Michigan- Interview: Joanna Whaley discusses going from Evangelical Pastor to Trans Politician

Joanna Whaley is running for state house outside of Detroit, Michigan as a progressive democrat. Before coming out as trans five years ago, she was an evangelical pastor. She spoke to The Needle about this transformation, and how she plans to help people going forward.

The original interview has been edited down for time and clarity.

Jane: I'm here with The Needle. I'm doing a series where I'm interviewing a bunch of trans candidates for public office. So, would you like to introduce yourself?

Joanna: I'm Joanna Whaley. I go by she/her pronouns. I am running for state house in Michigan’s 2nd district. I came out as a trans woman about four years ago. And before that I came out, I was an evangelical pastor.

So you can imagine the complete and utter chaos that ensued from that moment. When I say I came out, I got outed by someone in my church. I had been wrestling with my gender my entire life, since about the age of eight. And I had been subjected to 15 years of conversion therapy through my churches. So I've been through many different rounds and formats of conversion therapy. This was all when it was legal in the state of Michigan.

I grew up in the Christian nationalist world. All that to say, when I came out four years ago, it was a complete world shift. I worked in some of the biggest churches in the country. So my coming out was a shockwave in the evangelical world in this area.

Jane: [faining shock] Oh, no, she went to the other side.

Joanna: Yes, exactly.

I always tell people that my transition, my coming out, was actually more theological rather than it was anything else. And so I went on a spiritual journey to understand myself. I think the coming out process is a spiritual journey. But coming from a more Christian worldview was a really wild journey.

So when I came out, I began to do the work of LGBTQ rights in religion. All these people that told me my whole life how much they loved me and cared for me, the second I was honest about who I was to them, suddenly the hatred and the vitriol was aimed at me. I was told over and over that I never was part of them, or that I wasn't allowed to have a spiritual journey anymore because of my gender. So I started LGBTQ rights advocacy work.

All of that over the last four years has led into politics, which was never on my bingo card at the beginning of this work. It just kind of snowballed from there into meeting more and more people in my area who need support. And people in Michigan, speaking specifically to trans folks all over the state who don't have anyone representing them at higher levels of government. So that pushed me into running for office.

Jane: Interesting. So I do want to emphasize that because a lot of our readership tends to be people who had their current attitudes from a relatively young age. They aren't political converts in the same way that you are. How did you go from the evangelical world to the one you're in? And how would you describe your current world?

Joanna: There's this big word within the church spaces called deconstruction. And that is a big buzz phrase that makes people on the right roll their eyes back. But it's become a very big journey within spiritual spaces to say, hey, all these things that I've been taught my whole life, I'm actually trying to follow them. And now, I'm being punished, and told that I'm a liberal snowflake for believing those things.

I began that journey six years ago. It was during Trump 1, here in the US. His election was a huge ideological bombshell that went off and made me question a lot of things. I was watching many of my spiritual mentors in my life believe wild conspiracy theories, and backing this man that had absolutely nothing to do with anything I had ever taught and learned.

The big thing that tipped everything over for me, believe it or not, was the murder of George Floyd. I was a pastor for a really big church. I was watching people in my congregation act in ways that were so antithetical to anything I believe. I would stand in front of thousands of people every Sunday, and I would watch how they would act. The way they dismissed the death of a minority in our country was absolutely disgusting to me. I would stand in front of these thousands of people, angry at what I was a part of.

As I said, my gender transition was very much theological. That tipped over everything for me. What happened during George Floyd made the switch go off. All these things that I thought I believed are now in question. And that biggest question that I had my whole life was that I'm trans, but I don't think I can come out and be OK.

I thought that I would, quote unquote, “go to hell” if I came out. So I never did. So when that domino fell during George Floyd, it paved the path for pretty much everything I believed to be renegotiated. But that renegotiation cost me a lot in my life. I lost everything. I lost my job. I lost my marriage. I lost everything in that renegotiation.

Jane: I want to talk about what happened after that point. You come from this evangelical background. You were closeted. You came out. It blew up. What happens from there, both personally and ideologically?

