that I did have those conversations, but because gender is so ingrained in us that we think that we understand it. And we think that we know what it means that for me to even talk about being nonbinary, even within queer spaces, people [00:14:00] don’t know what that means. They cannot grapple with, with gender very well.
They don’t know the difference between sex and gender. So it’s, it’s very hard for me to talk with Latter-day Saints about this stuff, because they don’t know. They just, they, they don’t even have a foundation. So I’ve even been on queer podcasts where the folks interviewing me didn’t understand or know how to address me, understand how they’ll they’ve every podcast I’ve been on as a nonbinary person I’ve been called, I’ve been called a woman.
And I’ve asked them to edit those things out because it’s so ingrained that this is just what you are.
Colette: Right.
Kate: So it’d be great to have more of those conversations, but it’s, it’s at the, [00:15:00] it’s in its infancy to be able to talk about this within the church right now.
Colette: Yeah. That makes sense.
Talk to me about your pronouns. I know a lot of people are confused when they see a combination like yours. When you say my pronouns, are she/they, what does that mean to you?
Kate: You’re going to get a lot for me on this question.
Colette: Great! I’m excited.
Kate: Thank you for asking. First of all my pronouns are she/they. Mixed pronouns are, are becoming pretty common now. For me, the way that I see pronouns from somebody who studies and works with it, lives in different places, uses different languages.
Pronouns do not my pronouns do not mean nonbinary. My pronouns are just the pronouns that speak to me. So I think there are some people who will say, they’re not preferred pronouns, they’re your pronouns. And I [00:16:00] understand that position, but for me, working in other languages, there, they are preferred pronouns because there are going to be spaces where that just doesn’t work.
So, because I operate so often in Romanian, which is a romance language. Romanian is so gendered that there is no neutral. There is no neuter. So third person, singular, and third person plural, both in Romanian are still gendered. There’s no such thing as the neutral or the neuter. So for me, she was still very important because it allowed for people who speak other languages, particularly people who speak romance languages to still address me without me, this was a way for me to protect myself from a sort of gender dysphoria that would come from somebody using she or she in another language. So that’s why I kept it [00:17:00] initially. So right off the bat, when I came out as nonbinary, I, I wanted to keep she for that reason, thinking about other languages. But as soon as I came out and people started using they/them pronouns for me, like that was huge. I loved them. I get so much gender euphoria from somebody using they/them pronouns.
And th there’s even kind of a resentment that I have when people who are monolingual, who only speak English use she pronouns and not, they pronouns for me because I’ve made that exception for people who didn’t speak English as their first language or their primary language. And I’ve been, I’ve been pretty vocal about that. That’s still, it’s still hard for people to understand why it’s for me, why it’s she/they. So typically somebody would use she/they, or mixed pronouns because they like them. Some people will [00:18:00] use, she, he, they, all of them or Neo pronouns, all of these different things. They like all of the pronouns.
Pronouns are definitely important to me, but so is decolonization. So my pronouns are, are what they are, because I also am very strongly, deeply passionate about decolonization and allowing space for language and thinking through language problems.
Colette: Awesome. Thank you. That’s definitely a lot to think about, and I think it goes to highlight, you know, each person is individual and different and that’s why I’m excited to highlight different people’s stories. Cause I’m sure we’ll have other nonbinary people on here who have a different view of what pronouns mean to them and what their gender means to them. And it’s, it’s always just so interesting to hear all these different stories.
Talk to me more, you mentioned the term gender euphoria. Talk to me about what that means to [00:19:00] you and what brings you gender euphoria.
Kate: Often when we’re talking about transgender and nonbinary issues, we bring up so often gender dysphoria. What it means when you feel your gender is misrepresented, misunderstood. All of those sorts of things. That’s a gender dysphoria is. And just like we highlight at the beginning of the podcast, queer joy, there’s the opposite, which is what makes you feel your gender and feel excited about your gender? For me, definitely pronouns. Being able to express myself in ways that I didn’t think that I would be or I’ve been shamed to before. Right. So growing up, there were lots of things that I loved, but somebody felt the need to shame me for, and so I thought I needed to hide that or tuck that away or not do those things anymore or be those things anymore. And so [00:20:00] gender euphoria for me is reclaiming those things. For instance, short hair. My hair is short. I love short hair. I love going to a barber. I don’t go to a hairdresser and I specifically go to a barber and I go to have a not even a masculine experience, but man’s experience. I go because I want to be around other men or be around men and have them talk to me like I am among them and cut my hair. Like they would a man’s. Like that whole experience for me is gender euphoria.
