For the first 54 years of Barbara Satin’s life, almost every decision she made was centered around trying to “wash away” her transness: she went to seminary, joined the military, got married, none of which worked. “I made the decision to leave my marriage and go live as Barbara Satin and figure out who this person really is,” she says, eventually meeting a therapist whose words would prove life-changing.
“I went as Barbara and basically sat down and opened up my head and just let everything come out, all the things that I had been hiding for, at that point, 60 years. She said, ‘You have lived your life as though you have been cursed by God. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe this is a blessing from God? And that maybe God has blessed you with this gender identity?’ I hadn’t ever thought anything positive about what I was doing and I realized that it hadn’t been much fun living life as being cursed by God. I thought I would try and live it as a blessing from God.”
Since then, Barbara’s devoted her life to what she calls her “ministry of presence”, making sure that trans people are a visible, respected, and celebrated part of the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the larger faith communities of which she’s a part. Last month, she retired as the Faith Work Director from The National LGBTQ Task Force. Satin’s also served as the first out trans member of the United Church of Christ’s Executive Council where she was part of the church’s 2003 decision to affirm the inclusion of trans people in the church’s ministry.
In 2016 President Obama appointed Satin to the Presidential Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and in 2021 she served as one of the prayer leaders at President Biden’s inauguration breakfast. “It’s part of my DNA,” the 87-year-old says, “I work to try and make things better for people, including myself.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeffrey Masters: I struggle to name another trans person who is 87, at least that I know personally. I say that because for many people, being trans is a new thing that young people just invented.
Barbara Satin: Well, to some of us it was just invented, because when I first began to realize that I had something going on, I was maybe five or six years old. I was born in 1934, and we had no words for what was going on. We had “transvestite,” which today is sort of a pejorative term, but nothing else. And I knew nothing about the feelings that I had. I knew what I felt, but I didn’t have anything to model that after or compare it to.
I came out basically at 60, and I came out at a time when we were just beginning to be understood. So it’s been a new experience for me, although I’ve lived it all my life. I didn’t know what I was living. It just was something that I knew was different, and probably would be a threat to me if I exposed it to other people.
JM: And so back then, without language to describe this, how were you thinking about it? How would you have described it?
BS: The fact that I felt called to feminine things, I was conflicted by the fact that I was doing guy stuff, I was in sports and all sorts of different guy-related things. But I also got great satisfaction out of watching and seeing and experiencing, whenever I could, things that were feminine. But again, had no connection of that to anything more than just, “David, you are,” that’s my guy name, my legal name, “David, you’re just weird, something’s wrong with you.” And that’s basically the way in which my growing up was fashioned.
I knew that these weren’t homosexual feelings, I didn’t have attraction, as David, to other guys, other men, but I knew that I would be perceived or understood by others, if they ever realized my feelings, that I would be called probably homosexual, or queer, or fag, whatever was inappropriate at the time.
JM: Yeah.
BS: Basically my authentic life was pretty much lived as a lie. I hid most of what I was feeling, and occasionally, when I had an opportunity, in later years, to experience being as feminine as I could be, I treated that as something very bad and sinful, and something that I really should never do again, and always did again.
JM: And I know that growing up, Catholicism was a big part of your childhood, and as a teenager you went to study in seminary school. Was your goal to become a priest?
BS: Absolutely. My brother, who’s now deceased, was four years older than I am, had gone into seminary, and he was my role model, he was somebody I really admired and wanted to be like, and I wanted to do the same thing he did. And I went into seminary fully committed to being a priest, and realized that it probably wasn’t going to go well if I continued. And part of it was, after eighth grade we went into minor seminary, we lived away from home, and my sophomore year I was playing basketball. I was a good basketball player, and somebody threw me a pass, and I completely missed it, wasn’t even paying attention, ’cause I was distracted by this vision that I saw in the upper balcony watching the game, a young girl. To this day I don’t remember what she looked like, but I can tell you exactly what she was wearing. I just loved the outfit.
JM: What was she wearing?
