When Joanna Whaley calls potential donors to her campaign for Michigan state representative, she often faces a thorny problem. Awkward exchanges occur when an old friend or colleague is unaware that Whaley transitioned four years ago. Similarly, Whaley has been mistaken for her own brother, when in fact she’s an only child. 

“Some of those conversations go weird,” Whaley told LGBTQ Nation. “We have a semi-pro hockey team in the area, and I was sitting down with one of the directors. In the middle of the conversation, he says, ‘So do you have a brother? I went to high school with someone named blah blah blah,’ and they said my dead name. I’m like, ‘That’s me.’ And they’re like, ‘Whoa, what?’”

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“It happens all the time,” Whaley continued. “I’m honored by it, but at the same time, it does turn into some really weird and uncomfortable conversations, especially with some of my old Christian friends who then try to save my soul and tell me that I’m living in sin.”  Given that Whaley was a pastor in some of the country’s most well known megachurches over a career that spanned 20 years, she does have an abundance of “old Christian friends.”

“My Rolodex is very evangelical,” Whaley said.

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Whaley’s journey from evangelical leader to Democratic candidate is certainly unlikely, made even more so by the fact that she endured conversion therapy with four different therapists over a period of 15 years.

After publicly transitioning at 34, Whaley began advocating for queer rights in affirming faith spaces.

“In the winter of 2022, I was forced to resign from my job as a pastor at one of Michigan’s largest megachurches because they had heard that I was considering a gender transition,” Whaley said. 

“After picking up my life and picking up the pieces and starting my transition publicly, I started working at an LGBTQ affirming church in Royal Oak. And it was in that space that I really began to hear from people who were queer who longed for their faith, like they lost it, and they didn’t know that there were even churches that would accept them.”

By the summer, Whaley was speaking out and sharing her story on social media; she also started a podcast. She’d earned a master’s degree and was working as a clinical hospital chaplain in emergency rooms and ICUs. 

A pivotal opportunity came at a “Hands Off” protest in her community last fall. She volunteered to speak not only on LGBTQ+ rights but also on Christian nationalism, which she knew as well as she knew the Bible.

It was after that speech that people in the community started asking Whaley to run for office. 

“They said, ‘You need to run for something,’” Whaley said. “I wasn’t quite sure what that would be. It wasn’t on my bingo card to run.” 

Whaley was well aware that her current state representative was one of eight House Democrats who voted in favor of a resolution that would ban transgender girls from playing school sports. It was merely symbolic, a transphobic gesture put forth by the majority House Republicans in a divided Legislature with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at the helm. But the fact that so many Democrats voted in favor convinced Whaley how powerful her own voice could be in Lansing as the first trans member of the state Legislature.

Growing up, Whaley said she “wasn’t necessarily politically engaged at home” in her “super Catholic family.” 

“But then I ended up going to this church that was very much in the Christian nationalist world. And so I actually was like a full-blown Christian nationalist for my early adult life. That was what my religious environments taught me.” 

At 17, Whaley was hired for her first church job. This entailed mostly tech production; she said she could be considered a music minister. Whaley acknowledged she had a lot of responsibility for her age.

“Then I started working closely, hand in hand, with our youth pastor and pastoring young people within our church,” Whaley said.

Whaley lacked seminary training at that point, but said on-the-job training for high performers was pretty normal in megachurch spaces. 

By age 20, Whaley took the title of pastor. At one point, she stood in for a youth pastor temporarily during a period when there was a “really bad sex scandal” that she had to figure out how to navigate.

As a kid, Whaley had early inklings of being trans. She said she knew “something was up” around the ages of 8 to 10.  “But that was in the 90s,” Whaley said. “You know the environments we were in— my mom and my family—we didn’t really have language for being trans.”

“My mom knew something was up,” Whaley said. “She would ask me very regularly if I was gay. I’m like, ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m gay.’ And now I’m definitely very gay.”

It wasn’t until high school that Whaley said she started to ask questions. She gained more clarity in college.

“When I got to college is when I met my first trans person,” Whaley said. “And that’s when I first had the language like ‘oh my gosh, I think I’m trans.’”

By then, Whaley was already a minister at a megachurch. She felt safe turning to the people who had initially welcomed her with open arms, but it didn’t go well.

“That’s how conversion therapy began,” Whaley said. “I knew at a really early age, but didn’t come out until I was 34.”

Whaley said she was forced to go to Christian conversion therapy, paid for by the church. Being outed and losing her job, livelihood, and family connections was unimaginable.

Christian conversion therapy, as described by Whaley, always began with the Bible.

“We pulled out a Bible,” Whaley said. “And he said, ‘No matter what happens in this room, we’re going to start and end here.’”

“Speaking of the Bible,” Whaley continued, “that is really not good therapy. What that communicated to me is it didn’t really matter what happened. I had to kind of adhere to whatever the interpretation of scripture was.”

The first “round” of conversion therapy involved inner child work. Whaley’s transness was “blamed” on being raised by her mother and grandmother, as opposed to being the child of a nuclear family. “So now I was being put at odds with my family,” Whaley said.

Whaley also said her queerness or transness was sometimes blamed on an experience of abuse of a sexual nature during childhood perpetrated by a family member.

“That’s a narrative within Christian circles, that people who are abused become gay and become trans because their sexual experience is all messed up or whatever,” Whaley said. “They just started blaming it on all my ‘family failures.’ I did a lot of that very ill-advised trauma therapy. I would feel just like absolute dirt after every session.”