Joanna: So when I began to ask the bigger questions, I had people in my life who I talked to. I said, hey, you know, I've wrestled with this thing my whole life. What should I do? I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who to turn to. I was told I could only go see a Christian therapist for fear of stigmatization. So I ended up going to see a Christian therapist, and I started to process all of the things I've been going through. And then I brought up gender to this therapist. And I'm like, oh, great, here we go. This is conversion therapy again for me, right? I was getting ready to go through more conversion therapy. When the therapist stopped me, halfway through and said, you need to know that you're not sitting in a conversion therapy session right now. That was a huge moment.

And obviously, the big ugly tears came from that moment. So from that point on, I began to process in therapy with people that were affirming. I had never met people who were affirming to queer people before because my whole world said LGBTQ people are evil and that Satan is using them. That was my whole world view. I was undoing those things and opening up conversations with people that I had never been open to before. And that gave me the competence to understand who I was and who I am. Then I finally came out over the course of a year.

I came out online, and my phone was just going crazy for days and days and days with people telling me how terrible I am, how I'm deceived. But what surprised me was the love and support that I got from so many people. And that has grown since then.

Jane: When you say love and support, I want to clarify that. Are you saying love in teh sense of ‘Jesus loves you regardless of the sin’, or love and support for who you actually are, regardless of the religious stuff?

Joanna: One of the number one things I heard was, I love you, Jesus loves you… BUT. There's always a big but right that comes with that. What I found was any time I heard the ‘but’, it immediately was an end of conversation moment for me. That would be the last time we talked. If there's any conditions to love, that was the end of my conversations.

But the amount of people that said I love you and I support you, ‘can I drop off a bag of clothes to your house?’ was overwhelming, and came from places I never expected. People would show up to my house with garbage bags of clothes. I became better friends with some of my old guy friends and their wives after that. I was met with so much love and support by some really surprising sources.

Jane: How do all these experiences with being deep in that evangelical world, and then having to completely change that, affect your political life, such that you're in queer politics today?

Joanna: It's important to know that when I was deep into pastoral work, I definitely identified and affiliated myself as a conservative because it was the way that I hid myself. Which gives me so much pause anytime I hear Republican colleagues gay bashing and going after trans people. My gaydar goes off a little bit because that was me.

I was trained in Christian nationalism. In fact, I went to a church planning network that taught me the Seven Mountains mandate, which is a really big buzzword these days. I was trained in that. In fact, I still have their manual in my house. I keep it around so I can study it every once in a while.

I think that once I knocked over the domino of my own gender, everything else began to come into perspective. Until then, I couldn't see anything around me because I was so worried about this one question of whether I am OK to be me. Once I knew that I could be me, everything else fell into place. I realized this whole political leaning and affiliation I've had is working so deeply against my own interests, humanity, and survival. The first election of Trump made me very aware of that because I was going through conversion therapy and then hearing all of this anti-trans message all the time on TV. Even though I was being victimized by conservative thought through conversion therapy, I didn't see it until I knocked over the domino of ‘am I safe to be me?’ And that's how I began diving deeper and deeper into progressive politics. And the more I did the work of fighting for trans rights and fighting for LGBTQ rights in general, the more I began to understand how much I believed in the progressive platform. It was like a switch was pulled, and then a run down a ramp for a while. I had to undo a lot of stuff, as you can imagine. I had these deeply held convictions your whole life.

Jane: You were essentially involved in a politics that was to the benefit of people that were not you, and you saw yourself as a failed version of a patriarch.

Joanna: Exactly. Now I have a lot of empathy for those who blindly believed things that maybe come from their parents, from Fox News, etc. I have a lot of empathy for that because there's a lot of times when I was just like that.

Jane: It's almost like cringing at your past self. A lot of trans people have this moment where they go “oh god, I did that. I was so bad. I didn't pass.” You're cringing at your past politics instead.

Joanna: The funny thing is, on my social media, I made a really conscious choice when I came out that I wasn't going to create a new social media. I just went, guess what? You can go through my social media and see all the old stuff I used to post. I'm not running from it, because I want people to see that you can evolve. I'm a firm believer in the evolution of people and that we can evolve. We may just be trying to survive today, but we might be more enlightened tomorrow.

