What Happens If You're Transgender In The Church | State Of Grace | Refinery29

the most vitriol we receive is in the name of Jesus they wish us bodily harm in the name of Jesus obviously that's not Christian that's not into life and even in the name of Jesus close your eyes and imagine God what does God look like if anything to you is it an old man sitting on a cloud a woman in a rocking chair a very wise owl what gender do you assign to God and why like many other faith traditions Christianity has drawn definitive lines on the basis of gender the gender identity of a Christian can impact how and where they are allowed to worship and often the types of leadership roles they are allowed to hold historically straight white men are the most frequently championed for leadership positions in the church many denominations like the Roman Catholic Church don't allow women to lead or be ordained and certainly if you don't identify neatly within a gender binary things get even trickier remember this from funerals to pride parades these street preachers condemn entire communities yeah it should come as no shock that some of the most exclusionary and harmful messages about queer and trans children of God are being taught from the pulpit where to begin let's go straight to the source material it is estimated that there are around 450 English translations of the Bible which was originally written in Hebrew and none and this is true were transcribed by God or Jesus so which one is correct and what might have been lost or altered in translation I'm visiting the office of dr. Lizzy Bern de Geer a Catholic feminist and Hebrew Bible scholar to learn more about what's really in the sacred texts you can actually look at these texts that we all have and you can find really powerful experience of Divine Feminine of women with power of spirituality that calls us all well beyond sexism and well beyond misogyny and we just have to be honest about the fact that like using the pronoun he for God is a habit but it has no theological justification the word Elohim in Hebrew is actually a plural word elohim that once monotheism started to become entrenched they grammatically made it masculine singular but Elohim is plural and it comes from the fact that we understand the divine in many ways it's becoming clear to me that much of what we've been taught about biblically-based gender roles has been shaped by social context and the very human people doing the translating the person of color the first woman in the collegiate church history to become a collegiate senior minister Wow 15 years ago this is my predecessor Gordon who was committed to hiring a woman to replace him and so that was a pretty prophetic thing for a man to do he wasn't going to hire any men it looks to me like progress on these walls or all the collegiate ministers that have served this church and one of them was a slaveholder look how far we've come I visited middle Collegiate Church the oldest continuous Protestant church in the United States led by senior minister reverend jackie lewis who made history as the first woman and person of color to hold her position did you always want to be in a leadership position I always wanted to be a pastor since I was since I was almost nine they didn't see women preachers but I had the best female Sunday School teachers and I think they saw my calling and they really affirmed it mrs. Dickson was my semi schoolteacher from the time I was in second grade till high school her steadfastness her leadership I was clear that she was a minister even though she wasn't a minister I think a lot of times we hear about you know women serving in leadership positions but yet I'm hearing about your Sunday School teachers it doesn't really matter to me if they have to meet right throughout time people have interpreted Scripture in ways to codify solidify their own presumptions biases prejudices every human being is creating what they think God is like all the time with their image of God is and the relationship they have with God it is an ongoing process you can see in our stained-glass windows that we've picked there's women there's Jesus talking to Mary Magdalene when he is resurrected there is Jesus over here having a conversation with Mary and Martha that's breaking boundaries does this make sense that God wouldn't appreciate LGBTQIA people if we're also saying God created us all in love it's a struggle sometimes when people are throwing verses at you and people you care about in communities you care about but then you can argue on interpretation and translations well I imagine a trans child coming to understand I think I might be a girl in this boy body I'm like thank you God that the child is becoming aware of who they really are and our job as a culture as a society as a church is to make safe spaces for people to be in my own personal journey yeah when I was presenting is like real female I was the furthest from God because I was the most concern with what the world thought of me I wanted to know that I walked into every room that I didn't make people uncomfortable because I was so uncomfortable with who I was as soon as I was able to really have this moment of like I want to cut my hair I've wanted to do it for so long like you know and as soon as I was able to do that and like when I felt safe and I felt comfortable and I felt loved only then was I able to have any type of a personal relationship with God God creates out of love God creates love out of love we who are in the image of God are all awesome so when I'm talking to you I'm learning a little bit more about God because you're in God's image and when you're talking to me the same is true we only know God because we know each other well let's do together Jackie made me think about