Out of the Dark: What Trans Lives Reveal About Surviving Religion
Based on a 2014 survey, this essay revisits what trans lives reveal about inner life and spiritual endurance at a time of renewed religious hostility.
In the fall of 2014, I set out to ask a deceptively simple question: what does spirituality actually look like in the lives of transgender people?
At the time, public conversations about transgender lives were only beginning to edge into mainstream awareness. The language we now use so easily, especially the word non-binary, had not yet entered common circulation. Most people in my community described themselves as trans men, trans women, gender-queer, or gender-fluid, using the language that was available to them then. If this same survey were conducted today, many of those same participants might well describe themselves differently. The map of language has changed. The terrain of human experience beneath it has not.
I was not trying to make a theological argument or defend any religious institution. I was not trying to produce a manifesto or even a critique. I was trying to listen. What I wanted to understand was what remains of a person’s inner life after years, sometimes decades, of hiding, negotiating, enduring, and surviving. When institutional religion has wounded you, when belonging has been conditional, when your own body has felt like contested territory, what becomes of meaning, awe, compassion, and hope?
There is a persistent assumption, especially in religious circles, that transgender people are hostile to spirituality, or that they have rejected transcendence along with the churches that rejected them. The Transgender Spirituality Pulse Survey, or TSPS, quietly but decisively challenges that story. What it reveals instead is something far more complex, and far more unsettling.
Transgender people do not arrive at adulthood unmarked. For many, childhood and adolescence are dominated by vigilance. One learns to watch one’s gestures, one’s voice, one’s desires, one’s reflections in mirrors and in the eyes of others. Long before there is language for what is happening, many learn that something about them is dangerous, or shameful, or forbidden. They learn to survive.
That survival often requires concealment, performance, and relentless emotional self-monitoring. It also requires, in many cases, navigating religious environments that present themselves as sources of moral certainty but function instead as engines of fear: fear of hell, fear of rejection, fear of being found out, fear of being unlovable in the eyes of God.
By the time many trans people reach adulthood, they have lived for decades in what can only be described as a social and emotional pressure cooker. The TSPS did not set out to measure trauma, but trauma is everywhere in the stories. And yet trauma is not the most important thing the study reveals.
One part of the study used a well-established instrument in health and psychology research called the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale. It does not measure beliefs or church attendance. It measures ordinary, lived experiences such as awe, gratitude, compassion, mercy, longing for connection, and a sense of being held within something larger than oneself.
When the results from the TSPS were compared to general population data, the difference was not subtle. Across nearly every category, transgender participants reported dramatically higher frequencies of daily spiritual experience than the general public. Not slightly higher, not marginally higher, but in some cases two or three times higher.
This is not the profile of a spiritually alienated population. It is the profile of a population that is spiritually intense.
The finding forces a reframe. The question is no longer why trans people are so alienated from religion. The question becomes what kind of inner life is forged in a life of prolonged existential exposure.
For many participants, transition was not only social or medical. It was existential. Again and again, people described a similar shift. Before transition, enormous amounts of energy went into surviving, managing appearances, controlling fear, and holding the self together. After transition, many found themselves able, often for the first time, to be present to others.
They described becoming more open, more emotionally available, more perceptive, more honest, and more compassionate. This is not because transition is easy. It is because authenticity is metabolically cheaper than concealment. When the enormous psychic labor of pretending is finally laid down, attention becomes possible. And attention, in many spiritual traditions, is the beginning of compassion.
The study also makes something else very clear. Most participants had been deeply wounded by organized religion. The language they used to describe their experiences was strikingly consistent. Churches were described as judgmental, dogmatic, fear-based, repressive, hypocritical, and unsafe. Many participants lost not only their congregations but their families when they came out. They lost entire worlds of meaning and belonging.
And yet almost none described themselves as spiritually empty.
What they had largely abandoned was not transcendence. It was institutions that could not love them.
Spirituality did not disappear. It migrated. It became quieter, more personal, less performative, less doctrinal, and more rooted in nature, solitude, reflection, creativity, and a handful of deeply trusted relationships. Only a small minority remained active in any church or formal religious community. This is not a story of secularization so much as a story of spiritual decentralization.
When participants were asked to describe moments when they were deeply moved by someone else’s compassion, the stories were often simple and devastating. A nurse who did not flinch. A sibling who stayed. A child who said, “I will always love you.” A friend who created safety when safety was not expected.
What makes these moments unforgettable is not that they are extraordinary. It is that they are unexpected. Many trans people live with an internalized expectation of rejection. Their nervous systems have been trained by experience. Kindness, when it appears, is not merely pleasant. It is disarming.
