CNU professor’s memoir recounts how a Christian became ally for queer people

It’s been decades since the first time a teenager told Cynthia Vacca Davis that he was gay, but the conversation still haunts her.

The former Christian youth group leader remembers the way the gangly boy’s eyes flickered to her face before returning to his fidgeting hands. As she sat on a beanbag chair across from him, she felt as shaky as he sounded, dreading what she knew she was supposed to say next.

“The only thing I remember saying is, ‘The Bible calls it sin,’” she wrote in “Intersexion.” The book, published in August, shares the story of how she eventually came to give up her dream job rather than condemn the queer community — though she once did so in moments she now calls “humbling, scary and life-changing.”

The teen, whom she remembers as loyal, kind and devoted to church activities, nodded slowly, his mouth a thin line, then quietly thanked her and left. They never spoke of the moment again, and he stayed just as involved with the church. But things had changed — both their relationship, and Davis’ deep, nagging sense of shame, which slowly propelled her long journey to queer allyship.

“You can give lip service to being an ally,” said Davis, an adjunct writing instructor at Christopher Newport University since 2011. “That’s different from actually having skin in the game and actually experiencing some of the pushback.”

As powerful as Davis’ story is, though, “Intersexion” doesn’t just narrate her own experience. It also shares the life of “Danny,” an intersex man; how Davis met him almost 10 years ago and came to tell his story; and how telling it changed both their lives.

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‘Like a lady’

Growing up in Hampton Roads in the 1980s, Danny didn’t understand why everyone thought he was a girl, when he knew he was a boy.

Danny’s birth certificate said he was female, and his family insisted that he dress and act “like a lady,” especially at church. But he never questioned his identity. Instead, he prayed for a body that would match who he was on the inside.

When puberty came and he developed a penis and one testicle, it seemed his prayers had been answered. But then he also got a period and developed breasts.

“As a teenager, there’s no way I could have said I was intersex and anybody understand that, and not think that I’m a freak,” said Danny, whose legal name The Virginian-Pilot is withholding, instead using the pseudonym Davis gave him, because he fears for his and his family’s safety.

Danny himself didn’t know the word “intersex,” a term for someone who has ambiguous reproductive characteristics — from the obvious, like genitalia, to the invisible, like chromosomes. Sometimes the ambiguity is apparent at birth; sometimes it shows up at puberty, as in Danny’s case; and sometimes, no one knows at all, even the intersex person themselves.

Cases like Danny’s are rare. Around one in 2,000 people have clinically identifiable sexual or reproductive variations, according to one of the most frequently cited medical studies on the subject, “How Sexually Dimorphic Are We?”

On the other hand, the study says, a person having internal or external reproductive characteristics that don’t perfectly match their assigned gender — sometimes called atypical sex differentiation — is common, affecting about one or two in every 100 people.

Danny didn’t know any of this in seventh grade, though. The only place he felt he could ask anyone about what was happening to his body was the girls’ locker room. As his classmates compared notes on their periods and pubic hair, Danny eventually summoned his courage to ask if anyone had “other things” down there.

The room screeched to a halt, then exploded with jeers of “freak” and “gross.” Becoming a target both in and out of the locker room persuaded Danny not to bring it up again for more than 30 years, while he lived as the woman his family and religious community expected him to be.

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‘At what cost?’

That was how he was living when he and Davis met at church almost 10 years ago.

Davis had just found the small church, though it was a stone’s throw from her Hampton Roads home. Danny had attended for years.

As a former youth leader herself, Davis was drawn to the two women who ran the church’s youth group. Everyone seemed to assume they were a lesbian couple, though in a “don’t-ask-don’t-tell” kind of way that let everyone avoid the subject — and any debate about their suitability as role models.

Those leaders were Danny and the only person who knew his secret: the woman he had considered his wife for almost a decade. They had exchanged private vows, and considered themselves married in the eyes of God. But they didn’t consider themselves lesbians, and over the 25 years they were involved, both had struggled with the idea of appearing to be in a same-sex relationship.

“We couldn’t be public, or chose not to be public. That made for a secret life that was torturous,” Danny said.

No one knew about their vows, and few even knew for certain they were together. Their joys and struggles were borne in isolation, and their relationship began to fracture.

