Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her.
Kaitlin Mendoza and her family are among the most-hated churchgoers in America.
When she went to church in 2014, the 12-year-old Mendoza got “real emotional” sitting in a front row with her mom and 2-year-old sister. Her family went to a “slightly progressive” church called the Kingdom of Life Church in Southfield. Soon after, Mendoza, who is transgender and was born a boy, started “feeling trapped.”
“I would be like, you know, ‘Don’t send me home when I want to go home,'” Mendoza told The Huffington Post. “It was just weird sometimes.”
When her church failed to support her after Mendoza began transitioning, she joined a community of others who are transgender — both transgender and gender nonconforming (GNC) — and began to make headlines.
Their story, told in a new book by a local journalist, was originally published in the Detroit-based newspaper MLive.com this week.
At first, Mendoza says, she wasn’t sure how other people would respond to her new identity or her revelation that her family was transgender in church.
“When you start to become a part of this community where we’re living with this, it’s like, it’s not just me, and everyone’s going to think it’s amazing and amazing,” she said.
But the reaction was, in some ways, even worse than she could have imagined. With no support from the people around her, she says, she was forced to “pull down” her identity, which eventually led to her family’s loss of their church — and her own.
She is not alone. In America, many people are being pushed out of their faith or faced with an unfamiliar and often frightening