Colette: What a great example. I’m glad you’ve been able to experience that. I think it sounds like for a long time, you really wouldn’t allow yourself to experience that and you just pushed it down, just thinking this is the way it has to be. I was assigned female at [00:21:00] birth. So this is my experience. So what was it like starting to embrace that I don’t fit in this box that I’ve been put in?
Kate: Actually, weirdly enough, this is kind of funny. The way that I finally understood my gender was not through anything masculine. It was through something feminine that I had tried to reject all of my life. And that is makeup. I was watching Schitt’s Creek as all queers do. And I noticed that first of all, Daniel Levy is a genius and can portray gender in these really complex ways that I love and adore. But in one, one way is that you might not recognize, but I recognized, was he wears eye shadow. It’s usually like pink or [00:22:00] purple or something. And it’s like very clear that he’s wearing eye shadow. And for me, that was a light bulb moment for me. It was like, I want to be him. It was never, I wanted to be a woman doing man things. It was that I felt manly and wanted to be feminine in my manliness. So I really heavily associated with his whole gender experience because suddenly I wasn’t seeing myself as a woman doing man things. I was seeing myself as this person that could be a man and a woman and enjoy those things all at once. So this thing that I’d rejected all of my life or all of my life, I refuse to wear makeup. Like growing up, [00:23:00] I really didn’t ever want to wear makeup. I felt uncomfortable in it actually. And when a little bit later when I was like, no, I’m really going to embrace this feminine side of me because I’m receiving a lot of feedback that this is what I feel normal for the first time.
When I, when I decided to be all in, in my femininity, people treated me like I was normal before that, when I was these borderline things, my nonbinary self, people treated me poorly because they couldn’t understand my gender. But now that I’m all in, in femininity, people started treating me well, but I didn’t feel comfortable at all. I did not feel comfortable wearing makeup. I didn’t feel comfortable in the clothes or whatever. I just like went with whatever anybody told me it was good. And so makeup to me felt super uncomfortable. And then there’s you get Dan Levy and I have this moment where it’s [00:24:00] like, oh, I can be like a sort of man wearing makeup. That’s gonna kind of be my identity and suddenly fell in love with it. I loved being able to experiment in all these different ways with makeup, femininity, the way I presented, the way I hold myself, I hold myself in a much more masculine way. Like the way I walk or the way I sit and those sorts of things, which came naturally to me as a kid and people kind of shut down. So I’ve kind of, re-embraced those things.
Colette: You talked about re-embracing, what was it like to come out multiple times, you know, come out when you were younger and then have to go back in the closet, come out later and then also come out with another identity.
Kate: Yeah, I think it’s representative of the queer experience. I think you also, I think you understand this, [00:25:00] coming out multiple times. I think any person who’s queer has to do it, come out so often. Allies and people who are not queer think that this is just like a one and done thing. Oh, you’re out now, but it’s not, there are certain places where you’re not safe to be out too, right? So.
Colette: Sure.
Kate: So there’s constantly a coming out. I just learned that very early on. I mean, I definitely want to offer some advice to folks who aren’t out. Make sure that, you know, the people who are going to be safe for you to come out, because it definitely hindered me coming out to people who were unsafe and unaffirming. And I had no other, I had no one else to go to after that.
I felt like two people, they responded really harshly. There is no way I was going to do that over again. There’s [00:26:00] no way I was going to try that again and risk even another person rejecting me. So I do have the advice to make sure, at least like you go to a group or, you know, come to one of us something to be able to come out first.
Or as you have people who, who are there for you to come out to, who are going to be supportive and affirming.
Coming out was also a really big process for me. I don’t mean to participate in bi erasure. But I came out as bisexual first off, and that happens for some folks. Their bisexuality is a real thing. Pansexuality is real thing, but for me, that’s not how I identify, but I did use it as a jumping off point. How, how are people going to react to my coming out as bisexual? And it didn’t go so great. So then the next step was maybe I’ll come out as bisexual again and see how it goes. So the next time I came out I was 31 to my [00:27:00] mom who had come out previously to. And I said, “Hey, I’m coming out as… I’m bisexual. Remember we had that conversation a long, long time ago.” And she said to me the second time, “So does this mean I’m not having grandchildren?”