BS: It was a blue button-down dress, lovely sort of sateen finish to it, and it was just so feminine, so beautiful. And as I shamefacedly ran back up court, I realized that this isn’t gonna work, I need to leave, ’cause this is not going away. I thought, being in the environment that I was in, that all of those, quote, “temptations” would be gone, and they weren’t. So that was my decision then, to leave the seminary, go back home, and finish high school and college.
JM: In a perfect world, would you have wanted to continue seminary and become a priest?
BS: Probably, but at that point I had no idea that there were trans women, I didn’t know. I was a freshman in college, walking to biology class, when another student ran up to me and said, “Did you hear about this guy that went to Denmark and had sex reassignment surgery and came back as a woman?” It was Christine Jorgensen.
JM: She was famous, but also likely the only trans woman that people could name at that time. Not that we used that language.
BS: Right. And she was the first American to undergo a sex reassignment surgery, and it was freeing to some extent, because it helped some of us understand that, oh, we’re not the only ones that have these feelings. But again, these were feelings that, in our own mind, and based on the culture we were living in, was unacceptable. This was not something that you proudly proclaimed yourself as a trans person. So again, I had a better understanding of what I was going through, but I was also fighting what I was going through. I was trying to overcome what I was going through. We were told it was a perversion, and we thought of ourselves as cursed by God.
JM: And you had no other examples to contradict that, right?
BS: Right, right. The only examples that I had, believe it or not, the St. Paul newspaper had a column that they published twice a week called “Crime and Punishment,” and in it they had all the people that were arrested for drunken driving and for being a thief and all that type of thing. And occasionally, maybe two or three times in a year, they would arrest somebody for being dressed as a woman, a guy being dressed as a woman, and they would put that person’s name and address in the paper and actually describe what they were wearing. He was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt and black bra and panties. It was just weird. But it was also informative, and also reassuring, to those of us who were trans, that, oh, I’m not the only one that has these feelings, and I feel really bad for this person that got caught, but I’m not gonna get caught. That was the hope and the prayer.
JM: When you were alone, were you finding ways to express your gender, by putting on dresses or anything like that?
BS: Yeah, I would. Living at home as a young adult, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 years old, living with family, it was very difficult, but I would find something at a Goodwill store or something like that and stash it, find a place to put it on, and just feel glamorous, and then feel really terrible about doing that. It was a very conflicted time in my life. When I graduated from college and such, I went into the Air Force and was going to be a fighter pilot. It was the way in which many of us in the trans community at that time tried to hide who we were, by being as macho as we could. I tell people that at any one point I could have raised a battalion of Marines who were trans, simply because there were so many of them who went into that, knowing that that would diffuse any people’s feelings that, “Well, maybe that person’s a little effeminate.” No, he’s a Marine.
When I came out, I went into the Air Force and was in pilot training, and I came down with a kidney infection and got a medical discharge, and came back home and began working in the corporate world doing public relations. But anyway, I also fell in love and hoped that, by being married, by being with the love of my life, that I would wash away all these temptations and feelings. And I realized at about four to five months that they still were there. And so now what do I do? I’m committed to this relationship, and I just have to make that work. And so I did, and had three wonderful kids and a great wife, and had a model home life.
When I retired from my business career at 54, I began realizing that I needed to understand who this person was inside of me. The person finally had a name. We used to have, before the internet, computer bulletin boards, and there was a computer bulletin board based out of Mendota Heights, which is a suburb of St. Paul, that was free to anybody to join, and it was of an international scope, around trans people. To get into it you had to have a username, you had to have a feminine name, and so I picked Barbara Satin. Barbara after the name of the first girl that I really was attracted to, both sexually and physically, she was the epitome of femininity, and Satin as the fabric of my life. I was trying to figure out how do I understand who I am without actually being able to live that. So I made the decision to leave my marriage and go live as Barbara Satin, and figure out who this person really is.
JM: And did you tell your wife that that was the reason why?
