Being Pastorally Transparent with a Trans Parent
In many states right now, legislators are discussing and advancing bills that would limit or outright ban healthcare services for individuals who are transgender or trans.* In my home state, there is a bill which would make appearing in drag in public (updated in the bill to say “adult cabaret”) illegal. Another bill would charge parents with child abuse for seeking trans healthcare services for their children - services that are approved and deemed life-saving by the major medical associations. This same bill would go after the licenses of physicians for providing that same care. The heightened attention on this population has brought me back to a conversation I had a few years ago that deeply impacted me personally and as a pastor.
About six years ago, a friend of mine who is a mother to two children asked me to coffee. As we caught up with one another, she began updating me on her kids. She told me me that her older child, who was in high school at the time, had come out to her as trans. She told me of her child’s pain and struggles in what they described as “knowing this body is not who I am.” My friend had read books, talked with mental health professionals, met with doctors, and read all pertinent literature from professionals with expertise in trans youth. She said she wanted to hear from me, a religious professional, about what the Christian faith has to say about her child’s desire to transition while in high school. I remember her setting her coffee down on the table, and while leaving her hands tightly wrapped around the cup, looked at me and said, “I feel like I’m doing to right thing by my child. What do you think?” I will never forget the sincerity and what I interpreted as a touch of fear that I saw in her eyes at that moment.
My initial instinct was to think, “Who am I to tell you as a parent what is right for your child?” I didn’t even have kids of my own at this point. But I knew that she wasn’t asking me a question about parenting. She was asking me, as a pastor, whether the Christian tradition, and more importantly the Christian community, would make space for her child, and for her as a supportive parent.
It will likely not surprise you to know that many of the LGBTQIA folks who I have encountered in my life have painful histories with the Christian church. Many have been scolded, belittled, condemned to hell, kicked out, abandoned, and even told not to exist. There is a very strained relationship between the church and LGBTQIA folks. The church is met with well-deserved suspicion and skepticism considering the collective historical treatment of members of this community. I felt a great deal of pressure to represent the history of the Christian tradition, scripture and the Love of God in our conversation.
I started out, “I don’t have all of the answers on this, but here is what I know to be true…..”
The world of Christendom has a long history of abusing folks who are anything other than heterosexual and cisgender (meaning the sex you were assigned at birth clearly matches your understanding of yourself and your outward presentation to the world). If we go back to the Apostle Paul, one of the primary architects of the early church, he had some pretty rigid prescriptions for what gender and sexuality should be. Women, wear your hair long. Men, wear your hair short. Women, cover your heads and don’t wear elaborate jewelry. And for goodness sakes, if you can stay single and celibate, then that’s the best thing to do. Seriously, in 1 Corinthians, Paul says it's best if we just not touch each other in romantic or sexual ways at all! To be single and celibate, like Paul himself, is what he claims is best. However, if you can’t control your sexual urges, then Paul conceded it’s better to go ahead and marry someone of the opposite sex than for you to burn with passion.
The tricky part is we know from the Bible and from biblical scholars that Paul was highly apocalyptic, believing that Jesus would be returning at any moment. My New Testament Professor, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, used to say, “Paul thought Jesus was coming back next Tuesday.” As such, most of his letters to the Christian communities of the early church that comprise the Pauline books in the Bible contain strict rules aimed at keeping peace and order for “just a few more days” until Jesus came back and set everything right. Add together Paul’s apocalyptic perspective with the significant gender inequities in the first century, and it’s easy to understand why the Bible alone has not set Christians up for fruitful and complex conversations on the topics of gender and sexuality. As a result, we usually don’t do very much integration of our faith and these topics at all.
What does Jesus say about being trans in the Bible? Well, nothing directly. He certainly acknowledges that some people are men and some people are women. The characters her interacts with in the Bible are almost always described in the gender binary. However at no point is Jesus asked about questions of gender presentation and gender fluidity. He is never asked to directly affirm the rigidity of the gender binary.
So while I did not have a direct verse to quote to my friend that would answer the question of what the Christian tradition says about her trans child, sometimes the Bible does has some hidden nuggets – things that you will only find if you do some mining for meaning, looking at historical context, and different translations. Sometimes the Bible contains verses that, while not answering complex questions directly, raise questions and invite us to deeper considerations.
In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus gives instructions to Peter and John for how to locate the infamous Upper Room where the Passover meal, which we now know as the Last Supper, will take place. A very similar account featuring this same water carrier is found in the Gospel of Mark. In both Gospels, Jesus tells the disciples, who are all out-of-towners, to go into the city and a man carrying a jar of water would meet them, and they were to follow this man into the house that he enters.
At first read, this seems pretty simple, and a little like a scene from a spy movie – look for the guy carrying water, make eye contact and after he gives you a subtle nod and you follow him to the secret meeting place. But there’s more happening here.