how becoming the most authentic version of yourself regardless of gender can bring you closer to God but is it possible to do that within traditional doctrinal parameters well it is a beautiful fall day in New Jersey so we here at state of grace thought that it would be the perfect time to talk about gender the leaves are changing and so are our perceptions of Gen okay we're going to a convent and we're going to speak with a nun who has a pretty different interpretation an understanding of her gender as it relates to her faith I started out as a little kid in the early 70s in reruns were The Flying Nun and I watched the nuns story and I remember thinking when I was like seven or eight years old that's me I think all our life when you're trying to find your authentic self you you see it somewhere and you go I could fit in with those weirdos cuz I'm the same kind of weirdo and people thought that I was crazy I was told by my family and by my friends by the entire culture that women were supposed to get married and have children that never felt right to me I didn't feel called to marriage I didn't feel called to children I felt called to God sister Monica spent 14 years paying off her financial debt in order to become a nun since you have to be debt-free to enter the sisterhood you're here six times a day yeah six times a day coming here and praying I'd left the Southern Baptist faith when I was in my mid-teens because I had so many gay friends I was a Roman Catholic Church and I thought can I belong to a denomination where women cannot be priests and where there is an inclusion sister Monica's commitment to inclusion led her to the Episcopal Order do you feel empowered as a nun I do in my secular life I was very shy very low self-esteem i I didn't look people in the eye I looked at the floor at the first big gathering we had here when I was a novice I remember going around and talking to people and shaking hands and being really excited and really happy and I thought I'm not shy anymore because I think this is my tribe it felt like I had been in exile all my life and I had finally been allowed to come home how do you feel like being a nun is countercultural I think because I've rejected our culture's mandate for happiness I've rejected romantic relationships I've rejected having children I'm rejecting this model of happiness and saying there's another way to be happy but what happens when your gender is deemed invalid by church teachings listen I know this is a video on the internet about gender so I anticipate some spicy responses just to get ahead of a few things gender and sexuality are entirely different genders who you are sexualities who you like and being transgender is not a mental disorder so let's not look stupid in the comment section and say that Google is free now back to our feature presentation this is dr paula stone williams she is a pastor speaker and gender equality advocate before coming out as trans in 2012 she was a prominent evangelical pastor and CEO her son jonathan followed in the family business and is also a pastor at forefront church here in brooklyn we started with an organization that was fairly conservative I wasn't ready to put the label progressive on myself it was made clear to you that there were certain boundaries you couldn't cross in order to maintain sort of the status of your community or faith community it was very implicit as soon as you do that you're going to lose money and you're going to lose people and your church might not ever get off the ground and then my dad decides she's going to transition to the female gender which will which will do a lot to a person yeah I had a lot of power and a lot of influence and so I was pretty convinced that from my rather lofty perch of power and influence that I could bring about change from within and it might take oh I don't know a few thousand years but but you know I thought once that came out it they can either think oh my god we were wrong about Paul's character we thought he was a person of character and he's not or they could think oh wow we really must be wrong about our view of gender dysphoria and what it means to be transgender because we know the character of this person and so we need to re-examine the issue you know didn't exactly expect them to choose the former I lost all of my jobs within seven days in 21 states you cannot be fired for being transgender but in all 50 you can be fired if you're trans and you work for a religious corporations I saw that there was a crisis of life for her I saw that she was depressed and to me that was heartbreaking and so I said you know if my dad's going through this there's got to be thousands of other people going through this similar disowning for lack of a better term from their faith or from their families or from their friends and so as a church we publicly said we are going to affirm the LGBTQIA community we don't have to be uniform in that belief right away we can question it we can disagree but this is the stance our church is going to take from here on out during my message while I was preaching I watched you know five or six people get up and go for real yeah I would say people gave it a month two months and and when they were like oh he's really doing this he's really going to be an ally for the LGBT community this church isn't for us any longer if we lost lots of people and lost thousands of dollars it was such a good move we could sit here and be comfortable and say okay well the money is still rolling in and there's a lot of people coming through my doors and we can feel good about that but when there's literally people out there who told that they're not loved and people whose families are disowning them for this we need to step up and become safe spaces