By Alex Kenderdine
The Independent Fundamental Baptist (IFB) cult that I grew up in had insanely strict rules and regulations for what we were allowed to read. Most books I read were classics because they deemed those safe. However, it was through the classics that I discovered parts of myself that the IFB would hate.
Reading Anne of Green Gables and watching the 80’s version of the movie, I came to realize that both Anne and Gilbert were attractive to me. I had no words for what I was feeling, however, I knew that my crush on Anne was just like the crush I had on Gilbert. Maybe even a bit more.
Little Women emboldened me to go ahead and embrace the masculine side as well as the feminine side. Jo was not only a crush as well, she was someone I admired for not falling into the strict gender roles she was born into. I saw some of myself in her.
Neither of these things were things I necessarily understood. I did, however, understand that they were things to keep as a secret and hidden away. Over the years, I learned to stuff it all down and conform to what I knew I had to be to survive the IFB. There was, however, a great amount of fear.
There was an internalized fear that I felt due to the IFB having beliefs that LGBTQ+ community was full of dangerous, wicked, and evil people who wanted to destroy society. Not just society, but God and the church as well. There was so much judgment that I placed on myself, and I even dealt with a lot of shame and guilt over being who I am.
I was also very afraid of harm coming to me.
Pastors would regularly boast about how they’d beat their kids if they were gay. There were parents who would send their kids away to homes to get conversion therapy. One pastor spoke about putting all LGBTQ+ people into concentration camps and letting them die out. I was told that if I ever came out as anything, I’d be hunted down. The threat of constant harm was already a thing, but I knew that with this it would be different. The hate they felt for the LGBTQ+ community was so much stronger than their hate for other people, and it made me feel very afraid and unsafe at times.
When I left the IFB, it took me a few years to accept that I’m bisexual. It took me longer to accept my gender. Given the abuse girls and women, including myself, received in the cult, I had a hard time embracing any kind of femininity to me. I saw it as weakness and everything the cult had told me it was. So, for a long time I identified as strictly male. However, over the years, I realized that that also wasn’t right. Thanks to a lot of therapy and education, I came to accept both the feminine and masculine as well as all the other parts of me. My gender, as I have come to know it, is something I don’t feel the need to put a strict label on. Though, I do think that demiwoman is a term I relate to the most.
As with most things in my life, it either comes back around to books or the TV show Supernatural. In this case, it’s back to the books. Still to this day I read both Anne of Green Gables and Little Women with a great deal of fondness. Not only did they provide solace in the chaotic mess that was the IFB, they gave me something I could relate to and identify with when nothing else could.
Alex Kenderdine is a writer, blogger, and caregiver from Pennsylvania. She left fundamentalism thirteen years ago and has since focused on deconstructing and rebuilding their life. When not working, she loves reading and spending time with friends and family. You can check out Alex’s blog, Not Ruled by Fate.
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