So did Danny’s mental and physical health. Unable to form close friendships, suffering severe pain and bleeding that led to a medically necessary hysterectomy, he faced a desperate choice: share his secret, or admit he was starting to consider suicide.

“I thought I would lose everything,” he said.

Davis feared ostracism, too, though many things had changed for her since the day she told the teenage boy that his identity was a sin.

“The common denominator that you always hear with Christianity is love. But I wasn’t seeing love played out consistently in churches,” she said.

A 2022 survey by The Trevor Project showed that almost half of LGBTQ+ youth, 45%, considered suicide in the past year — but that rate dropped to less than 25% if people felt they had strong family support. Over time, statistics like these, science, and personal experiences convinced Davis that the mainstream church was wrong about LGBTQ+ issues.

She began to feel she needed to speak out.

“But how, and to whom? And more troublingly, at what cost?” she wrote.

Her allyship was quiet: a listening ear, a spare bedroom and a place at the table for anyone who needed it. Over time, her home became a kind of “underground railroad” for the queer community.

That’s why Danny picked her to practice coming out. But when he asked her to write his story, making it the center of her thesis for the master’s in fine arts program she’d started at Old Dominion University a year earlier, she realized it would be a kind of coming-out for her, too.

“If I wrote about intersexuality and gender transitions, I could never again be opaque about my views on sexuality if I found it inconvenient,” Davis wrote.

She had no idea how quickly that resolve would be tested.

The very next week, Davis was invited to apply for a tenure-track job at a tiny Christian college in North Carolina where she had been teaching as an adjunct. They had an unexpected opening and seemed intent on offering it to her.

It was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Davis, who doesn’t have the doctorate such roles normally require. But there was a catch: She’d have to sign a “Marriage and Family Statement” declaring anything other than a cisgender, heteronormative relationship to be repugnant.

“It would have been on some level an easy thing to just say this is work, and my personal views are my personal views and just carry on,” Davis said. She also considered taking the job and staying as a kind of “secret ally” for queer students on campus.

But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

“I realized that true allyship has a cost,” she said.

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‘My faith doesn’t allow me to keep quiet’

Now, eight years after starting his public transition, Danny has an updated birth certificate, driver’s license and passport. Some family members no longer speak to him, and his transition coincided with the end of his relationship. He believes his former partner feels cheated by never living openly together as husband and wife, he said, and they are no longer in contact.

“I think it’s almost like I went through a second puberty — not because of the hormones, because the hormones, if anything, made me feel normal,” said Danny, who identifies as both intersex and transgender because of his social and legal transition. “But emotionally … letting go of that huge secret that I held for so long, I think really freed me.”

Davis is still an adjunct professor at CNU. She declined to name the college where she passed up a shot at tenure, because, she said, the school’s identity isn’t the point.

“It could have happened anywhere. It is happening everywhere,” she said.

Danny wants to share his story in hopes it will help people like him feel less alone, and help overcome the ignorance of others. He still struggles with the choice to remain anonymous.

Despite his updated legal documents, he fears political efforts that would take his rights away and force him to be identified as female again, along with threats and other backlash or discrimination against his family.

Fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people continues to increase, according to reports by the Human Rights Campaign, which has tracked such violence since 2013. It’s difficult to track victims, who are often misgendered, but there have been at least 37 victims so far in 2022. Last year, there were at least 50, and at least 44 in 2020, the HRC reports.

“I have the privilege of what the community calls being stealth, meaning that I can live my life and nobody knows anything ever happened to me,” Danny said. “Some people don’t have that privilege, and so there’s a lot of guilt there with that.”

Neither Davis nor Danny still attends the church that brought them together. Though it was a refuge for them both at one time, like so many other communities they each experienced, it eventually fractured and changed.

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“You can be an upstanding member of the church family one week and completely ousted and never spoken of again the next week,” Davis said. “The way the LGBTQIA+ community is being treated is so wrong, and my faith doesn’t allow me to keep quiet about that.”

Katrina Dix, 757-222-5155,katrina.dix@virginiamedia.com

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If you go

What: Author talk and book signing

When: 1 p.m. Nov. 12

Where: Barnes and Noble, 5100 Kilgore Ave., Peninsula Town Center, Hampton

Details: tinyurl.com/53tumrst