Transgender and Christian
Grace Thomas shares her story of being transgender after more than thirty years as a pastor.
Gender Stories is a series seeking to better understand the experiences of gender atypical, transgender, and non-binary people, all from a Christian perspective. See the schedule of upcoming live interviews.
I have to admit when I set out to do a series on gender, I was nervous. Part of my anxiety stemmed from knowing gender is an explosive topic these days, and I don’t like conflict. And part of my trepidation was my own learning curve, particularly as it relates to transgender and nonbinary people. I wondered what questions were okay to ask and not. I worried about saying the wrong thing. At the same time, I wanted to have honest conversations, even hard conversations, that would really help us to wrestle with the topic of gender as Christians.
During a recent spiritual direction session, I shared how I was feeling. My spiritual director asked what stories of Jesus might guide me as I move forward in this Gender Stories series. One story we discussed was Jesus at the home of Mary and Martha. I could see that, like Martha, I was anxious about many things. And Jesus was inviting me to sit with him, along with Mary, who I pictured as Grace Thomas, who is featured in today’s Gender Stories video.
Grace lives up to her name. During two separate conversations, she was a soft place to land. She is sitting like Mary at Jesus’s feet, soaking up her Savior’s love and presence. And Jesus invited me to sit down beside Grace, as sisters, to learn from Christ together.
Grace Thomas is a committed follower of Jesus with a call to ministry. She is also a trans woman. She served 32 years as a pastor in a conservative denomination. Deeply committed to Scripture, Grace has spent hundreds of hours investigating the best scholarship on both sides of the LGBTQ divide. She also works tirelessly helping parents discover that they can both love God and love their LGBTQ children.
Click on the video image below to watch/listen. Or click here. Note: keep watching after the first conversation ends (44 min mark), as there is footage from our second conversation after that.
Questions:
1. What emotions come up for you when contemplating gender? What is Jesus’s invitation to you amid whatever feelings you have?
2. What did you learn from Grace about the transgender experience that you might not have realized before?
3. Who do you know that is transgender that you might befriend or get to know better?
Relevant Terms:
Gender identity: a person’s sense of self as a woman, man, or combination/variation of gender. Not to be confused with sexual orientation, which refers to the direction of one’s sexual attractions (e.g. toward the same-sex or/and opposite sex).
Gender dysphoria: acute distress over the incongruence between one’s sexed body and one’s internal sense of sex/gender (though awareness of incongruence does not always lead to dsyphoria/distress for every person affected). Importantly, some transgender people may have undiagnosed intersex conditions, leading to feelings of incongruence they can’t explain.
Transgender: a person whose gender identity differs from their biological sex or the sex they were assigned at birth. In the LGBTQ community, the short-hand "trans” is often used. A trans man, for example, is someone assigned female at birth who has transitioned to living as a man (which may or may not include hormonal or surgical interventions).
Cisgender: a person whose gender identity aligns with their biological sex or the sex they were assigned at birth. This describes the majority of people. “Cis” is latin for “on this side,” whereas “trans” means “across” or “beyond.”
Transsexual: This is not a favored term anymore. It was frequently used in medical and social scientific research literature, leading to an off-putting medicalized connotation (similar to how “homosexual” is outdated).
Drag queen: a person who theatrically performs the opposite sex. Drag queens are often cisgender gay males and not transgender people. The goal is entertainment or storytelling. One dresses up for the event, like an actor dresses for the stage.
Want to hear more from Grace Thomas? Stay tuned. I will be posting two additional videos from our conversation—one for parents of LGBTQ children and one on discerning God’s will.