TransPreacher

May 16, 2023 speech given with Trans Allies of Ohio and LoveBoldly at the Ohio Statehouse.

I never thought it would happen to me. That me, and people like me, would be the target of such controversy.

There seems to be something broken about our human nature that we need some group of people to fear, vilify, and scapegoat so we can feel better about ourselves. We need someone to blame for the ills of the world and an enemy to rally against.

When I was a kid it was the Soviets and the communists who were allegedly taking over the world and imposing their agenda on all of us. I can remember doing duck and cover exercises in elementary school in preparation for when the bombs would fall on northeastern Wisconsin. When I was in the fifth grade I took a social studies test on communism. The last question on the test was would you be willing to live in a communist country. Even at that young age, living in a world where everyone shared what they had and there was enough sounded good to me, so I answered yes. Turns out the question on the test was really a setup to identify potential sympathizers and I was asked to stay after the class and got a lecture from the social studies teacher. In 1989 we learned that the scary Soviets were not so frightening after all as the Berlin Wall and Eastern Europe tumbled and the Soviet Union collapsed.

But we needed someone else to be afraid.

Next, it was the Muslims. The people of Muslim faith who were allegedly taking over the world and imposing their agenda on all of us. We had about 15 minutes of imagining living in a world without an enemy and we dreamed of how we would spend the peace dividend. But instead of doing that, we redirected our fear from the Cold War to the Global War on Terrorism.  Media portrayed a religion of peace in to a movement of fear. During these years I was in the Air Force and deployed to Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia where I lived in the contrast of the propaganda I heard on the news and the incredibly kind and generous and faithful people I met. People who loved God and lived a practice of prayer and fasting that was nothing like what I had lived or experienced as a Christian.

We continue to this day to seem to need someone to fear and blame. A boogeyman at the door.

We are a nation of immigrants who fear the brown-skinned immigrants from developing nations that will overwhelm our country and take over the world imposing their agenda on all of us. In last week’s televised town hall broadcast on CNN, our previous president continued to advocate for the practice of separating families at the border as a deterrent to immigration. We call ourselves a Christian nation but chose not to listen to the reminder from Leviticus “‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”

For most of my life, I have heard fear spoken against reproductive rights. The pro-choice advocates were going to overwhelm our country and take over the world imposing their agenda on all of us. For 50 years, an incredible amount of resources were spent on the life issue. Not issues that lead to life like increasing access to healthy food for low income neighborhoods, creating economic opportunities and living wages for all people, or addressing the epidemic of gun violence in our neighborhoods. There have been over 200 mass shootings in our country this year. And from my experiences as a pastor on the South Side of Columbus, who regularly does funerals for people in their 40s and 50s, the life of a person in poverty who dies from violence, addiction, or being on the wrong side of the social determinants of health seems less than sacred. The very people who Jesus called blessed in the Sermon on the Mount—the poor and hungry and persecuted—are the very people our world leaves behind.

As scary as the pro-choice advocates were made out to be, last year it was the so-called pro-life contingent that took the day. The Supreme Court erased the constitutional right to abortion. The God-given right to control, autonomy, and agency over our own bodies was taken away. State laws sitting on the books, largely written by men exercising control over women’s bodies went in to effect.

But if we no longer have to fear the pro-choice crowd, who is there to be afraid of?

Enter, the pink white and blue flags of the transgender people– that will overwhelm our country and take over the world imposing their queer agenda on all of us.

People who spent decades and millions of dollars seeking to exercise control over reproductive rights have redirected their energy and tactics toward transgender bodies. As a result, state legislatures like this one are hard at work to prevent people like me from imposing our trans agenda.

So far this year, 543 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 49 states. So far, 70 have passed and 370 are still in active process. In all of 2022, 26 anti-trans bills were passed. We have almost tripled that amount already this year. An additional 23 anti-trans bills have been introduced at the federal level.

These laws are being proposed under the ruse that they are designed to protect our children from those that will overwhelm our country and take over the world imposing their queer agenda on all of us. But the truth is, they threaten our children’s lives.

On April 19th, almost a month ago, I attended a hearing here in the Ohio Statehouse in which another bill was introduced to ban all gender affirming care for anyone under the age of 18, including counseling or therapy. During the hearing, a member of the health committee asked the bill’s sponsor, Rep Gary Click, a Baptist pastor, if he had the expertise to disagree with the endorsement of the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and a long list of other professional medical groups that supports gender affirming care. Rep Click responded that these groups represent the interest of a few elites and result in harm perpetrated against minors.

After this, Rep Click characterized the number of transgender youth who attempt suicide exaggerated. He accused the Trevor Project of inflating numbers to validate their arguments.

