More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 31 - July 31, 2022
Oftentimes transgender people are misgendered by law enforcement and news agencies after their death; as a result, their true identities and their stories are lost to us. Additionally, it’s crucial to note that the majority of transgender homicide victims are women of color—specifically, Black trans women—who must deal with the triple threat of sexism, racism, and transphobia.
were accounted for, transgender people were disproportionately affected by homelessness, poverty, job discrimination, bullying in school, and harassment by law enforcement.29
When our churches support or even organically formulate the idea that transgender people are morally, intellectually, or theologically inferior, we feed right into the hatred that leads to death for an already marginalized group.
to 59 percent among those who were harassed at work, 61 percent among those who were harassed by law-enforcement officers, and 78 percent among those who experienced physical or sexual violence.
In fact, the number one predictor of health and well-being in LGBTQ+ youth is family acceptance and the creation of a safe haven at home.33 Over half of the LGBTQ+ young people who were rejected by their families reported having attempted suicide, compared to only 32 percent of those who had supportive families.
Family acceptance is also a protection against depression, substance abuse, and other negative mental health issues that are usually seen in those who experience minority stress.
But this is also where God begins to bring life out of death, because although religious affiliation in families has been connected to rejection of LGBT children, faith can also be one of the largest contributors to well-being in youth if their religious community supports them.
gender is mental and emotional and has to do with your personality, while your sex has to do with specific parts of your physical body, like your genitals and your sex chromosomes. That distinction between the two terms has been fairly commonplace for the last forty years or so,13 but more recently we’ve found that humans may be more complex than this simplistic description allows.
What we can take from all this is that parts of the brains of transgender people seem to match their true gender, rather than their assigned sex, though we don’t yet know if this difference is something that exists when the person is born or something that develops over time.
it appears that science can tell us something about how transgender people experience their own identity, and sociology and anthropology can help give us context when it comes to the overall human experience.
problems. The first issue, according to the integrity framework, is that the transgender person is not fulfilling their ordained gender role, as decided by their assigned sex, in everyday life. Men should be protectors, providers, and leaders; women should be nurturers, helpers, and submissive to the leadership of the men in their life.
The minute a trans person tries to exist within the structure of gender complementarity, things start to get tricky.
The trans person is encouraged to see dysphoria and the internal struggle between their gender identity and their assigned sex as their particular cross to bear, or as part of the flesh that must be crucified in order to become a new creation in Christ. Diversion from the assigned role is considered sinful, and repentance is necessary.
But what if the Bible does not actually portray humankind as neatly divided into cisgender men and cisgender women
if that’s what they want, the disability framework inherently treats the transgender person’s identity as an illness that should be cured, and in the hands of other mental health practitioners it can quickly become an excuse for so-called “reparative therapy.” As we saw in the case of Leelah Alcorn, this kind of treatment can lead to irreversible harm, especially for children and youth.
Without oversimplifying the argument too much, it seems that the biggest stumbling block for many Christians when it comes to the diversity framework is the belief that biological sex is both cut-and-dried and also divinely decreed.
“The idea of queerness or transness was not even remotely on my radar,” they explained as we talked one night. “I felt different, but I didn’t even know any gay people. Nobody talked about it.”
If they feel comfortable enough with you to volunteer that information, they’ll do it in their own time and in their own way.
Depending on what part of his ministry you caught him in, the apostle Paul would probably have been surprised to see openly LGBTQ+ folks leading prayers and people who had been divorced distributing the elements of the Eucharist.
Christian men in the early church were intentionally giving up the power they held as men in their culture. They were taking an action with the direct consequences of placing themselves lower in the social hierarchy.
ultimately to his relationship with God. … He is not baptized in spite of being a eunuch or after lengthy session of apologetics explaining his gender to Philip, but simply at the point at which they passed a body of water.”
The eunuch may be the one who gets baptized, but Philip is the person who has to change his metric for who’s in and who’s out. Even though this story is two thousand years old, a third conversion is still taking place: will the church eventually realize that when God’s love overpowers all human distinctions, nothing can prevent us from full inclusion?