Jane: It's interesting how that develops, where a lot of people who are trans used to be right wing, and then they really came to terms with their identity and then became more left wing over time. Do you think that's happening outside of queer people? I mean, people changing their politics these days is a very rare phenomenon.

Joanna: We are getting so polarized, right? Even just recently here in the state of Michigan, we had a House member who was a very outspoken anti-LGBT Republican lawmaker who got caught on kink sites and things like that. You know, he's trying to ban pornography in the state of Michigan and he just got caught having accounts on gay porn sites. I think what's happening is that we have such a polarized world and documented world.

And so I think that we have little tolerance for evolution anymore. And that's something I noticed when I was in right wing politics: you can't change your mind. And this is where I think that my theological training is really interesting within the political space. This all comes from a biblical worldview of saying ‘God is the same today, yesterday, today and forever’. I don't subscribe to that theology anymore. But that's a whole nother topic.

It comes out of a spiritual space of saying we're not allowed to change our minds because we're in God's party. Republicans really do believe they are God's chosen party. So of course, we can't change our mind, because if the Bible says this, we can't change our mind. So it's really hard for people to make those evolutions anymore. But on the other end of things, those of us in the progressive wing of politics, we have to be willing and gracious to allow the evolutions to happen. So if our Republican, you know, lawmaker, you know, comes out and says, you know what guys, I was at the Charlie Kirk event and I was on Grindr. There's going to be a lot of work to be done, a lot of harm that has to be made right. There's going to have to be a lot of apologies. But at the same time, we have to find a way to allow people to evolve.

Jane: Sure, people will change from one kind of left winger to another kind of left winger, or they'll change from a Christian to a Christian nationalist. But people going from one end of the spectrum, broadly speaking, to the other, is incredibly rare. And it only seems to happen when people have changed life circumstances, like for example, coming out as trans. This doesn't seem to be happening to most people. Most people are set in their ways. And this isn't even an old person thing. People are getting set in their ways as early as high school. People changing their mind on politics doesn't happen that much.

Joanna: And I think there's an element of self grace to that. I think one thing that I always credit my mother for teaching me is to know when to admit when I'm wrong, and that it's okay to admit that and change.

I can stand in front of a thousand people and say, Hey, I got that wrong, and I'm going to change now. And I think it comes from the documentation we have in our social media. Because now people have receipts on everything. And so when we evolve, we have to be willing to be called out for that evolution. And I experienced being called out on that evolution by thousands of people who rebuked me for who I was and who I was becoming and how I believed. And they would bring receipts. It’s still better than being dug in and being wrong forever.

And it's really hard to watch when you don't like the evolution. I've watched people evolve the other way on things and that's so painful to watch. But am I going to change their mind in a comment section? No, I'm not. I'm going to just continue to advocate for those who want the support that I can offer them.

Jane: I guess the question is how often is this happening? I know it happened to you, but is this happening more or less often than it used to be? Are you an outlier, or part of a trend?

Joanna: As far as people going from evangelical to gay or trans, it's actually very common. In my work in the last four years, I have counseled maybe about 200 people who have come to me and said, hey, I'm a pastor. I'm a parent. I'm this. I'm that. And I have been wrestling with this my whole life. The problem that evangelicals have with trans people is because they have so oppressed trans people and put them in the closet, now we just can't take it anymore. And so they're all beginning to come out of the closet.

And so it seems like everywhere that people finally have that courage to come out. So it is actually much more common than people think, but it's just not popular in social media algorithms. So people will see maybe one person who's ex-angelical and came out as trans. But the vast majority of people are trying to survive, so they don't post anything. But on the other end, being Christian and being trans are two things that the algorithms don't like together. If you were just Christian, we would blow you up. And if you were also just trans, we might blow you up. But if you're both of those things, you may not see them in the algorithm. Especially as of today, since TikTok has removed the trans flag from emojis, if you were not aware of that.

Jane: Oh, that's news to me.

Joanna: Oh, shit. In America, if you type the trans flag in comment sections, it replaces it with a white surrender flag and the gender non-informant, which also communicates that you surrendered your gender, which is such bullshit.