And I was like, “No stop responding poorly.” But. It was still like a treading out into these waters, you know? And then when I finally like decided, this is who I am, this is what I’m, I’m standing in my truth. And coming out publicly as a lesbian, I had to go through a lot of those processes. So by the time I came out as a lesbian, it made the next step a little bit easier. Every step is a little bit easier, but I mean, there’s still a lot of discomfort, gender dysphoria, so much [00:28:00] insecurity about my gender, more so than my sexuality. At this point, I’m really comfortable in talking about and claiming my sexuality, but my gender is much harder because it’s so often unaffirmed still, right?
So there are lots of spaces where I can be affirmed. Even in Mormon spaces, I can be affirmed for my sexuality, but people just don’t understand my gender. And so that’s… each coming out has just been, you know, a little bit further getting me a little bit further along in the process.
Colette: Yeah, I think it is a very interesting experience. I think like, you know, if we look at the idea of boxes, it’s like, oh, this person’s nonbinary, this person’s lesbian, this person’s gay, you know, and you are both nonbinary and lesbian. And I think that probably confuses some people, like how can you be a lesbian if you’re nonbinary? What would you say to that?
Kate: Oh, my goodness. This is such a great [00:29:00] question, because it was the first question I asked myself because when I was trying to come out as nonbinary, when I was thinking about what that meant for me, what that meant for my relationships, those sorts of things, it always came back to me that I felt and understood and knew myself to be a lesbian. So I didn’t want to let go of that identity because it meant so much for me to claim that. It took so long for me to claim that, that I wasn’t going to give it up. And finally, what I recognized for myself was I was raised Mormon. I was raised a Latter-day Saint. And so, I constantly had those gendered experiences. It meant something that I was assigned female at birth. It doesn’t mean that doesn’t mean that I am female, that I feel female, that I associate with my [00:30:00] femaleness. It meant that somebody else associated me with that assignment at birth. And that impacted my sexuality, that, that assignment at birth impacted who I thought I could love.
And so, challenging that and recognizing who I do love and, and who I was cut off from loving that’s what makes my lesbian-ness so important to me is that I had been cut off from that and I refuse to be cut off from that any longer. So that’s why I keep the lesbian identity. This is kind of new language. That’s how I’ll put it. This is new language for us to use, and there are a lot more people are coming out as nonbinary lesbians. I think probably for similar reasons, that they feel like they’ve been cut off from that sexuality. It didn’t matter that they were non [00:31:00] binary. What mattered growing up was the assignment, the assigned gender at birth.
Colette: Right. Tricky stuff.
Kate: It was the first question I had. I, so I’m in a PhD program in, at the university of California, Riverside. I’m in a history department and my friends, lots of them do gender studies, gender theory and queer theory as well. So we have these conversations, very intellectual conversations. And so I asked them. Can I be out and can I be nonbinary and a lesbian? And my friends were like, yes, of course. So for me, that was the first question I had too, like, can I still claim all of these things at once? And yeah. I can.
Colette: And I think that is a profound question a lot of people ask ourselves is can I claim these identities at once? Can I claim both being queer and Mormon? You know, for example, and again, [00:32:00] going back to that discussion of labels, I think labels can be helpful until they’re not. Like they’re not supposed to be limiting for you! The way I view labels is they’re helpful in you quickly communicating your experience and being able to find your people. It’s not supposed to limit you and put yourself back into a box of you can’t be both of these things. You can’t be all of these identities.
Kate: Yeah. Definitely.
Colette: And I would be curious, you know, you’ve really have claimed the Mormon label as well. And so you have three seemingly incompatible labels. How do you work with that? How do you, how do you deal with that in life?
Kate: Yeah. Well, I, I strongly associate with my Latter-day Saint identity because I had such a strong conversion back to church. And it’s really painful for me when people want to tell me that I’m [00:33:00] not a Latter-day Saint because I am queer or because I fell in love with the woman or whatever they want to say. They’re taking away a really divine experience that is part of me and part of my soul and all of these things are very much part of me.
