if she joined the dollsz
how purity, punishment, and belonging follow us from the church to the queer collective.
I. The Covenant of Belonging
It always begins with warmth.
“You belong here.”
“We take care of our own.”
“We protect each other.”
The words feel like sunlight after years underground. For so many trans women, especially those who grew up in the suffocating glow of conservative religion, community becomes a kind of resurrection. We were told that to be ourselves was to choose damnation. We were told we’d die alone if we ever left the light.
So when we find a circle that promises love without condition, we step toward it carefully, trembling with both hope and memory. We want to believe that this time it’s real, that this time, the light won’t burn.
But for her, the rhythm feels too familiar.
She survived a cult that called itself a church. She survived purity disguised as care, forgiveness used as control, and “family” that only held her when she obeyed. She learned what it meant to be loved on the condition that she stayed small, agreeable, and grateful.
So when she encounters those same emotional patterns in the trans community, wrapped in the language of accountability and safety, something inside her recoils. It feels like déjà vu. The scenery has changed, but the ritual hasn’t.
II. The Sermon Rewritten
The words have softened, but the structure is the same.
“You hurt someone.”
“You’re unsafe.”
“You need to make amends.”
“We’re just trying to protect each other.”
It’s the same sermon she heard as a teenager in youth group, only now rewritten in activist dialect. In the church, confession made you pure. In the community, transparency makes you safe. Both ask for surrender. Both define redemption by obedience.
The church once told her to repent in public, to prove her sincerity through humiliation. Online, it’s no different: apology threads, accountability posts, emotional self-flagellation for the sake of “repair.” There’s a cultural ritual to it now. The same cycle of sin, confession, penance, and exile. Only this time, the altar glows with pastel flags instead of stained glass.
She doesn’t think the community is evil. Far from it. She loves her people. She knows that trauma survivors often rebuild what they escaped, repeating the only structures of morality they’ve ever known. But control wrapped in compassion is still control. And purity, no matter how progressive, still requires someone to be cast out.
III. The Poem
When someone told her she should come back—
that she should rejoin the group, reenter the circle, rebuild trust—
… that she needs community, that nobody can live without,
she didn’t keep fighting them.
She wrote instead.
if she joined the dollsz
they’d say it was open—
the circle, the room, the cult of care.
all hearts welcome, all wounds held.
she could walk right in,
they said,
she wouldn’t even have to knock.
but she knows how they love their martyrs.
how fast the warmth curdles
when the wrong name glows at the top of the feed.
how quick kindness turns to teeth
once her shadow crosses their light.
if she joined the dollsz,
they’d praise her softness first.
they’d call her “sister,”
say she’s safe now,
say she belongs.
and for a moment, she’d believe them—
that maybe this time she isn’t poison,
that maybe she can stay.
but belonging is a borrowed thing.
it always asks for blood in the end.
they’d find her posts from months ago,
the ones she wrote when her mind was burning,
and hold them up like relics,
proof that she’s still the monster they remember.
if she joined the dollsz,
she wouldn’t have to type a word
to be crucified.
they’d build the cross from her old apologies,
nail her with screenshots and sighs.
they’d say it’s accountability,
say they’re protecting the community.
and she’d just stand there—
mute, shaking,
half wanting to scream,
half wanting to disappear.
because this is what she does best:
love people until they hate her for it.
bleed honesty until it looks like manipulation.
reach for closeness,
and watch it rot in her hands.
they think she fears the dark.
but no—
she fears the light that blinds first,
then turns on her.
so she stays outside the circle,
listening to the laughter,
the prayers,
the sound of people who haven’t yet learned
that love, too, can become a weapon.
and if she ever joined the dollsz,
they would not even notice
when the crucifix began to hum,
when the iron key at her throat grew warm—
when she smiled, finally understanding
that exile, too,
is better than the light.IV. The Cult of Light
What the church and the queer community share is not intent but instinct. Both believe that safety comes from sameness. Both build belonging through moral clarity. Both define goodness through alignment.
The church said, “Stay pure.”
The community says, “Stay accountable.”
Both mean: Don’t disrupt the peace.
The church said, “Your heart is deceitful; let us correct you.”
The community says, “Your behavior harms others; let us correct you.”
