I didn't post in February. I tried. I really did. But what I wrote sounded a lot like a sub-Reddit dedicated to romanticizing clinical depression and taking pleasure in pointing out the meaningless suffering that is life. It was a modern take on Ecclesiastes 1. It was too hyperbolic and dramatic even for me, the queen of hysterical existential crises. The first line of that post was, "The sun is hiding out somewhere, crouching in a cave with my life force and everyone else's common decency." Yikes. Remind me to send flowers to my friends who have had to listen to that for the past 15 years.
While I'm a tiny bit ashamed of the delivery, I stand by the sentiment. This has been a hard year for me on several levels. I gained a bunch of weight after having my fallopian tubes removed. That, combined with the sheer number of cloudy days we've had this winter, has my physical body's energy level way down. When my pastor retired in January, I not only lost a mentor, but as a member of the vestry I gained a heavier work load as we all try to keep the church running and happy without a priest. And, of course, I'm sickened by the election of Trump and all his executive orders.
Ecclesiastes said it perfectly.
I have seen all the works that are done under the sun;
and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.
That which is crooked cannot be made straight:
and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.
I couldn't get off the couch some days and what little energy I did have went toward being scared for the safety and rights all the immigrants and queer folk or angry at all the ignorance that got us here in the first place. I looked around me at all the problems, personal and political and ecclesiastical and environmental and economical, and I couldn't see the point in trying.
But then a funny thing happened. A thing I never thought I'd see again. A thing I had forgotten could happen. The sun came back. With it came my energy and my fight. I was able to resume some of the activities and groups I had taken a break from, like the theological class Education for Ministry that I take on Tuesday nights.
In EFM, we read Amos,
Surely the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret
to his servants the prophets.
The lion has roared; who will not fear?
The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?
and we read Jeremiah,
I must shout, “Violence and destruction!”
For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say, “I will not mention him or speak any more in his name,” then
within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.
and we saw that the canonized Hebrew Bible gives us prophets that felt so strongly that they had not only heard the voice of God but had been called to spread that word despite derision and danger.
Nothing odd about that on the surface. My Christian upbringing taught me that God spoke directly to the prophets and to all the men who had a hand in writing the Bible and that's why the Bible must be treated as the infallible word of God. The problem starts when you actually read these prophets and you realize they don't agree with each other or with some of the law that came before them or with some of the traditions that came after them. It becomes very clear that the Hebrew Bible wasn't put together to tell one cohesive story about the one and only theological truth - or if it was supposed to then someone did a shit job of it.
Same thing goes for the New Testament. We have Jesus's words and actions and then we have Paul's interpretation of those words and actions, which are sometimes in disagreement with each other and almost always in disagreement with the Hebrew Bible. What the Bible actually is, is a history of things people thought and did: the ancient law VS the life of a fully God/fully human being who detested law and popular culture and the Roman empire VS the letters of a Roman citizen who had to water down the radical love and acceptance modeled by Jesus to make it more palatable to the people in that time and place. Yet we have been told that we must read every word in this giant jumble of verses as one cohesive whole that must be the only guide for our lives.
The Old Testament doesn't agree with itself, the New Testament doesn't agree with itself, the Old and New Testaments don't agree with each other. Is there any wonder that Christians today can't agree on what it means to be a Christian?
The sun came back and it rekindled the fire that I have in my bones, just like Jeremiah, to preach what God has told me. I cannot hold it in. The Lord has spoken to me, just like he did to Amos, and I have to prophesy the truth as it has been revealed unto me.
Yes, I fully understand that makes me sound crazy if you don't believe in God at all or just don't believe the same way that I do. All I mean, in plain language without trying to be cute and reference the prophets, is that I think it is important that I tell the world what I think is the truth, based on Biblical, historical, and scientific study as well as personal experience. Just like in the times of Amos and Jeremiah, there are a lot of disparate voices out there. Unfortunately, the loudest voices are those of the Far Right Conservative Christians (FRCC), the Evangelicals, or the non-religious Republicans who want to strip all support for the low to middle class person and give it to the billionaires.
