I Have Said Many Times That…

I am not a religious person, I believe it is more important in how you live your life and treat others, but one thing I do know is that those who use religion against us pick and choose and twist passages to suit their bigotry.

New book concocts a religious excuse to demonize trans people
"Love the sinner, hate the sin" is back and more harmful than ever.
Think Progress
By Zack Ford
August 10, 2017

In God and the Transgender Debate, due out next week, Andrew T. Walker has written a wickedly dangerous book. He has repackaged the “love the sinner, hate the sin” mantra — used to condemn the gay community for decades — to help evangelical Christians reject transgender people in exactly the same way.

As Director of Policy Studies for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), Walker’s anti-transgender stance is neither new nor surprising. Nevertheless, the way he sugarcoats his condemnation in love and compassion throughout this book is shockingly nefarious.

Walker acknowledges that the Bible does not actually mention transgender people. His argument, instead, is rooted in pure creationism (yes, that creationism): God created Adam and Eve as male and female, and to question whether He got that right is to rebel against Him. “To misunderstand, blur, or reject the Creator’s categories for humanity doesn’t just put us in rebelling against the Creator and creation — it puts us at odds with how each of us was made,” Walker explains. “When someone rejects this blueprint, they are not merely rejecting a thousands-of-years-old text. They are rejecting Jesus.”

He also acknowledges that we are not mentioned in the Bible, but that didn’t stop his from attacking us on “religious” grounds.

Of course he cites medical doctors who have been discredited but the medical community,

 In a footnote here, Walker cites Paul McHugh, the infamous Johns Hopkins University psychologist who believes trans people are mentally ill. McHugh made this argument in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, basing it entirely on one particular 2011 study out of Sweden that, he claimed, showed that trans people still had high rates of suicide years after undergoing surgery. But that’s not what the study found.

Indeed, the author of that Swedish study, Cecilia Dhejne, has repeatedly — including just recently on Reddit — rebuked attempts like McHugh’s to distort her results to suggest trans people don’t benefit from transitioning. As Dhejne explained to The TransAdvocate, her study didn’t actually evaluate the effectiveness of surgery, and even her results show that the higher suicides rates disappeared for patients who received their surgeries after 1989. “If we look at the literature, we find that several recent studies conclude that [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] Standards of Care-compliant treatment decrease[s] gender dysphoria and improves mental health,” she corrected. In other words, there is a consensus that transition is what best helps trans people.

Some religious scholars have found what maybe positive references in the Bible about trans people. In his play Transfigurations, Peterson Toscano points out possible gender nonconforming passage in the Bible.

Where in the Bible does it say you can’t be transgender? Nowhere.
Washington Post
By Eliel Cruz
August 26, 2016

A funeral director in Michigan recently won a court fight by claiming his Christian beliefs would not allow him to employ a transgender person. When Target said it would allow its customers to use the bathroom that matches their gender identity, protesters shouted and walked through some of the retailer’s stores holding up Bibles. When parents published a Washington Post essay about their happy transgender 5-year-old recently, a reader wrote, “As a Christian this deeply disturbs me!”

What’s behind this animus toward transgender people in the Christian community? As I see it, it’s not the Bible.

There is not a single verse in scripture that discusses transgender identities. Yet these Christians have decided that trans identities are sinful, mostly through their lack of understanding of what being trans means.
[…]
When the funeral director says his beliefs come from the Bible, he seems to be referring to Deuteronomy 22:5, which says, “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the Lord your God detests anyone who does this.”

That verse talks about cross-dressing. It is clear that the funeral director does not understand what it is to be transgender. Being trans is not cross-dressing. It is embodying a gender that does not align with the one that was given at birth.

They twist passages to conform with their bigotry, they use the Bible to justify their hate.

As I said before many religions are affirming, but the ones that are not create fear and loathing in their flock.