Elder Rahkel Henry Talks Faith And Trans Identity: ‘God Was Clear About Who I Would Be’
Elder Rahkel Henry
“You know who I am and you know what I am here for. Turn up for Jesus and turn down for nothing!” Those who follow Elder Rahkel Henry, 44, on social media are familiar with this call to action that serves as the intro to several Facebook videos posted by the Atlantic City, New Jersey native to inspire her followers. During a recent conversation she confessed, “I know I’m real talkative, I can’t help it.” This is true, but what Henry doesn’t mention is that when she speaks, she always has a WORD that compels people of faith or no faith at all to sit up and listen, which as an African-American woman of trans experience in ministry, is a feat of epic proportions.
A founding member of The Vision Church of Atlanta and current Elder in ministry at Rehoboth Fellowship Atlanta, Henry’s journey as a transgender woman to live her truth and to occupy space in the Black church traditionally dominated by men and unwelcoming to LGBTQ people— was not an assignment she could run away from—it was her calling.
“People in positions of ministry have got to stop uninviting people to a table that never belonged to them anyway,” said Henry. “How are you gonna uninvite me to a party that ain’t even yours?”
Henry believes that God’s love extends to all of his people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity. Luckily, for members of the Black LGBTQ community who have felt rejected by the church, there are affirming ministries in Atlanta such as the one Henry pours into even if our own internalized homophobia will not allow us to attend.
“There are a lot of people who are a part of the LGBTQI community who will not go to an affirming church,” said Henry. “And the reason why they won’t go to an affirming church is because somewhere inside of them they’re not as free as they’re speaking they are. Because freedom looks like, I can show up in any room and be. I can exist anywhere that I show up. It is a sad thing when people that are a part of the LGBTQI community can’t go to an affirming church because deep down inside of themselves they feel like they’re not right anyway because they’re gay,” she said. So there are some spaces in them that got to be freed, and that’s why they can’t show up. But they’ll sit in a church, they’ll sing, they’ll usher, they’ll pay their tithes and offering and the preacher sitting in the pulpit telling them they’re going to hell in a handbasket. There’s something wrong with that.”
“I’ve had conversations with a lot of guys. And for them to have a conversation with me and to find out that I’m just as human as they are, it’s completely changed their view of who trans people are...”
Henry tells The Reckoning that she chose freedom in her late teens when she decided to start transitioning into the woman she says God already knew she would become. She had this to say when asked to respond to self-righteous Christians who quote the catch-phrase, “God doesn’t make mistakes,” as a way to admonish transgender people who make the choice to transition: “If God is big enough to send his only son to save us so we could have the right to the tree of life, why couldn’t God send me as my mother’s son and have me carry the cross of becoming my mother’s daughter? God was big enough to know that. So you mean to tell me that God isn’t big enough to know that I’d be Rahkel one day?”
As Henry scoffs at the audacity of people to “put God in a box,” she recalls having a premonition about who she would become as early as five-years-old. She also says that many of the young boys she grew up with knew before she did.
“It’s amazing how people can see you for who you are before you can see yourself for who you are,” she said. “The guys in my school saw me for the woman I would become and I wasn’t clear [at the time] that I was going to become her.”
Henry says she was very clear about her gender identity by the time she reached her late teens, which prompted her to seek hormone replacement therapy and to have a tough conversation with her Pentecostal mother.
About 17 or 18, I had a conversation with my mom and I said, ``Mommy, I think I want to start taking hormones,” said Henry. She was like, ‘hormones for what?’ “I said, I wanna start taking estrogen. And she said, ‘you don’t need estrogen— estrogen is a hormonal replacement for older women who don’t have those things in their body anymore.’ I said, well, mommy what I’m clear about is that I know that it will slow up hair growth. I know that it will stop a whole lot of things that happen to men that I won’t experience. My mommy started crying and I started crying. I said, you know mommy, in my heart, I feel like I’m a girl.”
Henry, who enjoys a wonderful relationship with her mother and is often told how amazing their relationship is, says what people don’t know is that mother and daughter went through a process after she came out as trans.
“Her reply to me [Rahkel’s mother] was ‘you know better than that, you know what we’ve been taught.”
Elder Henry & Mom
And my reply to her was: “were we taught what they believe or taught what we found out for ourselves? I know what they’ve told me, but what they’ve told me has nothing to do with what's going on inside of me and I wanted that battle to stop,” said Henry.
A product of the holiness church, Henry says hearing negative messages about LGBTQ people in church during her formative years was par for the course, and she was prepared to lose her mother to live as her authentic self.
“My mom had to either accept that her son was gone and she had a daughter completely or I had to let my mom go,” she said. “ And that was probably one of the hardest decisions that I was willing to make, but thank the Lord I didn’t have to make it.”
A hairstylist by profession, Henry says that she’s been in a position to change the hearts and minds of folks who carried negative perceptions about transgender people by engaging them in conversation and “allowing them to meet Rahkel first.”
“I’ve had conversations with a lot of guys. And for them to have a conversation with me and to find out that I’m just as human as they are, it’s completely changed their view of who trans people are,” she said.
“The bible says, ‘my people are destroyed for the lack of knowledge.’ And when you don’t know, you do what you’ve been taught and what you’ve been taught may have been a bad thing.”