there was anything Jesus did it was holed space for the people in the margin I mean when he's dealing with Mary and Martha they're confronting him they are women of wealth they're pretty much in charge of their brother they're everything we think women and vynil times were not the way that the patriarchy really from the time of August and on has twisted the story is in a direction that does not fit with the historical Jesus [Music] hi I'm grace hi I'm grace nice ge thank you so much for having me this is Jamie Brisa Hoff and her daughter Rebecca when Rebecca came out to her family is trans the Brisa Hoffs rallied to not only support their daughter but spread awareness about lgbtq+ issues furthermore Rebecca's dad is a pastor so much of the brezza Hoffs activism is especially focused on engaging with faith communities the sign that started people of faith are doing the loudest and most significant damage to the trans and non-binary and LGBTQ communities both personally and politically we really feel that the only way we can combat that negativity is with people of faith standing up and saying no this is actually not in alignment with how we understand our faiths that well you can be Christian and trans and you can be Christian and gay and that they're not mutually exclusive you guys have chosen to be quite visible and I wonder why well your lead largely well because I think it's really important for kids like me to have the support and knowledge of that there's someone else fighting for them it's a lot scarier for kids that don't have supportive parents but don't have good policies in place in their schools that don't have everything she's had that has made her successful and so we really felt like it was our opportunity to use that privilege to make the world a safer place for those kids I get told it's child abuse on a daily basis by like strangers on the internet or that we're forcing this on her at some point like I couldn't force her to eat a vegetable like it that she didn't like if I tried I can't imagine that I could force her to be someone who she is in whoa I've been with one of them once and I wiped out this is the LGBT agenda they warned you about we always said colors are for everyone closer for everyone be any kind of boy you want to be she just wasn't a boy and so now we know she's a girl and we say be any kind of girl you want to be because like it's not about just switching boxes it's about breaking down those boxes and just showing up fully as her cell and saying that like society doesn't get to determine what that means like some church communities that would be like okay well that's not important for us I think they're like well we don't want to make Church about you know LGBTQ identity is like that's like we're Church like we're Christians is our identity here kind of thing what they don't understand is that by not creating that space by not being loudly boldly and joyfully welcoming you are excluding people we get hate mail we get death threats then we're all going how that she's going down that she's like the devil incarnate she gets kind of excited about that if they're not in my lives in my community then why should I care that because she can love even to the most hate today we're having a workshop at church that's about creating safer and welcoming community it's a kewpie ball we have to do the work to prepare like you can't say all are welcome and not change anything about your community I'm gonna review something like the 101 stuff so we're on the same page and then we'll talk about tangible ways we can make our spaces and our communities more welcoming to all people most importantly we respect self-identification so we can listen to the words that people use to describe themselves and mirror that language back to them even if we don't know all of the terminology I believe God loves us all so by attending here I'm learning some tools that I need to make in see the difference and in attending more pride events like you said will give me more information or more education I think that's that's what we all need to do okay I just want to say it's really incredibly moving to be here with this community and to see so many people that are like really fired up to support us because we really need you all again you can't do this on our own this is the sort of christ-like love that I want to feel and I want people to know and understand from the Christian community I'm a transgender fee it costs of Jamie is why I came back to this church I left the Catholic Church I didn't feel like we belong especially with the rhetoric coming out yeah I saw it everything that Jamie's done for her daughter mm-hmm and this is why I came back to this church you all being here it matters a lot like more than [Applause] my time in New York and New Jersey left me reflecting on the mind of God the impossibly mysterious and creative mind of God when we stand before our Creator what criteria will be used to judge our character everything I've experienced tells me that gender or gender presentation is no indication into the condition of a person's soul I've met people who have expanded and challenged the way I think about gender especially as it relates to Christian teachings why is the Bible still a reference point to justify harm against some of the least among us biblical context is so important and ignorance is frankly inexcusable when the stakes are so high when we discover our authentic selves and celebrate and support others for doing the same we get just the tiniest glimpse into the infinite and divine thank you for watching refinery29 for more videos click here and to subscribe click here

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Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 21 2019