BS: Not at the time I left. I eventually did. I have to say, though, part of that decision to leave came from my three kids that I mentioned. My oldest son is a physical therapist, my second oldest son is a psychotherapist, and my daughter is a cosmetologist. And if you put all that together, I have the best of all worlds. If my body goes, I go to my oldest son, and I go to him more often now that I’m going to be 88. If my mind goes, I can go to my second oldest, and if I need my hair colored, which I do, I go to my daughter. So I have all the resources in place to live a great life, I think, and I have.
JM: That’s the best reason to have kids I’ve heard.
BS: My second oldest son, after I had been retired for a couple of years, called me and asked me if I would go have a beer and a hamburger with him and just chat. And I thought, “Well, this is my son gonna ask Dad for some advice.” And it turned out not to be that at all. It was basically my son saying, “Something’s going on with you that we’re really concerned about, ’cause you are so different, you are more harsh and critical, short-tempered, and that’s just not you, what’s going on?” And I said to him, “Jamie, I’m gonna tell you something I’ve never told anybody, I’m transgender.” And there wasn’t even a pause, and he put his hand on mine and said, “You know, Dad, we’ve been waiting for you to tell us.” They had figured it out.
And I keep telling that to people that I’ve worked with over the years, that have struggled with their gender identity and gender expression. I say, keep in mind that you think you’re living this great secret life, and maybe people have already figured out what’s going on with you, or have suspicions of what’s going on with you. My kids did. My son said, “Would you ever think about going to see a therapist?” And I said, “Well, I never have, but I would.” So he arranged for me to go to a therapist. Wouldn’t be appropriate for me to go to him, nor anybody within his clinic. So we found somebody else, and my first appointment with her I went as Barbara, and basically sat down and just sort of opened up my head and let everything come out, all the things that I had been hiding for 60, at that point 60 years, the feelings, the concerns, the frustration, the anger. And her reaction to me was very simple. She said, “You have lived your life as though you have been cursed by God. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe this is a blessing from God, and that maybe God has blessed you with this gender identity and expression?” I hadn’t ever thought anything positive about what I was doing, and I realized that it hadn’t been much fun living life as being cursed by God. I thought I would try and live it as a blessing from God, and basically that’s what I’ve done for the last, I was 60 then, so I’m 88, that’s 20, almost 30 years.
It opened up a lot, and that was what basically led me to realize I have to figure out and live as Barbara, to see what this is all about. And so that’s when I left, and I’d been very, very active within the Catholic Church. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be honored or blessed within the church, I was very active. I was the chairman of the Archbishop’s Council in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Archdiocese, and all sorts of good stuff. I’m very proud of the things that David accomplished in his lifetime, just as I’m very proud of the things that Barbara has accomplished in hers. And I don’t want to erase David, I want to celebrate David while I also celebrate Barbara. So when I left, I realized that there was probably no place for Barbara within the Catholic Church, and so I basically left the Catholic Church and began living a spiritual life on my own. And that didn’t satisfy me in many ways, simply because I missed the idea of worshiping with community, within a faith congregation.
JM: I think it’s interesting that this didn’t turn you off of religion completely. I think there’s a version of this story where you never enter a church again.
BS: No, never at all.
JM: So what kept you coming back and wanting to seek out a religious community?
BS: I think it’s the life that I had lived, both within my birth family and within my own family, was always God-centered, and that meant a lot to me. And I thought, well, I’ll just have my relationship to God on a more personal basis, without the bells and whistles of liturgical worship. And I realized that part of what made that so meaningful to me was the sense of community that you have with others that are worshiping in the same faith community. So I decided I’d see what I could find, and I found an LGBTQ church in Minneapolis called Spirit of the Lakes. It was a United Church of Christ congregation, which was started as a queer community church. And when I walked in the door on a June morning, I quickly realized that it was an LGBT church, but they had never had a T member. The trans part of it was, “Oh, what do we do now?” In fact, the music director at the time was quite appalled, and came up to me about six months later and said, “You know, you walked in the door and I thought, ‘He should not be here, he should go someplace else.’”
JM: Oh my God.
