I loved all the religions I knew about as a young child. From the sweet-faced Jesus my great-grandparents talked about to the stern big daddy God of my Pentecostal cousins to the muddy femme spell-craft of my Appalachian kin, it didnt seem strange to believe in it all. Then life happened. I learned you had to pick a god or at least a side.

But I couldnt see myself on one spiritual path. All of them seemed to revere the binary. Some paths were more equal than others for women. Most seemed ruled by men, with no possibility of genderlessness or ambiguity in any religious space. As a female-assigned person who was dubious about gender from a young age, I knew that I did not belong.

I am not the only queer person who has struggled to find their place in a spiritual community. Sadly, I consider myself lucky because I did not experience religious trauma or the long-term emotional damage caused by practices like exclusion , or conversion therapy. For me, not fitting into religion was disappointing but not dangerous. Unfortunately, that is not true for many queer people .

While many people find comfort and community in religion, queer people often face rejection and denigration that take a major toll on our well-being. Recent research suggests that religious trauma increases the risk of abuse , mental illness and suicidality for queer people. But it is human to crave a spiritual home, and more and more queer people are forging new spiritual paths instead of waiting for the old dogs of religion to learn new tricks. What contemporary queer spiritual leaders are doing is revolutionary as they rehabilitate our relationship with old religious ideas and structures.

I left mainstream Christianity because as an Asian American, bisexual woman, I intimately know what it feels like to have my body scrutinized and vilified as a sin, Tara Teng, a spiritual embodiment coach in Vancouver, Canada, tells me. Teng helps people heal from trauma using their bodies. But she was formerly a preacher in the evangelical Southern Baptist tradition, as was her father. Ultimately, she was called to a different path because the intersections of her identity were not accepted. There was an expectation to live up to my parents dreams for me, and being a bisexual Christian or ex-evangelical was not part of that, Teng says.

Now a leader in the Deconstructing Faith movement a loosely organized group of spiritual orphans she uses her work as an embodiment coach to help people reconnect to spirituality and their bodies after religious trauma. When we know in our bodies that we, as queer people, are a unique embodiment of the Divine, then we can see how we have been lied to by institutions seeking to gatekeep access to God, Teng says. It does not have to be this way, and we can heal the trauma in our nervous systems that have been taught to believe such lies.