At the same time, he exaggerated the number of times that people choose to detransition as an argument for withholding life-saving health care.

According to the National Institute of Health, 82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.

Rep Click’s comments were so audacious and untrue that they often resulted in gasps by those of us attending the hearing to show our support for transgender right. Our gasps garnered warnings from the committee chair. The chair was more concerned about the audible presence of people working for justice than the untrue statements of the bill’s sponsor.

While we were once afraid of the communists, the Muslims, and the immigrant, today we are told to be afraid of people with gender identities and expressions that don’t fit expectations. Our gender identities run deep and are a part of who we are, so perhaps it is not surprising that living authentically makes people uncomfortable.

But today, I want to say that people of different gender identities and expressions are not a threat. We are not a topic of debate. We are not an issue to be legislated away. Instead, we are children of God. We are part of God’s creation—queerfully and wonderfully made. We reflect something unique about who God is.

We are not people to be tolerated, but people to be celebrated. For we bring unique gifts to the world, to our faith communities, because of who we are.

What if we looked at each other as people with gifts to bring instead of threats to legislate?

How do each of us reflect something different about our understanding of God. In the Christian tradition, the very name of God shared with Moses means I Am that I AM, or I will be what I will be. We cannot put God in a box—and just as we cannot contain God, we cannot contain God’s creation.

The first gift that transgender people bring to faith communities is that we illustrate God’s work of continual creation. As my siblings in the United Church of Christ have said, God is still speaking. God is a God of the comma and not the period. God is still active and alive, making all things new, ever at work within us as individuals and as communities to bring us to full life.

At the Church for All People where I serve, we often say God loves us just as we are and God is not finished with any of us yet.

For many years, as a pastor, I said that to other people as God’s words to them. But I was also talking to myself.

God was not finished with me.

God’s Spirit was not going to leave me in a place where I turned away from mirrors because I didn’t identify with my reflection. Where the sound of my name was lifeless. Where I didn’t feel safe to be who God created me to be, a woman.

I am beautiful.

I am wonderful.

I am the manifestation of God’s creation.

The God who gave Abraham and Jacob and Saul new names, gave me a new name—Joelle.

I am more alive than I ever have been in my life and I am just getting started.

My life is a testimony to the work of God in us today.

The second gift that transgender people bring is the hard work that we have done in order to be authentic. We have had to deeply examine ourselves. To deeply know ourselves. We have gone through individual and group therapies. We have had to process for ourselves who we are so that we could share it with others.

Contrary to some reports, we don’t wake up one day claiming to be transgender because we saw one too many social media feeds.

It takes the deep work of knowing ourselves so that we can build the courage to share with others.

As we authentically share who we are, we then give other people permission to understand and share who they are.

In the last six months I have had countless coffees and lunches with people who not only want to understand more of my story, but who have been holding back their stories, holding back their identities. When we as queer and transgender people shine with the unique beauty that God has brought forth in us, we give other people permission to shine.

Our world wants us all to be the same. A blah, beige, mono world where we all swim the same direction. But God created us unique. We can’t contain God, we can’t define God, but when we celebrate and make space for the beauty of our diversity to shine, we get just a glimpse of who God is.

So the first gift transgender people offer is the living testimony of a God who is still at work. The second gift is an authenticity that gives other people the space to be their full and true selves, the third gift is our interconnectedness.

Transgender people come in all shapes, sizes, abilities, colors, ages, and backgrounds. Our expressions are as diverse as there are people. Our diverse use of pronouns may confuse some, but they illustrate the diversity of who we are.

Every fall we honor transgender day of remembrance. We remember the people every year who have been murdered because of their gender. We see their faces. And they are not people who look like me. It is young black woman after young black women.

The interconnectedness of gender and race is powerful.

The number of people who are gender and neuro-divergent is high.

There are multiple intersections of gender with all marginalized groups.

And in that, there is hope.

The primary teaching of the Christian faith is to love God with all of who we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Our neighbor is not limited to the person next door to us in a house like ours, but the person who is different from us. The person who loves different than us, the person who sounds different from us, the person who dresses different from us, the person who uses pronouns different from us—for that person is a child of God. That is our sibling.

If we, as a people of faith, can learn to love and celebrate people of all gender identities and expressions we will at the same time love people of all classes, all races, all nationalities, all politics, all countries of origin, and all faiths.

If we love one another, we will break the cycle of fear and scapegoating that has defined us.

The philosopher Renee Girard says that Jesus came to be the final scapegoat to break cycles of violence.

For 2,000 years we have made Jesus’ sacrifice in vain as we have continued to scapegoat one another.

Let’s put an end to it. Let us love another, celebrate one another, heal one another, so that we can all gather at the banqueting table together and all of us can discover what it means to really be alive.

Amen.