2015 Year Of The Transgender

Okay what did you think about when you read the title?

What if I told you it was from a religious news website, would that change what you were thinking?

On the website Religious News Service the blog by Jana Riess was about the Golden Globe awards, and the teen who committed suicide.

Good-bye, NBC and ABC. Hello, Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.

But hello also to transgender persons, who are demanding to emerge from the shadows.

Transgender identity came to national attention two weeks ago with the suicide of Leelah Alcorn (born Josh Alcorn), who threw herself in front of a semi about twenty minutes from where I live in Cincinnati. The tragedy has been front-page news around here.

She goes on to say,

But if some good can come from this tragedy, and from shows like Transparent, it’s that we can bring the reality of transgender identity to people’s minds so that maybe next time, parents and others will think twice before automatically rejecting what trans people are trying to say.

Unfortunately, it took a tragic death to start the discussion. It is also time for us to realize that not all religions or religious people condemn us and as she points out,

Let’s face it. Gender fluidity is a difficult concept to understand. During pregnancy (or at least after birth), the very first question to be resolved is the gender of the baby. Gender is a person’s primary identity from that point on throughout life. The whole notion of “trans” inhabits a liminal space that sociologists tell us can feel most dangerous. Anything the falls between established categories is disorienting; we harbor a primal fear of the undifferentiated. 

She concludes with,

I hope that 2015 is the year that we talk about this, however uncomfortable that is. Some people are already doing so, like with Lily Burana’s “Letter to My Possible Son” here at RNS. “The First Commandment of child rearing is to parent the child you have, not the child you wish you had,” she says. 

I have done a number of outreaches for churches in the area. We need to start a discussion between us and the religious community. We can’t just brand all religions the same, yes there are some that will never change or if they do it will take 400 years to admit their mistake, but there are others that are struggling to understand and those are the ones we should reach out our hand to.