BS: And he put his arms around me and he said, “You are the best thing that’s happened to this church in many, many years, thank you for being here.” And I realized that, and a number of other things, made me realize what my calling was going to be. And the idea that I was sort of this anomaly within this LGB-focused church led to the fact that the pastor was involved with a national arm of the United Church of Christ called the LGBT Coalition, United Church of Christ Coalition. They have a national gathering every year, and they had never had a conversation around the T part of LGBT. And I was asked if I would do a plenary session around what it means to have a trans person in the church.
JM: What year was this? The early 2000s?
BS: This would be, no, it would be late, late 1990s, like 1996, ’97.
So they asked me if I would do this, and I was apprehensive, because I really had just been out, and I was still feeling my own way. But I realized it was so important for them to have this conversation, and so I said yes. And I realized, not right away, but a couple days later, all I did was tell my story, and it had an impact on people, to get to know someone who is transgender and understand who they are and what it means in their lives, and the blessings and the sufferings that go with that, but also the authenticity that it brings to their lives, to be able to live that fullness of who they are.
JM: And then you say that you discovered your calling, to share your story. Is that how you would verbalize it?
BS: Right. It’s what I basically have made my ministry of presence. I realized that my ability to be out, and at that time that still was a challenge, my ability to be out as Barbara had an impact on people. Some of it good, occasionally some of it bad, for the most part it was good, and I had an openness to be willing to talk to people about who I am and what is inside of me, and what’s inside of trans people. And I think part of the reason why the choir director came up to me and said, “You’re the best thing that’s happened to this church in many, many years,” was the fact that I was willing to be as open and forthright about who I am, and who we are as trans people. I became involved with the coalition group of the UCC, eventually became their chair, and then was asked to become a member of the executive council of the United Church of Christ. This is the governing body of a denomination that basically doesn’t like to be governed, so it’s a wonderful organization.
JM: I know that you spent many years also at the National LGBTQ Task Force, where you recently retired from. You spent so many years being incredily productive, for lack of better words. Are there things you still have that you want to do?
BS: I just received yesterday a letter of affirmation and commendation from the leadership of the United Church of Christ, acknowledging the fact that I was retiring, and thanking me for all the work that I’d done with the task force, and all the work I’d done within the United Church of Christ. I was blown away when I responded to them and said, “I’m not done, but I don’t know what’s next.” I guess that’s sort of in the hands of God, because basically all of this has not been something that I planned, it was basically opportunities that I was offered and I was willing to take on.
So I want to spend time with my family. I went back to my marriage, and my wife and I are growing old together, and it’s fun. Some mornings when you get out of bed it doesn’t feel like fun, but for the most part it’s fun, it’s a wonderful time in our lives, and I want to enjoy that with her. But I’m also realizing that there may be things that I understand, from the way people respond to what I’ve done, that I have visibility that I never really thought about. So we’ll see whether there are other things that I can do that would be of value. The ministry of presence still is an important part of who I am.
JM: Is that a terminology that you created, “ministry of presence”?
BS: To some extent, yeah. Actually, a young seminarian had used it about me, something along the lines of, “What you’re doing is like this ministry of presence.” And I thought, well, I wanted to be a minister, and I’ll just take that on. When I first began exploring who Barbara was, I became involved with a trans group in the Twin Cities area called City of Lakes Crossgender Community, and we had about 400 members.
JM: That’s a ton.
BS: Oh, yeah. But you’d never know it, because we met in the basement of a gay bar in St. Paul, and you never knew when the meetings were going to be, or the time, because it was so secret. You had to go through two different interviews to even get accepted, and then you had to have access to the information about when the meetings were gonna be. We had people standing at the door, sort of a sergeant-at-arms type of thing. It was a scary time for people. They wanted the opportunity to be together, and to sort of be with people like themselves, and to talk about their concerns, get fashion tips and makeup hints and all that type of thing.