For years, this story has been claimed by members of the LGBTQIA community as an example of a queer character in the Bible. Carrying water in jars to the home was a decidedly female role during this era. It was “woman’s work.” It’s probably part of the reason that Jesus gave the instruction to follow the “man” carrying water in a crowded city where there are probably plenty of people carrying water – he would be the only man doing it amidst the large crowds gathered in the city for Passover.
Many questions have been posed to this text:
Was this man trans?
Was this man in a same-sex partnership with the owner of the home they are heading to?
Was the water carrier a member of the Essene community of Jews, who lived celibate lives marked by asceticism and did the roles of both genders?
Why did this man have access to an empty room large enough to host a crowd of disciples for the Passover Feast? Where was his own family?
LGBTQIA folks have read themselves into this passage over the years, sometimes seeing the water carrier as their trans ancestor or trans-cestor - outwardly male-appearing but feeling more at home doing the work of a woman. They have seen the water carrier as the loving partner of another man, and the two lived together in the place where the disciples gathered. Some folks have read themselves into this story and pondered whether if this was a same-sex relationship, could that have been the reason that this couple had an empty upper room to fill with strangers instead of family on one of the biggest holy holidays of the year? Perhaps their own families had rejected them, leaving them alone?
These are interesting theories and questions to pose to this text. We are unlikely to ever know the true story of this water carrier, but this story introduces important questions as we reflect on what Jesus thought about gender and sexuality.
Why, as a good and devout Jew, with all of the prescriptions for gender roles and responsibilities in the Jewish tradition, did Jesus choose to use a transgression of gender as the sign to his disciples that day? He could have just instructed them to follow the man holding any particular object, or the man with one sandal on, or any other cue that would have allowed the disciples to pick someone out of a crowd. Jesus chose to use a person not confirming to gender norms of the time as the sign.
And why did this man carrying water have access to a space large enough to host a large group for the Passover feast that was not already claimed for celebration by a particular family or religious community? Why wasn’t this man otherwise occupied celebrating Passover? Was he not part of a family? Or was he perhaps rejected by family or organized religion for some reason? Was the host for the the Last Supper an ostracized individual?
What are we to make of the fact that the directions to the Upper Room, the sacred space that would be home to the Last Supper and later to the Feast of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples, are given by someone who was outside of the strict, gender roles of the day? What are we to make of the fact that a twist on gendered work was offered to the disciples as the cue to know the way to the Passover feast that was and is so important that it is replicated all over the world, every single day? What would it mean if we were to understand that Jesus had a gay or trans individual lead us to the Communion table?
I do not have definitive answers to many questions about the Bible and why Jesus did or said things certain ways. I do have questions. I have things that make me go, “Hmmmm,” and “I wonder.”
But I do know this, if Jesus’ perspectives on human sexuality and gender identity looked anything like the rigidity that we see in the many Pauline books of the Bible - the same rigidity that we often see modeled in the Christian church today, I do not believe that he would have utilized a gender transgression in a crowded city as the secret clue to lead the disciples to the Upper Room. That doesn’t add up for me.
What I wonder instead is whether Jesus thought of and treated those of non-hetero and non-cisgender identities the same way he thought of and treated those of every other marginalized identity that we see him interact with in scripture. He saw them as God’s creation and God’s beloved. And most importantly, maybe he used one such person as the guide to one of the most significant teaching moments in the whole of our tradition. Perhaps he is teaching us through this passage, that we are all God’s creation and God’s beloved.
I shared my wrestling with this and other Biblical passages with my friend at the coffee shop that day, and told her that I don’t know definitively what God thinks about her child transitioning. But I confidently told her these things I know to be true:
I told her that I know she loves her child, and just as God is so often described in terms of parent-child love, I saw that same deep and unconditional love in her desire to support and protect her child.
I told her that as a female pastor, I know all too well what it feels like to have someone quote scripture as they tell me I am wrong about my own knowledge of who God made me to be. I told her that trusting that knowledge is an act of survival and that God delights when we live into who we were made to be.
I told her that when I don’t know the concrete answers to many of life’s complexities with certainty, I try to assume a posture of humility and operate from an ethic of love, which is what is so clearly modeled in the birth, life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus.
During these contentious weeks, my prayers are with and for the members of the trans community, who are caught in the crosshairs of the divisive battles playing out in many states right now. I pray that legislators who are fervently pro-life will acknowledge and support the life-saving measures that the medical community has deemed safe and essential in protecting the lives of trans individuals, including youth. And I pray that all of us who lack first-hand experience with being trans or having a trans child would assume a posture of humility and operate from an ethic of love on this and other complex issues.
Amen.
*As the language for sexuality and gender identity is ever-evolving, I confess I did my best to be current. If I used a dated term in this piece, please forgive me, and I welcome your feedback.