Whaley said after a course of conversion therapy, she would be “good” for about two years. Then she would “bottom out” and go back to therapy.

The second time Whaley was put through conversion therapy involved what she called public homework. “It was like, ‘OK, you’re gonna now start telling your testimony and name it and claim it’ type of theologies. ‘You’re gonna claim your victory. Tell everyone that God has delivered you from cross-dressing.”’ 

“And so I started doing that,” Whaley said. “I started standing on stages in front of thousands of people and saying how God delivered me. And when it didn’t work, after a couple of years, I bottomed out again.”

The next type of therapy was much different, Whaley said. This time, she denied her feelings existed. “We’re going to erase this and put it in the bottom of the sea like Christ does to our sins,” Whaley said. “And that was what I had to endure: forgiving myself, forgiving my sins.”

During this third round of therapy, Whaley was married. It was fear therapy, Whaley said.

“It got to the point where I wasn’t allowed to have cash,” Whaley said. “My locations were tracked. I would be questioned if I stopped at a gas station. ‘What are you doing there?’ I was not even allowed to go into Target with my family. Any store that had a women’s clothing section, I was not allowed to go into.”

Whaley prefers not to say much about her ex-partner. It was a very difficult period for all involved.

“I try to honor her and our children,” Whaley said. “I have a great relationship with my kids, another thing that I was told in therapy would never happen. Yeah, my kids love me, and they call me Dad still. I love that title, and I’ll always allow them to call me that.”

Yet Whaley still hadn’t found a fourth and ultimately affirming therapist. She said she interviewed potential therapists and asked how they felt about LGBTQ+ issues. 

“They gave me some pretty cliche answers,” Whaley said. “But the one guy that I ended up going to see gave me a bit more of an intriguing answer. But he was still kind of unclear.”

When Whaley completed the intake process this time, explaining why she had come to therapy, something unexpected happened.

“I start sharing my story, and then he stops me halfway through,” Whaley said. “He says, ‘I just need you to know you’re not sitting in a conversion therapy session right now.’ And I just lost it. I just bawled my eyes out. And that was really the beginning of that journey for me to feel cared for and feel like I was safe. It was a beautiful thing. It was unexpected and very beautiful.”

From then on, Whaley was welcome to come to therapy as herself, as Joanna.

“It was very liberating,” Whaley said. “It was really important to be able to talk about my spirituality, as myself. It did help me to see that I could actually have a better relationship with my divine presence.”

Whaley called her first experience being out publicly “phenomenal.”

“I went to my uncle’s cottage in New Hampshire and basically had a very spiritual experience of ending my time in my old self and emerging as Joanna the next morning,” Whaley said. “And it was a really beautiful moment. Yeah, it took me a while to get used to the fact that I wasn’t wearing pants at times.”

These days, as the August primary date approaches in Whaley’s left-leaning district, she’s betting community members are more focused on what she stands for, and less on her gender identity.

“This has been a really deeply ignored district, especially in Lansing and state leadership in general,” Whaley said of House District 2, encompassing Lincoln Park, Allen Park, Melvindale, and parts of Southgate. The area is south of Detroit, known as Downriver. 

“Some people kind of refer to our communities as the ‘drive-through’ cities.” Whaley noted some more desirable “hot spots” in her district, yet many people are mostly focused on paying their utility bills. Whaley is hoping that her potential constituents see in her someone who struggles as they do, and who is already putting in the work to address their basic needs.

Whaley’s two primary opponents have both served in elected office previously. However, it’s Whaley and her team who delivered water to more than 300 homes in Melvindale during an unexpected shut off, and who raised over $10,000 to ensure that district residents who couldn’t make it to food pantries had food delivered when SNAP benefits ran out.

“My transness, my queerness is never even a topic with most people in my community,” Whaley said, “because we’re focused on the things that they are focused on. And the number one thing is utility bills.”

In addition to reining in the state’s ever-climbing utility costs, another high priority for Whaley is supporting legislation introduced by a representative in the Ann Arbor area that would create MiCare, a universal, publicly financed healthcare system for Michiganders. “If the federal government can’t act, I am going to,” Whaley said.

Whaley is proud to have earned endorsements from such organizations as the LGBTQ Victory Fund, Run For Something, Her Bold Move, and Families United for Trans Rights (FUTR).

Well-versed in social media and unafraid to turn the camera on herself, Whaley has drawn the attention of both fans and foes. She chooses to leave the comment section uncensored. But it sometimes goes beyond transphobic jabs: Whaley has received a number of death threats. 

“My advisory board, actually, they were very tough on me about getting a security company before I filed for office,” Whaley said. “I knew it was gonna get bad. And it has been bad at times.”

Whaley’s greatest campaign expense has been security. Still, she’s undeterred by threats and nasty comments. Whaley credits her thick skin to the media training she received as an evangelical.

“They always preached at us that we would be ‘persecuted for our faith,’” Whaley said. “I’m using big air quotes here. American evangelical religious persecution is hilarious. It’s accountability. But they taught us how to stay focused on our mission through opposition. So honestly, I’m taking everything they taught me and applying it and staying focused on the things people want and are asking for.”

“Also, I come from the Whaley family, and we’re just very strong-willed people. You can’t knock us off our goals.”

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