The View from Bolton St.

This week, Memorial hosted our fourth Vigil for Trans Lives in conjunction with the Maryland Institute Queer Alliance (MIQA). Every fall, students from MICA take time out of their busy semester schedules to gather and remember members of the Trans community that have died by violence in the last year. We gather, we pray, light candles, read names and stories, and remember. It is a remarkably religious event for a group of students and a campus that is famously almost proudly non-religious.

For me it is a sacred honor to gather with a group of Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer and Gender Non-Conforming students as they seek to remember the dead and to ask for a better life for them in the world to come. A holy moment that always comes at a busy time but that I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Every year we have a guest speaker. I try and use this as an opportunity to disrupt our ideas of what ‘trans’ means - we have had military veterans and seminarians, and this year we had Brother Merrick Moses, who is a member of Holy Nativity and a Brother in the Independent Catholic Church, who spoke about the importance of remembering not the deaths, but the lives of the people we have lost. That it is only in remembering them as fully human that we can ever get to a world where we no longer kill people because of who they are or who they love. A world where we all are just ‘human’.

Now you may be asking, where does The Church stand on trans lives? For many Christians and Christian traditions this is a challenging, and complicated question. Perhaps it is a question you yourself have struggled with. Perhaps you yourself are wondering what ‘trans’ means?

To be trans, or transgender means that your Gender Identity differs from your biological sex. That is you may have been born biologically male or female in terms of your physical body, but you understand yourself to be the opposite or neither. Medically this is called Gender Dysphoria, and is a diagnosable medical condition where one experiences stress when their physical body does not match their mental understanding of themselves.

While not all Religious traditions understand this theologically the same way, even some of the most conservative traditions begin the appropriate response with compassion. Andrew Walker is a prominent Southern Baptist author and in his book “God and the Transgender Debate” he reminds all of us that when a Trans person reveals themselves to their parents and family “These few seconds are perhaps some of the most consequential of your child’s life. And Yours...A child who rejects your faith...will never cease to be your child.” Even extreme conservative Christians would agree that the first response should be one of compassion, understanding and support.

There are of course, also many Trans Christians, including clergy, crating a much more positive outlook on the Church and Trans people. In his book TRANSforming Austen Harke writes “There are two ways to interpret what Paul says in Galatians 3:28 about our being one in Christ: either it means that we are all whitewashed and homogenized and our differences are erased... or it means that we are called to find a way to make our different identities fit together, like the bright shards in assorted colors that make up the stained glass windows of a cathedral. Are we called to sameness, or are we called to oneness?”

In the Episcopal Tradition, we are canonically much more accepting of Trans people, in that we do not put any limitations on their participation in the life of the Church and we understand them to be, like all the rest of us, ‘Made on the image and with the likeness of God.’ Trans people can and do serve on the altar, as clergy, on vestries and in Diocesan leadership. But as Episcopalian and Duke Divinity Student Vivian Taylor frequently points out, the numbers don’t lie. Representation in churches and in leadership is very small. Partly because the Trans community itself is very small, and partly because we as Christians still don’t quite know how to respond. For example, it is still common for people to confuse ‘Drag Queens’ (who are performance artists that may or may not identify as Transgender) with trans people, or to use derogatory terms like ‘tranny’ to refer to them.

This year we remember 27 trans people who died by violence in the United States. Almost all of them are black trans women. Two were trans women who died in detention by Homeland Security/ICE. It is an extremely small, extremely vulnerable population whose life expectancy is a fraction of what it should be. I am not asking everyone who reads this to agree on whether we are born male or female, if gender is fluid, if gender dysphoria is real, or at what age or who gets to make these kinds of decisions - I expect even in a community like Memorial there are a wide range of feelings and emotions on this issue, and one brief reflection won’t move the needle much.

But I do hope you will take a moment to consider what you will do when someone you care about comes to you with a very scary, very sacred, very fragile secret about their own identity. Will you look at them like an oddity? A side-show? Or as a beloved Child of God. Made in God’s image, with God’s likeness, with all the possibility the divine has given them and the promise to fulfill it. I pray it is the latter, and that you will honor that sacred trust that has been given to you, and share it back with them.

I can’t answer all the questions about God and Trans lives and salvation. But I do know that God has crafted us in God’s image, and Jesus desperately seeks to draw us closer to God through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. And our role as Christians is to make that path for others as smooth as possible so they can see God’s love in this place so that one day they may experience it every place. Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image,    in the image of God he created them.