A Stable Place in a Time of Transition: Steven Leigh Williams and Stacey Craig

April 23, 2015

When he was 12, Steven Leigh Williams felt called to enter religious ministry. At the time, he was a young woman who would eventually come to see himself as transgender, leading to harassment and threats from his peers. In this conversation, Williams discusses with Stacey Craig, a fellow Unitarian Universalist, his path to ministry as a transgender man.

This story was produced by StoryCorps.

This story is a part of the American Pilgrimage Project, a conversation series that invites Americans of diverse backgrounds to sit together and talk to each other one-to-one about the role their religious beliefs play at crucial moments in their lives. The interview was recorded and produced by StoryCorps, a national nonprofit whose mission is to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.

Steven Leigh Williams: I first felt a call to ministry pretty soon after you met me, but I was 12 years old. And that deeply felt call kind of fell to the wayside while I dealt with the process of surviving my teenage years. My body was betraying me in a way that goes beyond what most kids experienced during puberty. I'm transgender, I'm female to male transsexual, but in the eighties and nineties, I didn't have language for that. There wasn't a lot of visibility. The only transgender people I saw were on Jerry Springer, throwing chairs at each other. It was terrifying and lonely cause I had no compass point for what was happening to me. And one of the ways this church supported my navigating my identity was not being too rigid about gender roles and expectations.

Stacey Craig: You were involved with the youth AIDS education project, which was a group that we started here at All Souls, and so you were instrumental in helping to educate other young people about how to protect themselves against AIDS. And then you also helped to start the gay-straight alliance at your school. And both of those were, I thought were just extremely brave moves on your part. And I wonder, what risks did you take to be involved in that?

Steven Leigh Williams: I was risking my life every time I walked out my front door, simply by being myself. I got yelled at on the streets. I got taunted in the hallways. I had guys at school or out in the world constantly challenging me that if I thought I was a man they'd show me what a man really was. I had friends who were attacked out in public. I haven't had one friend who was attacked in the church parking lot.

Stacey Craig: If you were to speak directly to adults who might know a teen who is trying to figure out who he or she is, what would you say to that parent or teacher?

Steven Leigh Williams: So often in this culture, we downplay adolescent experience as just a phase, or you don't know what you want, you don't know what love is. You don't know this, you don't know that. But every single human being is an expert in their own lives and expert in their own inner experience. And if what they are experiencing is pressing enough for them to talk to you about, then you better listen, because it's important. And if you listen compassionately, you might be the person who is that adult that makes a difference for them and allows them to be who they are, even if it's only for the time that they're in your presence. Because I can guarantee you, I would not be here right now if it hadn't been for this faith community that gave me my only consistent, stable, safe place growing up. And I am 100% sure that I would not be where I am today without having had that.