Both mean: Let us decide when you’ve earned forgiveness.
When she points this out, people get uncomfortable. Nobody wants to see themselves as the new priests. Nobody wants to admit that even liberation movements inherit the tools of control. But every ideology believes its own purity is necessary. Every group convinced of its moral light ends up casting someone into shadow.
She knows this intimately. She’s been both the one standing in the light, convinced she was protecting others, and the one bleeding in the dark, wondering how love became another word for discipline.
V. The Pattern of Exile
She’s seen it happen in real time: the quiet excommunication.
First, the whispers. Then the sudden, polite distance. Then the group chat she’s no longer in. Someone says she made them uncomfortable. Someone else says they’re “choosing safety.” Nobody names it directly. Nobody calls it exile.
In the church, they called it shunning.
In the community, they call it accountability.
It’s the same gesture: hands folding neatly, doors closing softly, love withdrawing just enough to prove a point.
People tell her it’s not personal, that accountability isn’t abuse. She agrees. But she also knows what spiritual gaslighting feels like: when people hurt you and call it care, when they control you and call it safety, when they erase you and call it peace.
VI. The Void
She’s been told that the void is loneliness. That choosing solitude is a symptom, not a choice.
But the void is where she learned to breathe again.
It’s where she remembered that selfhood is not a group project.
It’s where she found peace in silence, without being watched, measured, or judged.
The void is not absence. It’s sovereignty.
She doesn’t reject community because she hates people. She rejects it because she has seen what communities can do to their own when fear becomes a virtue.
She knows how easily “protecting each other” becomes “punishing deviation.” How quickly “safe space” becomes “sacred space,” and how sacred spaces always require sacrifices.
She’s not willing to be the next one.
VII. The Dead and the Living
She works at 911. She listens to the dying and the terrified. Every night, she is the last voice some people ever hear.
Her job has taught her what it means to live in the borderlands between panic and calm, between life and its unraveling.
Maybe that’s why she sees the pattern so clearly: the way people try to build heaven on earth, to engineer purity through fear.
The church wanted heaven.
The community wants safety.
Both end up policing the human mess that makes life real.
But death, in its quiet honesty, doesn’t pretend to be pure. It just is.
And maybe that’s why she trusts the dead more than the living. They no longer demand confession. They no longer care about moral perfection. They simply pass through her line, whispering, “Thank you,” before disappearing into whatever comes next.
She stands as a guardian between worlds, and she keeps the dead close because they don’t ask her to repent.
VIII. The Exile
When people tell her she’s bitter, she smiles. When they tell her she’s isolating, she laughs softly. Because she’s heard those words before - from pastors, from elders, from well-meaning friends who thought salvation looked like surrender.
They all meant the same thing:
Come back. Obey. Belong.
But she already did once. And it nearly destroyed her.
She knows what it costs to trade autonomy for safety, to bend herself into something acceptable. She’s done performing purity, religious or social.
She’s not angry. She’s just done.
She walks in shadow now, by choice. It’s not rebellion anymore. It’s peace.
IX. The Truth Beneath the Light
It’s easy to think the opposite of oppression is love, but it isn’t. It’s power shared honestly.
And that’s what both the church and the community struggle with: honest power. The church hides its control behind righteousness. The community hides it behind care. Both believe they know what’s best for you.
Both would rather see you obedient than uncertain.
Both would rather see you redeemed than real.
She no longer believes in purity: of faith, of ideology, of identity. Purity is what killed her once, and she’s not interested in dying again for anyone’s vision of what a “good” woman, a “good” trans person, or a “good” survivor looks like.
She’ll take shadow over sainthood.
X. The Closing of the Door
She left the church. She did it alone. And she survived.
So when a new congregation calls her back, wearing eyeliner instead of crosses, waving flags instead of Bibles, and says, “We need you. We love you. We’ll protect you,” she only hears the echo of the past.
She smiles, thanks them, and walks back into the dark.
Because she has learned that exile, too, is better than the light.
…
Author’s Note:
This essay is not a condemnation of the trans community or of faith—it’s a reckoning with the shadows that exist in both. Communities born from trauma often repeat the patterns of the systems that harmed them. The work isn’t to abandon each other, but to recognize when our safety starts to look like someone else’s cage.