That’s why, that’s why I want all of those labels. They, they mean something very deeply to me and my Latter-day Saint identity means something to me. It’s going to mean something to everybody differently. Right? Some people is just going to be their heritage. Some people it’s just going to be what they do on Sunday. It’s going to mean different things to different people, but for me, it was the way that I reconnected to divine and also actually to my personal[00:34:00] conversion and relationship and belief in a Jesus Christ. Right? That for me is really crucial because that belief held a lot of healing for me in that I understood. And especially, I would say, especially when I was coming out as lesbian, as nonbinary, I relied so heavily on a relationship with an understanding of Jesus Christ and an atonement where there was a, it didn’t matter that I felt completely alone, that there wasn’t anybody that understood what I was going through because to be frank, nobody understood what I was going through and people were very open in expressing how they did not understand what I was going through, but I could always rely on that conversion, [00:35:00] that I knew that there was a divine that loved me and understood me. And I could always rely on a concept of Jesus Christ as a person that, that felt what I felt. That is something that I appreciate about Latter-day Saint theology, that there is a being, a divine being, that understands you so wholly and completely, and has felt what you felt. And you can connect with that being. That that literally saved my life. That belief literally saved my life. I don’t really care about the truthfulness. Like we put quotations, we talk about the truth or the knowledge of the gospel, all of those things that doesn’t matter to me, what matters to me is that I know what I felt, and I’m not going to deny what I’ve felt any longer.
So many people have asked me to [00:36:00] deny so many things about myself and I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not going to deny my own experiences anymore. And that’s why all of those labels are important to me because it’s a, an acknowledgement that I’m not denying those things any longer.
Colette: That’s a powerful statement. I’m not going to deny my experiences anymore and just show up as a full you.
You mentioned the being engaged to a guy. Is that something you can talk about more and what that experience was like as you were coming to terms with your sexuality?
Kate: Yeah. I was engaged to a man and in love with a woman. And the reason that I got engaged to a man was he was interesting and attractive. I met him in Romania. He was studying in Romania. He is actually from Nigeria, going to [00:37:00] school here. And it kind of just happened to be that we met at church. He was a Latter-day Saint.
There were things that I could find about him that I was like, yep, this is why we could be together. Yup. This is why we could be together, but I wasn’t connecting with him. I wasn’t wanting to talk with him all the time. I wasn’t wanting to be with him all the time. He was the person that was going to be part of my eternal salvation.
And yeah, it, it turns out that Mormonism is really great for having a shared culture, no matter where you are in the world. But sometimes we don’t talk about the way that, that breaks down in places around the world. So [00:38:00] sometimes missionaries are baptizing people without explaining all of that goes into being a Latter-day Saint. And I think that we think that everybody understands what it means to be a Latter-day Saint and everybody understands, for instance, the law of chastity and this person did not understand the law of chastity. And so we’d had that conversation multiple times. No, we’re not doing this, because we can’t get married in the temple. And he, that concept was not getting through to him. And I said, no, no, no many, many times. And ultimately it came down to, I could say, no one more time. Or, you know, if I said, yes, I wouldn’t be gay anymore. And. I didn’t want to do what he was asking me to do. I [00:39:00] said no many times, and he pursued and continued asking, and I felt like I was trapped. Either I can do this. Or, and because this thing is not going to be as bad as being gay, it’s going to be. And it was, it was, it was way, way worse. It was a horrible experience. I left that night. I left a ring on the table. Didn’t even didn’t even really say a proper goodbye or whatever, but I was just, I was done. That was an experience that I wasn’t gonna be able to recover from. What sucks, even worse than that whole thing was the, one of the first calls I made after was to my Bishop to say, what do I do? I’m in this predicament? [00:40:00] And my temple recommend got taken away and his did not. And that was like super hard on me. It felt like, I mean, I was violated and there was somebody who wasn’t respecting me and my person and my body and playing into my fears about my queerness and, and yet I’m the one who’s been punished, you know?
Colette: Oh my gosh, that’s so hard. And I appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing this part of your story, because I know there’s going to be people that see themselves in your story.
