SAVED

Finding self-love after Christian conversion therapy

- HENRY CARNELL

GROWING UP, Myles Markham always felt like an outsider. Markham was multiracial in small, mostly white Florida towns. And they were queer. “I was swimming in water that told me that who I was, what I was, needed to change if I wanted to be safe,” they say. “I really believed, ‘I am a problem. I need to be fixed.’”

As a teen, a friend got them interested in evangelical Christianity, which seemed to offer the promise of ­transformation. They joined a church youth group and began studying the Bible. Soon after, Markham found an online forum for a ministry that supports “those affected by unwanted homosexuality.” Markham didn’t identify as transgender at the time, but to their mentors in the conversion therapy program, Markham says, sexuality was inextricable from gender identity. “A woman being attracted to women—she was confused about her gender identity, confused about what it means to be a godly woman,” they explain. “And so what they end up doing, therapeutically, is attempting to police and reform your gender presentation.”