I may be a small, insignificant voice in the grand scheme of things, but I can't stay quiet when people are using the name of the most loving man in the history of the world to hurt, and in some cases cause the death of, the very people he sought to uplift. One of the groups in the most danger right now are trans people. The FRCC are attacking these people out of fear and ignorance and I hope I can give even one person a new perspective on how people in general, but especially Christians, should be treating these fellow human beings.
MISINTERPRETATION #1: THE BIBLE IS A TEXTBOOK
Besides the sun coming out, another huge boost to my mood has been our upcoming trip to Italy. I love planning a vacation more than actually going on it. It's all the excitement and the expansion of my horizons without the jet lag. Part of what we do before we go somewhere is to consume as much media about and set in the place as possible. We make a playlist of songs (dude, our Texas playlist was so fun) and we watch movies set in that place and we watch documentaries and YouTube travel guides. I even went to the local book store and bought every used book they had that was even tangentially about Italy. It makes the vacation last for months, not just days.
It's been fun to learn new things, like that Italy grows 40% of the rice consumed by Europe and that Venice is a bunch of buildings held up by thousand year old sticks in the mud. But the things I've learned about Galileo have been of greatest interest to me in light of recent events.
Galileo was a devout Catholic. He believed in God. He believed in the Bible. He believed in the Church. But the Church didn't believe in him because he wouldn't shut up about things that he had observed that didn't jive with the dogma of the Catholic Church in the 15th century.
Galileo observed with the telescope whose lenses he created himself, evidence that Copernicus's 1543 theory that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the our solar system. The church did not want to hear about heliocentrism because they thought it went against what the Bible says about astronomy. Speaking of Ecclesiastes, 1:5 says "The sun rises, and the sun goes down and hurries to the place where it rises" and this is one of the examples that was given as Biblical evidence that the sun moved around the earth and not vice versa. Others are given below.
Joshua 10:12-14
On the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the Lord, and he said in the sight of Israel,
“Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.” And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.
Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in midheaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice, for the Lord fought for Israel.
Psalms 19:5-6
In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them, and nothing is hid from its heat.
Psalms 93:1-2
The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed; he is girded with strength. He has established the world; it shall never be moved; your throne is established from of old; you are from everlasting.
Psalms 96:10
Say among the nations, “The Lord is king! The world is firmly established; it shall never be moved. He will judge the peoples with equity.”
So the powers that be at the time, interpreted these verses as stating that the earth was static and the sun moved. To be clear, I want to make a couple of points here. First, there were people advocating against Biblical literalism way before this and Galileo quoted those in his defense of his work. Secondly, Galileo may not have even faced a formal and severe Inquisition if he had not written his work in such a way that the pope at the time felt personally mocked.
Still, the overall point stands. If the Bible is the inerrant word of God, these Christian leaders had 2 choices in light of Galileo's new information: Either the science was wrong, or their interpretation of the Bible was wrong because the Bible itself can't be wrong. In the Inquisition of Galileo in 1633, Galileo had to denounce his findings as the Church found his observations to be heretical to their interpretation of the Bible. As time has advanced scientific methods, the Church has had no choice but to find other ways to interpret the verses above. Now we can say that these verses should be interpreted in a theological and not an astronomical way.
The terrible and oppressive part of this whole story is that Galileo was not trying to refute the Bible at all. He saw something with his own eyes, studied it systematically, and applied God-given logic to those observations. His position was that the Bible is a wonderful and true religious book, but it was not designed to be nor does it claim to be an astronomical textbook.
I feel the same way about the issue of biological sex, gender identity, and sexual preference. While the Bible has verses that address these issues, the Bible is not in fact, nor does it claim to be a biological textbook. The Bible is not an astronomical textbook and therefore the things it says about astronomy should be read as representing how the uninformed minds of those ancient people interpreted astronomical events. In the same way, the Bible is not a biological textbook, therefore the things that the Bible says about biological sex organs, what is "natural" sex between two consenting adult bodies (sex is a biological act), or how the brain (a biological structure) functions to make people feel like a "man" or a "woman" should be interpreted as how the uninformed minds of those ancient people interpreted bodies and bodily functions.
MISINTERPRETATION #2: GOD DON'T MAKE NO MISTAKES
On that note, what does the Bible actually say about trans people? Well, nothing directly. Obviously, the word transgender is not in the Bible.