And here is one of the great paradoxes revealed by the study. Despite living with this vulnerability, or perhaps because of it, participants reported extraordinarily high levels of compassion toward others. Suffering does not automatically produce wisdom, but it often produces attunement.
It is worth pausing to say something about language and history. When this survey was conducted in 2014, the term non-binary had not yet entered widespread public use. People described themselves with the words that were available to them at the time. If the study were repeated today, the demographic categories would look different. But the spiritual contours of the experience would almost certainly not, because this study was never really about identity labels. It was about what happens to the human interior under conditions of prolonged existential strain.
The TSPS quietly issues a challenge to several cherished assumptions. It challenges the idea that suffering makes people spiritually smaller. It challenges the idea that leaving church means leaving depth. It challenges the idea that trans lives are spiritually thin or morally confused. It challenges the idea that religion has a monopoly on transcendence.
It also issues a more uncomfortable challenge to religious institutions themselves. The people you rejected did not lose their souls. They lost you. And they learned to live without you.
If anything, the findings feel more, not less, urgent today. We are living through a renewed surge of ultraright religious activism that is once again using law, theology, and moral panic to police bodies and identities. Old arguments have been dusted off. Old fears have been weaponized. The language has changed slightly. The impulse has not.
What this study suggests, quietly but firmly, is that this kind of religion does not, in the end, get the last word. It can wound. It can exile. It can take away community, safety, and belonging. But it does not get to decide whether a person has an inner life. It does not get to decide whether awe, compassion, and gratitude survive.
Beneath all the charts, interviews, and analysis is a simpler human discovery. When people are forced to rebuild their lives from the ground up, they often rebuild them on truth rather than fear. What emerges is not neat. It is not easily institutionalized. It is not easily controlled. But it is, in many cases, profoundly alive.
And it is still here.
Appendix: The Transgender Spirituality Pulse Survey in Brief
This essay is based on the Transgender Spirituality Pulse Survey (TSPS), a study conducted in the fall of 2014 as part of my Master’s degree research. The survey explored how transgender and gender-diverse people experience spirituality, meaning, and inner life, especially after experiences of exclusion or harm from religious communities.
At the time the survey was conducted, the term non-binary was not yet in widespread use. Participants used the language available then, most often trans men, trans women, gender-queer, or gender-fluid. If the study were conducted today, some labels would likely differ, though the underlying experiences would not.
In addition to narrative questions about religious background and life experience, the study used a well-known research instrument, the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES). This scale does not measure beliefs or church attendance. It measures ordinary experiences such as awe, gratitude, compassion, a sense of deep connection, and inner peace.
When TSPS results were compared with general population norms, transgender participants reported much higher frequencies of daily spiritual experience, in some categories two to three times higher.
At the same time, most participants reported deeply negative experiences with organized religion and no longer participated in religious institutions. Many described churches as judgmental, fear-based, or unsafe, and many had lost family or community after coming out.
And yet very few described themselves as spiritually empty. For most, spirituality had shifted rather than disappeared, becoming more personal, quiet, and rooted in reflection, relationships, creativity, nature, or solitude.
One of the most consistent qualitative themes was that many participants experienced greater emotional presence and compassion after transition, largely because no longer having to hide freed enormous psychological energy.
This was not a clinical study and does not claim causation. It suggests something simpler and more human: long lives lived under existential pressure often produce unusual depth, attentiveness, and emotional attunement.
Notes and Sources
The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale (DSES) was developed by Lynn G. Underwood and Jeanne A. Teresi and is widely used in health and psychology research to assess ordinary spiritual experiences rather than religious beliefs or practices. See: Underwood, L. G., & Teresi, J. A. (2002). The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale: Development, theoretical description, reliability, exploratory factor analysis, and preliminary construct validity using health-related data. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24(1), 22–33.
General population norms for the DSES are summarized in: Underwood, L. G. (2011). The Daily Spiritual Experience Scale: Overview and results. Religions, 2(1), 29–50.
On the relationship between chronic stress, hypervigilance, and heightened emotional and perceptual attunement, see: van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
The TSPS was conducted in 2014 as part of a Master’s thesis on transgender spirituality and religious experience in Canada, using anonymous, voluntary participation and mixed qualitative and quantitative methods.
Terminology around gender identity has evolved significantly since 2014. The widespread adoption of the term non-binary postdates this study and reflects linguistic and cultural shifts rather than a sudden emergence of new human experiences.