But we were meeting in the basement of a gay bar, and we were part of this LGBT acronym, and I would often get, I eventually became the president of the organization, and I kept getting comments from people, “I’m not gay, I’m not queer, why are we in a gay bar?” And I would say, “Well, it’s the only place that would accept us, that they don’t care who we are. They don’t know who we are, they don’t respect who we are, they don’t affirm who we are, they’re sort of apathetic to who we are, but they don’t mind us being there and buying drinks and having food and having our meeting once or twice a month.” So I realized that part of our problem as a trans community was the fact that, as part of this LGBT acronym, the LGB part of it didn’t care or understand who we were, and they needed to.
So I basically left the City of Lakes group to fend for itself, and they did very well, they found other leaders. And I began to make it my job to become active within primarily gay organizations. And I don’t think there’s more than maybe one or two gay organizations within the Twin Cities that I wasn’t on their board, because I felt it was so important for them to have an understanding of who we are, and to actually see somebody and interact with somebody, and to know and respect a trans person as a positive role model for their organization. And so I’ve been on activist groups, I’ve been on philanthropic groups, I’ve been on HIV/AIDS groups. If there was a gay group that I knew somebody who was part of, I would ask them, “Is there any interest in having a trans person on that board?” So that was part of the early part of my ministry of presence, which at that point I didn’t realize was a ministry, but it was so important for the trans community to be visible to the LGB community. And it’s not as though the trans community is separate.
JM: You’re in a same-sex marriage.
BS: Right, right. And as Barbara I have an attraction to men, which I don’t have as David. That’s a dichotomy in my mind that I still don’t understand.
JM: Oh, so you were 60 in realizing that you’re also bi?
BS: Mm-hmm. So my connection to the task force goes back to the fact that, in 2006, they realized, after the queer community basically had lost a number of fights around marriage equality, particularly in California, that the way in which faith communities were successful in anti-queer stuff, it was basically a question of the fact that progressive faith communities hadn’t been approached or provided the opportunity to do things around progressive issues and LGBT issues. And it’s been a marvelous experience, because we focused on the idea of helping churches understand why it was important for them to be welcoming and affirming to LGBTQ people, and we have been very, very successful in that.
Then the next step was to take that affirmation and take it outside of the four walls of the church, and take it out into the streets, and we’ve been relatively successful in that. For a lot of denominations, doing activism isn’t in their DNA, but for many organizations, or many religious denominations, that’s how you live out your life, is to actually be active and proactive around issues. And that’s been this delightful trajectory that I’ve been on for the last 14, 15 years.
JM: It’s directly contradictory to the first 60 years of your life, where every single decision and profession you chose, as you said, was chosen to wash away your transness, to hide it. And now the last 15, it’s like trans-forward, this trans ministry of presence.
BS: I marvel at the journey I’ve been on, and it’s been one that I’ve been blessed to be given the opportunities, and thrilled that I had the time, energy, and courage to step forward and say, “I’ll do that.”
JM: Can I ask you, as a spiritual and religious person, has that colored how you think about death and what happens after?
BS: As I said earlier, I want both David and Barbara to be honored. And David has a large, growing smaller simply because of our age, contingent of people who know who I am as David and all the things that I’ve done as David. They, in many cases, have no understanding of Barbara. And so I’m going to be cremated, I’m going to have two funerals. David will have his funeral, and probably the bells and whistles of the Catholic Church, and Barbara will have her memorial service, whatever that might be, within the United Church of Christ, and whoever else wants to come and pay tribute or condolences.
I’ve done some really wonderful things as David, things that I thought could just disappear if people found out who I was. I’m not concerned about that now, because I have shown as Barbara that I do the same things, it’s part of my DNA, whether I’m Barbara or David, that I work to try and make things better for people, including myself. And I want to share that with whoever wants to come, and not mourn, come and rejoice with me.
JM: Is death something that’s present in your mind, something you’re thinking about?
BS: I guess my Catholic background gives me an understanding that there’s something more, and what that is will be unveiled to me when it’s time. But so much of, when I was growing up, my concern was that I was going to go to hell. I don’t believe that anymore, I don’t particularly believe it. As Barbara, I think that what I have done, what others like me have done in living our authentic lives, is just a blessing, that will be treated as a blessing when we pass.
Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.
LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. @jeffmasters1
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