Most of what I have read on "Christian" websites use verses of creation to denounce trans people. This logic is along the lines of "God don't make no mistakes" or said another way, if God put you in a body with a penis, you have to act like you've got a penis (which brings up gender expression, but we'll cover that later) because God wanted you to have that penis.
This issue reminds me of another issue faced by Galileo that is lesser known than his heliocentrism, sun spots. These sun spots were observed by other people as well as Galileo. No one was arguing that there were dark blobs visible when the sun was viewed through a telescope. Galileo argued that these spots came from within the sun based on careful tracking of their movements and growth patterns. Scientists who filtered all observations through Christian dogma first, however, argued that the spots had to be structures moving in front of the sun because all of the heavenly bodies had to be perfect and without blemish. So even though the Bible doesn't say a thing about dark spots on or around the sun, direct observation was pronounced heretical based on men's expansion of the concept of God as perfect creator.
I find it both sad and hilarious that so much about how we view scientific discovery, objective facts, and the way we treat humans who are different than us is based on interpretation of verses that either don't directly speak to an issue or speak to the issue as uninformed ancient peoples understood it. This is a great example because those exact same creation verses spouted by some conservative factions are used on the FAQ webpage of Episcopal churches to support why trans people are, in fact, purposely created by God as an integral and necessary, not sinful, part of His plan. Both sides agree that we were wonderfully created and intimately known and unconditionally loved by God just the way we are. The argument occurs because the conservatives believe that being transgender is a purposeful, deliberate disregard for God's plan, whereas us liberals believe that trans people are trans due to their biology/genetic make-up/the way their brain works and that regardless of any aspect of biology, we all have an equal place in this world and in God's kingdom.
And while we are on this issue of a "plan" and a creator who makes no mistakes in creating, we need to be very careful and sensitive. If you are going to apply that logic to one area of biology, you have to apply it to all of them, otherwise you are a hypocritical cherry picker. If you are going to tell someone that it is God's plan that we are all born with exactly the right biological features, that means that God designed some babies to have fatal or debilitating biological features like a congenitally defective heart or brittle bones.
And if you think that being trans is all in people's heads, well, I'd say you are right because literally every bit of the human experience occurs in our head. Our brain is a biological structure that is itself prone to imperfections in function. We can be born with errors in the way our brains work, such as people who were born with dyslexia or with lesions in the visual processing regions of their brain that cause congenital blindness. So either way, whether a visible, physical issue or a brain processing issue, people can be born in ways that are different from the way most people are born.
Doesn't it make more sense in light of the realities of the world and what we Christians say we believe in - a loving God who has given us free will - to recognize that God doesn't control our actions and therefore doesn't control the gene pool and so while there CAN be mistakes in biology (men mistakenly born with female sex organs or people born with congenitally defective organs or people born with both male and female sex organs or people born with more than just XX or XY chromosomes or born without one or more limbs, etc, etc, etc) that God loves ALL people and excludes no one on a basis of biology?
If you still aren't convinced that being trans is an issue of biology, that's fine with me. I would request that you Google "biological basis of transgender identities" and read some of the scientific literature. If you'd rather not, or if you do and aren't convinced, that's OK too. In fact, I've recently read an article that stated that some people in the trans community think that trying to find a biological basis is itself counter productive. Don't worry, I have other arguments.
MISINTERPRETATION #3: IT GOES AGAINST COMMON SENSE and/or ITS UNNATURAL
Besides what the Bible did or didn't say about God's creation or how those verses were interpreted by the upper, ruling classes, the idea that the Earth was somehow spinning on its own axis and also hurling through space around the sun was laughable to the masses. I mean, come on, they were standing straight up and able to sit in a chair without being slung out of it. It went against the natural order of things in their mind, it defied common sense to an uneducated people.
A lot of the negative talk about trans people follows along similar lines. People are using their own narrow experiences to negate those of others. It's not natural for a man to be in a dress or to wear makeup. It's not natural for a woman to have a beard. It doesn't make sense for a man to want to be a woman or for a woman to want to be a man. Why would anyone want to cut off a part of their body, that's crazy.