I’m afraid that sexual abuse and assaults is part of a lot of people’s stories. Whether it’s maybe someone trying to prove to them that, oh, no, you’re not gay, see? Or trying to prove to themselves that they can make it work. You know, I think one reason I’m receiving additional training to become a sex [00:41:00] therapist is because how messed up sex is in Mormon culture. And for people who grew up Mormon, we don’t talk about sex education. So how can we talk about consent and, you know, You went along with it. That doesn’t mean it’s consent. Right? I don’t know if you have more, you want to add, I know this is a very intensely personal and vulnerable thing to be sharing to however many people listen to this, but I wasn’t sure if you had more to add about that.
Kate: No, not right now.
Colette: Okay. Well, I appreciate you sharing because like I said, unfortunately I think it is a lot of people’s reality is to have different sexual abuse, sexual assault playing into their story in one way or another. And I’m so sorry that had to be part of your story and that you were then further punished for it, when I don’t believe in a God that would do that for you. And that’s one thing we probably talk about is the idea of leadership roulette. And, you know, in my episode [00:42:00] talking about how I lost my temple recommend, but the Bishop gave it back so I could prove I had one, so I wouldn’t lose my job, but what would have happened if I had a different Bishop who was like, Hmm, sorry, consequences.
You know, leadership roulette is so real and super familiar to a lot of people who are queer and Mormon. Do you have more to say about the idea with leadership roulette and how you’ve been impacted by that?
Kate: Yeah, for sure. So this is the same Bishop, the same bishop who took my temple recommended away. I had to wait a number of months to get it back and go through the whole process. During that process, I was meeting with him about being in love with a woman and he was receiving phone calls and people who were threatening me or trying to threaten me through the Bishop. And he happened to also have my back. There were so few people I felt that I had in my Latter-day Saint [00:43:00] corner during that time. And it happened to be that the Bishop who took my temple recommend away was the same Bishop who happened to be in my corner and protected me from a stake president who wanted to discipline me based on rumors and speculation.
He met with me all of the time to talk about queer issues and he affirmed what I felt and he affirmed the love that I felt for another woman. And he understood that he didn’t quite understand it completely, but he understood me. He understood, he saw me, he, he really wanted to know me and help me and not just set me aside for a rule or whatever.
So in the beginning, that’s what it was, right? He [00:44:00] was like, here’s the rule, you broke it. This, this is the consequence. And then after that, it was no, we’d have to like dive into this a little bit deeper. And yeah, so that was super helpful for me. I think that there is Bishop roulette. And so many people are not having that experience. For me, I don’t think I would be here if I hadn’t been in California, if I hadn’t had this Bishop. Yeah, I just, the suicidality was too much at that point.
Colette: And this is where, you know, we talk about a lot of the hard parts of our story and how pretty much every queer person I know that grows that Mormon has dealt with suicidality to some extent. But would you be willing to share more about your experience? I know you’d mentioned suicide attempts, even. How much are you able to share about your experience with suicidality?
Kate: Yeah, I, my uncle died by suicide when I was 12. [00:45:00] And by the time I was 13, I was thinking about it by the time I was 13. I thought, I remember specifically going to my mom with a newspaper article that was about suicide from the salt lake Tribune and saying, you know what, Rusty did this as I’m thinking about it too.
So I remember being very young and this, this coming up for me. And it was so shameful. I felt so much shame about wanting to wanting to die all the time. I think that’s what keeps people from talking about it is there so much shame about that strong, strong desire and the thoughts that constantly come up or whatever.
So from 13 to 19, thought about it pretty often, it comes a lot with self harm as well. And when I was 19, I was in love [00:46:00] with a friend. Again like this, this is a recurring theme of my life to fall in love with a friend, as you well know. And I think I’ve always fallen for, for bisexual or pansexual people. I have theories about that, about what that says about my gender. I think that those people have an insight into my gender before I do. And yeah. I was like, I’m cutting myself off from my bisexual part of myself, which has happened also happened multiple times saying, no, I’m not bisexual. I’m only gonna pursue this, this other, the socially acceptable sex. That’s also detrimental, right, for bisexual and pansexual folks. Like that’s such a hard road to walk, but for me to be falling in love with these folks is also really difficult. And so it was, I couldn’t admit that. She knew it and would say really, really [00:47:00] hurtful things or like make out with people with men just to like get at me. And I just felt like this, there’s nothing safe about this. There’s nothing safe about any of my friendships. That suicide attempt at 19 was very much related to not being able to come out as queer and it’d be safe.
