The rich, almost salty scent of dark coffee had already begun to cling to my clothes. Signature brown and dark green surrounded me. I was in my favorite place: the “Women’s Issues” section at Barnes and Noble.

I pored over page after engaging page, so inspired I didn’t even need the nearby lattes to speed my heart. The book I was hungrily consuming addressed the particularly damaging effects of sexual violence in the cinema and proposed bold action: protests, demands for refunds at movie theaters, any kind of disruption, to heighten awareness of the problem. I was in awe.

While I was reading, two young women about my age perused the section behind me. I was absorbed and didn’t pay much attention until one comment caught my ear.

“Look at this,” I heard one of the women say to the other. A faint acidity was in her voice. “All I have to do is submit to my husband and I’ll be happy.” Then, the crisp sound of a rejected book sliding back into place on the shelf.

With the “Christian Inspiration” section behind me, and “Women’s Issues” before me, I was struck by and stuck in the chasm between the two realms. Why do I, a Christian woman, have to reference the secular world for affirmation of my womanhood? Why must I shun the “Christian Inspiration” section just to avoid being boxed into a role that proposes to convert me into something between perennial child and Stepford wife?

I’ve spent much of my life wishing I’d been born a boy. “Why would you want to be a man?” my grandmother asked when I expressed my feelings on the matter. “They have to work all the time.” That was precisely what I desired. I wanted the freedom, the responsibility, the physical power, the connection with life and God that boys inherit and girls merely observe.

As I transitioned from girl to woman, I encountered a new problem. I developed menstrual cramps so severe that I vomited once a month from the pain. Holding my hair back with one hand and clutching the bathroom sink with the other, I had to ask myself, Can I talk to God about this? After all—God is male.

When I was a sophomore in high school I dated a guy who espoused a very traditional, “biblical” view of gender roles. He used 1 Corinthians, chapter 11, to prove that all feminists were on the wrong track. Fifteen years old and completely unprepared for such a confrontation, I just blinked and waited awkwardly for a change of subject. When that relationship finally dissolved, I became a feminist.

I also embarked upon one of the darkest spiritual periods of my life.

If God loved women, I reasoned, why would he tell them to keep silent in church, to place themselves beneath their husbands, to learn in obedience with “all submission?” Why did God make me a woman when I so obviously didn’t fit these aptitudes? Maybe God didn’t love women—at least, not as much as he loved men. Maybe women weren’t supposed to matter as individuals. Maybe feminists were wrong. After all, they were demanding equal rights in society when they couldn’t even obtain them within the church. Maybe God wasn’t so good after all.

I had so many doubts—and no one to take them to. Of course, the usual abundance of advisors was available: male pastors, male counselors, male religion teachers. But hearing from men explanations of the “safety” of biblical gender roles is like hearing about the “benevolence” of racial slavery from white plantation owners in antebellum South. It’s easy to dismiss another’s concerns when you’re in control of what she’s concerned about.

The problem is not the goodness of the men in control. The problem is with a system that places men in control in the first place.

Here and there a little resolution would work itself into my life. I managed to maintain my identity as a Christian. Then, years later, I found myself in even greater need of solid, spiritual, feminine guidance.

My boyfriend at the time confided in me that he’d struggled with pornography both before and during his relationship with me. I felt numb—devastated—wounded. He told me he was willing to stop, and that he wanted to stay together if I did. I still loved him and wanted to try to mend what had been damaged. I quickly found that I couldn’t sort through my feelings alone.

I visited a counselor. A very kind, very Christian, very male counselor. Most aspects of life have more to do with humanity than with gender, and anyone can understand these commonalities. This counselor helped me a lot. But eventually the simple fact that he couldn’t offer a feminine perspective became obvious.

During one conversation, he leaned toward me. “Kate, what your boyfriend did—I don’t know what the female equivalent would be—an addiction to romance novels…”

I didn’t hear much after that. Because of what my boyfriend had seen and done, I felt as if my purity had been tarnished—as if some spiritually sexual part of me had been raped. Romance novels are an absurd comparison to pornography. And most women would have known that.

At that moment, more than ever, I wished I could see God as Mother rather than Father. I needed Jesus to take the form he talked about in Matthew 23 and gather me under a wing. I needed God to be as protective of my wounded heart as the mother bear robbed of her cubs in Hosea 13. I needed to be special enough to be sought out, like the piece of silver a woman lost and found in Luke 15. I needed a feminine Spirit to comfort me. A woman!

But because the Seventh-day Adventist Church has seen fit to place a higher value on cultural male-dominance than on the individual female, almost no women enter the ministry in leadership roles. And so, I was left alone, feeling misunderstood, unloved, and alienated.

I want to see God as something other than male. I want to see a reflection of God in the mirror. I want to believe that woman is exactly one half the image of God (see Genesis 1:27), and that every dirty joke, every demeaning comment, every catcall, every rape hurts God as much as it hurts me.

To see and think this way is difficult. And that’s okay; life never promised to be easy. What discourages me is not the difficulty, but the ironic fact that a church whose “pen of inspiration” was held in a feminine hand does so little to right the wrong.

Kate Simmons is a student at Union College, Lincoln, Nebraska.