Let's start with natural. If you read my last post, some of this will be redundant, but it needs to be said in defense of trans rights just like it needed to be said to call out the sin of male headship. Who decides what is natural or normal? We've talked about biology and brain function already. We've seen there are a million different ways that people can differ from each other. Who is to say which of those variations is the right one? We can say which are the most common, sure, but does that mean that any uncommon feature is unnatural?
If you are in the common class, it might be easy for you to feel that way. For instance, I got into a conversation about trans people a few weeks ago with my brother and he said something along the lines of he'd never wanted to cut his own penis off. He said it like it was a reason why he thought transness was wrong or unnatural. Just because you haven't personally experienced something doesn't make it wrong. And just because you haven't personally experienced something that most people do, that doesn't make you wrong, either. I'm talking about myself here. Do most women want to fulfill the biological potential they have to bear children? Sure. Am I unnatural because not only did I not have children, but didn't want to at all, so much so that I underwent surgery to make sure it would never happen? Am I unnatural because I'm a woman who can grow a mustache and beard better than some men (thanks PCOS)? No and no. But even if you wanted to call me unnatural on those biological and preferential bases, does it follow that God doesn't love me because I'm not the model of a woman that the Bible or popular modern culture would have me believe I should be. No and no and no and no.
There was a recent trend of MAGA make-up "tutorials" and while it might have been mean and petty, it brings up a good point. Where is the line on how we change the presentations of our biology? If I were to call out all the famous Christian women on TV and writing blogs for their heavy make-up, obviously dyed hair, and Botox injections, I would be accused of some sort of medieval, overly restrictive version of Christianity. Sure, I could pull out Bible verses about women being modest. I could also point out that all the money they are spending on their own vanity and not giving to charity is exactly the opposite of what Jesus called us to do. But for some reason, cis women wearing make-up and dying their hair and changing their face, no matter how unnatural it makes them look, are still not called unnatural but as soon as a person born with male sex organs puts on mascara or a wig or a dress, all hell breaks loose.
It is infuriating the stuff that today's mainstream Christians are focusing on. All they care about is culture and empire, two things that Jesus spent his entire life fighting against. Despite Deuteronomy 22:5 saying "A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for whoever does such things is abhorrent to the Lord your God," we let cis women wear pants, even in church, because we realize now that women in dresses aren't any holier than women in pants. And because we know that calling pants men's apparel and dresses women's apparel is just something somebody made up. And actually, now that I think about it, it would be more modest for a man to wear a dress with a hoop skirt à la Scarlett O'Hara because you can often see the outline of their junk when they wear pants. Amiright?!?!?! I'm right, aren't I? The purposeful ignorance of comment sense and logic, the appalling embrace of hypocrisy and the hate for people who are different is what makes me so hesitant to call myself a Christian, even in my own head.
Speaking of common sense, the other thing I hear a lot is that it doesn't make sense that people would want to remove part of their body. Why would someone born with a penis or breasts want to have them removed? First, not all trans people want to or choose to have gender affirming surgery. But for those who do, it is a great question, one that actually proves my point and not yours. Imagine having something on your body that brings you a ton of pain, something that keeps you from living, something that holds you back emotionally and physically. Remember that famous football player who had his hand amputated because it was hurting him? That had to be a hard choice to make, it is irreversible, but because of the circumstances, it was the right decision. Where I work in a podiatry office, people with certain deformities choose to have one or more toes amputated so that they can wear shoes and walk without pain. Other people have nose jobs or other cosmetic surgery because there is something about their body that they feel they can't live with. Did you know that your tax dollars pay for breast augmentation for the wives of service members if they tell their doctor that their natural breast size is distressing to them? I work in an area with a heavy military presence and this is a fact. Whether you would make any of these same choices doesn't matter. I just need you to see that you are happy to foot the bill for women to get bigger tits because its distressing to them to have small breasts, but you don't think the distress of trans people should be addressed surgically.
We all do things to change our appearance to show the world who we are and to make ourselves more comfortable in our own skin. It may be something small, like shaving your toes, ladies, or men getting treatment for baldness. How dare you deny that right to someone else just because it isn't something you would do to yourself?