Colette: I just, again appreciate your vulnerability and realness in this. And I think that highlights a few things. One, I always want to point people to resources if they themselves are feeling suicidal, or if they know someone that is. I didn’t realize this until I was certified QPR question, participate, refer a trainer that the majority of people that call the suicide hotline are not suicidal themselves, they’re calling on behalf of someone to know how to help and how to handle.
So if you or someone, you know, please use these resources, you can Google or look on our website for these resources. But I think you sharing that story also highlights the [00:48:00] inherent potential and unsafeness of being closeted. Because what would it have been like if you had been able to be out? this is me I’m attracted to women, I’m in this relationship. would it have turned out differently?
Like I know that I was in a, not ideal relationship for me at one point in time, but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it because it was a queer relationship. And did I stay in that not great relationship longer? If I had been able to be out and people could have said, Hey, maybe this is a kind of toxic relationship for you. I don’t know if that resonates at all to you.
Kate: Yeah, absolutely. We, so I was 19 when let’s see 2005, so. That’s only six years. It’s within the same decade as Matthew Shepard. It’s in the same decade as Ellen, like [00:49:00] it’s 10 years before same-sex marriage is legal in the United States that I was fearful because I had seen these other examples of what was happening in the world to these people, this isn’t, I think so often we, we are now reducing this to a Latter-day Saint problem, without thinking that, you know, just 20 years ago, this was a United States problem. That the way that we’re treating queer people within the church was the way that we treated queer people just 20 years ago. Was not safe for many of us to be out just in general. So Yeah, I think having that longer historical perspective might give us some comfort and hope that things can get better and get better very quickly and dramatically. But I did want to say that suicidality[00:50:00] has to be, we have to get rid of the shame around talking about it because I mean, that’s the thing that, that is really what puts us in danger is that you can’t talk about it. And it’s not just that you can’t talk about it because of the shame or whatever. Like there are legitimate real-world consequences of admitting these sorts of things that you can’t. There are certain things that you’re not going to be able to do, because you just said these sorts of things about yourself.
We have to be able to get rid of, and dismantle those systems that say, you’re going to have consequences for the rest of your life. Being able to talk about this. Or when you talk about this or admitting this. So yeah, I think there are lots of different resources and places to go, but this is a systemic problem. It needs to be fixed in a lot of different ways from the ground up and that kind of the [00:51:00] last resort are these hotlines and things, but they’re a great last resort. And I talk often about, I’ve used them within the past few, within the past year, I’ve used these resources and I’m not, I do feel shame about that, but I’m not, I’m willing to try to push through that shame in order to, for somebody else to say, okay, I also need to, or I should, or I have, because it’s happening and it’s taking place. The queer experience within Mormonism is challenging. And we do need to rely on these sources, resources, and people, especially allies, need to recognize that this is what we’re going through, and we have to be able to talk about it. You have to be able to open up the space for us to be able to talk about that.
Colette: Yeah. I know I’ve said before, when I was wrestling with my sexuality and spirituality, it felt like I [00:52:00] had to either kill off the Mormon side of me or the queer side of me. And since I couldn’t choose, I just wanted to kill off all of me. And I didn’t mean to laugh, but like that was the reality that it just, the pain was so intense and it felt so real. There didn’t seem to be a way forward. And so why keep trying? And so that is a very real thing that many of us end up dealing with. And we need to be able to talk about it, not to encourage it, not to encourage suicide or suicidality, but to normalize it so that we can talk about it so that people can get the help they need so that systems can be in place so that there aren’t further harms that people unknowingly do to others. That increase the risk for these things.
Kate: Oh my gosh. That was so great. Thank you for that. Absolutely. We do need to normalize the conversation. The way you put it was perfect. [00:53:00] Thank you.
Colette: I’m trying to think. We’ve been talking about a lot about your experience and there is so much and not sure what do you still want to talk about? Are there things you wished I had asked?
Kate: You’re very good at asking questions. I think that we’ve touched on everything I want to, I I’m sure that as we go forward with more episodes, that we’ll hear more of both of our stories. So I’m not, I’m not worried about that.
Colette: All right, then we will wrap this up for today. We appreciate you all listening. And if what we’re saying and talking about resonates with you, please feel free to follow rate, review, and share and please follow along. You can reach us on Instagram and Facebook @CalledToQueer. And our website is calledtoqueer.com. We will talk to you next week.