Lots of people were born with male bodies but female hearts and souls, and vice versa. Their bodies feel to them like unremovable costumes that daily force them into a role that they do not wish to play. From childhood on the world insists that they belong in one of the Two Big Gender Categories, while all along they know themselves to, in fact, belong in the other.
At some point in their lives a lot of people living with this terrible burden decide to give up trying to be John when they know they’re really Joan, to stop being Brianna when they were born to be Brian.
So they transition. They go from being and living as one gender to being and living as the other one. They move across (trans) the great gender divide.
Disliking the house into which fate birthed them, they change that house. Maybe they repaint the exterior: blue to pink (“Bring me wigs, falsies, lipstick!”); pink to blue (“Shoulder pads, a fake mustache, and a little sumpin’ sumpin’ for the front of these pants!”) Maybe they restructure the very foundation of their house, and get sex reassignment surgery.
Either way, it’s their house. They know what’s best for it and them.
Bottom line on transgender people: all of the world has everything to gain and nothing to lose from knowing, loving, encouraging, blessing, and embracing them. Transgender people have courage, vision, and a knowledge of themselves that few others ever have reason to acquire. I’ve known a lot of transgender people. I don’t want to say that they strike me as basically a superior race, but they strike me as basically a superior race. How could they not? I’ve only ever been one gender. A transgender person has been two. How is that not automatically twice as awesome as my life?
I’ve not written much about transgender people, because as a Christian writing to a (largely) Christian audience, I always knew that first we’d have to get the Christian universe to accept the truth that some people really are born gay, and that there’s nothing at all wrong or inherently sinful about that—and then, once that idea had transitioned from radical to acceptable, we could say: “See? Letting gay people get married and raise children didn’t cause Armageddon; the sky stayed right where it was. Yay! Isn’t that great? Say, you’ve heard the word transgender before, right?”
And onward we go, step by step.
Christians! Be thee not discombobulated by transgender persons!
They’re just making their outside match their inside!
It threatens you not!
When Jesus said, “The truth shall set you free,” he wasn’t talking to only some people. He was talking to all people. Woe be unto any person who attempts to use Jesus as a means of blocking anyone from living into that truth for themselves.
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