A lot of the push back around this issue is about children making these decisions. I'm not saying that the second a 5 year old says he thinks he's a girl that we should rush him into the operating room. Actually, no trans person or ally is saying that. The only people saying that are the FRCC who are trying to spread fear and ignorance to keep themselves in power and to hold down the trans community.
MISINTERPRETATION #4: THE WHOLE "TRANS" THING IS A MODERN CONSTRUCT
Ugh. I'm not going to spend much time on this because it's a simple Google search to prove you wrong. If you found this blog, I'm assuming you can Google. If not, you can trust me that they've been around for as long as people in general have been around.
MISINTERPRETATION #5: DENOUNCING TRANS WOMEN PROTECTS CIS WOMEN
Ugh. Where to start? Where to start? First, cis women don't need to be protected by cis men. We need more autonomy, not less. We need more equality, not more oppression. Cis men are the ones who people need protection from if the whole history of the entire race of humanity is anything to go on. We don't need womanhood to be protected. There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women so there is room at the table for all of us.
Listen, I understand where you are coming from, to some degree, about bathrooms and locker rooms. If it was up to me, all bathrooms would be uni-sex and single serve. I hate being either the witness or the perpetrator of a loud, smelly public pooping session. And yeah, it's weird when dad's have to take their daughters into a public men's room where men have their junk out at the urinals because they can't leave her alone in a public place for fear she'll get snatched. And if you are reading this, mean girl who I went to middle school with, I'm still scarred for life over what you said about my bug bite sized boobies in the girl's locker room during basketball tryouts when I was like 11 or 12 just because you were already wearing a bra and I didn't need to. I hope one day I get to flash my size B's in your face and ask if you like them better now. Until people learn to quit being creeps, it doesn't matter if we divide bathrooms and locker rooms into cis-men and cis-women and trans-men and trans-women spaces, there will always be some uncomfortable or smelly or mean shit that happens in there. Trans women aren't going to be safe in the men's room and I think that's what we need to consider over what a trans person would do to someone else in the bathroom, again, if history is anything to go by.
Although I don't necessarily agree with keeping trans women out of all women's sports, I can at least understand the argument. We go to great lengths to make sports as fair as possible by outlawing performance enhancing drugs and regulating the type of equipment that can be used. I can understand the hesitance some parents might have if there was a massively muscled and much taller trans girl who hasn't gone through hormone therapy yet playing a contact sport with girls who were much smaller. There could be some safety concerns. But listen, remember that mean girl who was already wearing a bra when I wasn't? That girl was a big, tall aggressive girl. She could have hurt me for sure. And she was a cis girl. I just don't think the situations that people are super mad about the possibility of are actually happening. Trans kids are already going through enough. please just let them play the dang game. And so what if a trans kid beats your kid in a non-contact sport when they are in middle school or high school? You might be surprised to hear this from a snowflake liberal like myself, but learning to lose is good for kids. I never did and trust me, I'm way worse off when it comes to losing as an adult than my husband who played baseball, a sport where you lose way more than you win. It won't be the end of the world. I'm sure they'll still get a college scholarship or a chance at the Olympics or whatever you've deluded yourself into believing your perfectly average child is going to achieve.
I hope something that I've said has opened your mind and your heart to the trans community. I hope that some of my arguments have struck a chord and you'll become an ally. Or that you'll be compelled to do some research of your own to form a more educated opinion instead of just taking my word for it, especially since I would hate for you to just take some other equal but opposite blogger's word for it. But if nothing else I've said so far touches you in any way, if you don't care how the issue of trans rights echoes Galileo's fight for religion, science, and reason to be in union, I would ask you the age old question WWJD. I would argue that we, as Christians, have to act toward trans people the same way that Jesus would - namely, He wouldn't hold them to cultural standards about how biology and gender expression should relate in the same way he dismissed gender roles with Mary and Martha, He would love them, He would eat supper with them as he did the hated tax collectors, He would not condemn them as he has not condemned us.
The ladies and theydies and gentlethems are our neighbors. We are called to love our neighbors. Love means acknowledging their existence, giving them equal rights, protecting them from bullies, providing medical care, welcoming them into our worship spaces as full participants in all levels of the church, and complementing them on their fabulous gown or their newly possible mustache that they've dreamed about for years.
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